The silence left by the K'tharr swarm's demise was profound. The Mycological Weald, having consumed its offering, returned to its deceptive tranquility. It was a peace bought with cunning, not strength, and it left a metallic taste of unease in Aryan's mouth.
"We should keep moving," Jaya said, her voice cutting through the stillness. "This place... it feels like it's waiting." She glanced at Rohan, whose complexion was still ashen. "How's the patient?"
Elian finished a quiet scan. "The bone is knitting, but it's slow. The trauma was... significant. He needs at least another full cycle of rest before we can consider him anything other than cargo."
Rohan grunted, a sound of pure frustration. "Cargo that can still give orders. Don't get used to this view from the floor."
Aryan managed a faint smile. "We'll try not to." His own head throbbed with a dull, persistent ache—the price of his conceptual manipulations. The brief, controlled uses of the Null-Shard were less catastrophic than the full unleashing against the Guardian, but the feedback was cumulative, a slow erosion of his own vitality.
Following the map, they left the Weald behind. The spongy, fungal ground gave way to a startling new terrain: a hard, calcified plain that stretched into a dimly lit cavern. The air grew dry and carried a faint, alkaline dust. Underfoot, the ground was a mosaic of interlocking, bone-like plates. Above, towering, rib-like structures arched into the darkness, and in the distance, they could see massive, fossilized shapes—the skeletal remains of creatures so vast their outlines were lost in the gloom.
"The Ossuary," Jaya murmured, her scanner struggling to penetrate the dense, mineral-rich material. "This must be a waste-processing zone. The Primordial sequesters spent calcium, skeletal structures from devoured worlds... it's a graveyard of forgotten forms."
It was a landscape of death within the body of a living god. The silence here was absolute.
Or so they thought.
They had been traveling for an hour when Aryan felt it. A tremor in the conceptual web, not of life, but of memory. A profound, clinging sorrow. He stopped, holding up a hand.
"Do you feel that?" he whispered.
Elian closed his eyes, his face tightening. "Echoes... so many echoes. It's not active pain. It's... grief."
Suddenly, the ground ahead of them shimmered. The air grew cold, and a translucent, ghostly form coalesced above the bone-plates. It was the spectral image of a magnificent, six-winged creature, its form elegant and alien, locked in a silent, eternal scream of agony. It flickered for a moment, a phantom from a world long digested, and then vanished.
"A memory imprint," Jaya said, her voice hushed with awe. "The strong emotions of the devoured, etched into the very matter of this place."
Before anyone could respond, another shimmer, and another. The plain around them began to flicker with a cacophony of phantom deaths. A city of crystal spires shattering. An ocean of liquid light boiling away. A trillion voices crying out as one, then being silenced. The air grew thick with the psychic residue of apocalypses.
The sorrow was no longer just an echo; it was a palpable force, pressing down on them, threatening to crush their wills beneath the weight of cosmic grief. Elian staggered, tears streaming down his face. Even Rohan grimaced, his jaw clenched.
"This is a defense mechanism," Jaya realized, her voice strained. "The Ossuary doesn't attack the body. It attacks the mind. It makes you remember that everything ends."
Aryan fought against the tide of despair. He saw the concepts at play: [Memory], [Grief], [Entropy]. He couldn't erase them. But he could build a dam.
"Stay close to me!" he shouted. He focused his will, the Null-Shard flaring to life. He reached for the concept they were using to affect the present: [Psychic Permeability].
He wove a shell around their small group, a bubble where external psychic influence was dialed down to near zero. The crushing weight of sorrow diminished but still present. The ghostly images still flickered, but they were now silent movies, horrifying but distant.
The relief was instant.
But the Ossuary was not done. The memories were one thing. The guardians of those memories were another.
From behind a massive, fossilized skull, a creature emerged. It had the general shape of a large predator, but its body was a patchwork of exposed, bleached bone and taut, mummified flesh. Its eyes were empty sockets, but in their depths swirled the same ghostly light of the memory-phantoms. It moved with a jerky, unnatural grace. A low, grinding keen emanated from it.
"A Remnant," Jaya identified, her scanner flashing red. "A construct animated by accumulated grief. It's not alive. It's a wound given form."
The Remnant charged. Rohan tried to rise, but fell back with a curse. Jaya's mend weaving blades sailed past harmlessly through its spectral sections.
Aryan knew brute force was useless. He analyzed the creature. Its core concept wasn't [Life], but [Persistent Memory]. A thought that refused to die. To fight it, he couldn't use concepts of destruction. He had to use concepts of release.
As the Remnant lunged, Aryan stood his ground. He focused on the tether that bound the agonized memory to its physical form. He found the concept of [Anchoring] and, with a precise, mental flick of his will, he severed it.
The Remnant froze mid-lunge. The ghostly light in its eyesockets flickered and died. The patchwork body lost its cohesion, crumbling to dust and clattering bone. The keening sound cut off.
He hadn't destroyed it. He had given it peace.
They stood in the sudden quiet.
"ARYAN?" Elian breathed. "You laid it to rest."
Aryan nodded slowly, the feedback a deep, spiritual fatigue. He was learning. The Null-Shard was a tool for imposing order on chaos, for cutting tangled knots.
They moved on, the bubble of psychic silence a fragile sanctuary in the sea of sorrow. But as they delved deeper into the Ossuary, the nature of the memories began to shift. The phantoms of alien worlds grew less frequent, replaced by something more recent, more familiar.
A phantom flickered: a human settlement on a green world, the sky suddenly darkening with the approach of the Primordial. Another: the interior of a starship, alarms blaring, the viewport filled with an impossible, voidish maw.
"They're... our memories," Jaya whispered, her face pale. "The worlds the Primordial consumed before ours. The ships it took."
The phantom shifted. It showed someone—Aryan, gaunt and feverish—looking out from the top of his skyscraper beside Dr petrov. The moment of Devourment.
The psychic weight of the memory was crushing, even through Aryan's dampening field. It was his pain, his terror, amplified and etched into the bones of this dead place.
"These aren't just random echoes," Elian said, his voice trembling. "The Ossuary is reacting to us. To the memories we carry."
From the swirling dust of Aryan's own remembered trauma, a new Remnant began to form. This one was different. It was smaller, more humanoid. Its bones were recognizably human, but twisted and fused. In its chest, a pulsating, dark core of Null-Energy swirled, a perfect replica of the Shard in Aryan's arm. Its empty eyesockets fixed on Aryan, and it raised a clawed, bony hand, not to attack, but in a gesture of accusation.
It was a Remnant of him. A ghost of the pain and fear he had experienced during his life before the Devourment.
"Aryan, get back!" Jaya shouted, raising her cutter.
But Aryan was frozen, staring at the walking embodiment of his own deepest suffering. He could feel its conceptual structure: it was built on [Trauma], [Fear], and [Self-Loathing]. Concepts that were intimately, terrifyingly his own.
He couldn't sever the [Anchoring] of this one. To do so would be to sever a part of his own soul. The Null-Shard within him thrummed in resonance with the Remnant's dark core, a sympathetic vibration of agony.
The Aryan-Remnant let out a silent scream that echoed directly in Aryan's mind, and charged.