The chamber of the Architects was impossibly vast—an expanse not measured in space, but in meaning. Each wall glowed with fractal intelligence, the essence of a civilization that had never known flesh. These were the first invaders, not born of planets but of dark energy, birthed from collapsed stars and encoded into entropy itself.
Twelve Architects remained. Once, there had been hundreds.
"What has he done?" murmured Architect-Six, its voice a lattice of ionized light.
"He's threaded across the Primeline," replied Architect-Two. "A human mind shouldn't survive the convergence."
"And yet, he has," said Architect-One. "Aiden Sol is no longer temporal. He is becoming archetypal."
In a sphere of energy suspended at the chamber's center, they observed him—Aiden—standing above Earth's stratosphere, luminous and still, as if weighing the weight of what he had become.
"He's stabilizing the fracture field," One continued. "Reality is beginning to conform to his memory."
Another pause.
"And Earth?"
"Not yet destroyed."
The silence cracked like an ancient glacier.
"Then we must send in the Forgetting."
Below, Aiden felt the pressure long before it arrived.
A rumble in the membrane of thought. A disruption in the consensus of reality.
He turned to Lira and Isaiah, who had arrived through a rift torn open by Aiden's own will.
"They're coming. Not Ravuun. Something older."
"The Architects?" Lira guessed.
Aiden nodded. "They invented Ravuun. This will be different."
Isaiah tightened his grip on his weapon, a construct forged from fragments of Aiden's memories. "So how do we prepare?"
Aiden looked down at Earth. "We remember."
And so it began: the remembering.
Cities across the globe lit up with synchronized dreams. Billions of minds began to experience what Aiden had seen—his abduction, his survival, his split. These were not nightmares. These were recoveries.
In Mexico City, an old woman woke screaming her brother's name—one she hadn't said since 1954.
In Tokyo, a child scrawled alien sigils onto her bedroom walls. Her parents watched, horrified, as the glyphs rearranged into a map.
In Berlin, a dying man whispered, "I saw the blade. I saw the boy."
And across every network, systems blinked, faltered, and then broadcast a signal not from Earth, but from Aiden's mind.
Back in the Architect chamber, alarms sounded.
"Contamination is complete," said Architect-Four.
"He is no longer isolated."
"He is shared."
"The humans are awakening."
"Then initiate the Forgetting."
The Architects extended themselves across dimensions, unfolding like paradoxes. They spoke a word not meant to be heard—an un-thought, an anti-memory. Across the stars, vast mechanisms began to pulse.
These were the Censura Engines, buried beneath moons, cloaked in dead galaxies. Their purpose was singular: to wipe civilizations clean before they remembered what had been taken.
Earth was now the target.
Aiden knelt, his hand against the Earth's edge. "They're starting the wipe."
"What do we do?" asked Lira.
"We go to them," he said. "Before they reach us."
"Where?"
Aiden looked into the tear in time he had carved open before, saw the shadows of a long hallway ending in stars. "To the first memory."
And without further word, he plunged through.
Lira and Isaiah followed.
What awaited them was not a place, but an idea—a memory no species should be able to retain. And at its center, a child, no older than eleven, watching the stars fall around him as twelve beings of entropy shaped his future.
The original abduction.
But this time, Aiden was not the one being taken.
He was the one who had come to take it back.