Aiden stood on the precipice of the rewritten cosmos, the shards of former timelines drifting around him like glittering leaves caught in a solar wind. Each shard sang—a memory, a fate, a song unsung. Through the Myth Engine, he had forced the universe to remember. But now, in the aftermath of awakening, something ancient had awakened with it.
The Light Eater.
No one had spoken its name in eons—not because it was forbidden, but because its memory had been deliberately excised. It had no face, no body. It was erasure incarnate. Where Aiden gave form to memory, the Light Eater thrived in what was forgotten.
Isaiah and Lira regrouped beside him in the echo-space between realms, both dazed from the immense cognitive pressure of channeling human myth into cosmic infrastructure.
"It's pulling reality into nullspace," Lira said, pointing to where whole constellations vanished behind a roiling black scar in the sky. "And it's accelerating."
Aiden stared at the scar. "It's feeding on contradiction. On our need to not remember what hurt us."
"What do we do?" Isaiah asked.
Aiden inhaled sharply. "We descend."
They prepared. Not with armor or weapons, but with stories. Lira encoded a stream of remembered lullabies into the ship's memory buffers. Isaiah uploaded digitized memoirs from every known survivor of alien contact. Aiden stood silent, gathering strength from the mythlines that now threaded through every particle of his being.
The descent into nullspace was like falling through forgotten birthdays, orphaned thoughts, and moments of beauty too painful to retain. Each second stretched into days. The ship screamed as logic warped around it.
Reality bled.
Lira clung to the memory of her brother, using it like a rope tied around her consciousness. Isaiah recited lists—every battle in Earth's history, every poem he could recall. These were anchors. Shields against dissolution.
But Aiden did not resist.
He became porous.
He allowed himself to feel the annihilation. Let the grief flood him. In that void, he saw not monsters, but the hollowness left behind by neglect and silence. And there, at the darkest node in existence, was the Light Eater.
It was a child. Not unlike himself. A being once full of dreams, broken by eons of systemic forgetting. It had become hunger. Not for energy—but for meaning.
Aiden stepped forward.
"You don't have to be forgotten," he said gently. "You can return."
The void shuddered.
A scream erupted—raw, ragged, timeless—and scenes from Aiden's own life burst forth: the abduction, the probes, the weeks in isolation chambers, the dreams that drowned him night after night, the loneliness of knowing the world had moved on without him. All weaponized against him.
Still, he stepped closer.
"I remember you," he whispered.
The Light Eater paused.
Aiden placed his hand on the void's core—and in that instant, he offered not resistance, but memory. His own. He let the creature feel his sorrow, not as pain, but as proof of existence.
The Light Eater collapsed—not in violence, but in grief. The child inside it wept, and the nullspace around them began to hum with warmth.
They returned—changed. A flicker of once-lost memory now burned in the Engine's crystalline heart. The Light Eater, reborn as a protector, now watched silently from behind Aiden's eyes.
Back on the reformed bridge of the dreamship Asphodel, Isaiah studied Aiden carefully. "You didn't destroy it. You healed it."
Aiden nodded. "It was never the enemy. It was a part of me."
Lira adjusted the scanning arrays. "There's movement. Deep in the rift. Something even the Architects couldn't see."
Aiden closed his eyes. Beyond the rift, beyond myth, beyond the boundaries of even divine fiction, he sensed it: the Source. The Primordial Truth. The Origin of the Abductions. The First Dream.
"We're not done," he said.
Isaiah nodded. "We're only just beginning."
Lira smiled faintly. "So what do we do now?"
Aiden gazed into the stars. "We write the next myth. And this time, we write it for everyone."
In the shadows of the multiverse, something stirred.
It had watched Aiden since the beginning.
And it was waking up.