The Aryan-Remnant moved with the jerky, painful grace of a remembered seizure. It didn't lunge with predatory intent, but with the desperate, flailing agony of its creation. Its bone-claws, extensions of Aryan's own remembered pain, scraped against the calcified ground with a sound that felt like it was shredding his sanity.
Jaya fired. her ethereal bio blade seared through the Remnant's shoulder, scattering bone fragments. It barely flinched, the wound already knitting back together with wisps of black energy and psychic residue. It was being sustained by the very memory it represented—a memory that was ongoing, living, and breathing inside Aryan.
"Aryan, snap out of it!" Rohan bellowed from the sled, his voice a lash of command that cut through the dawning horror. "It's not you! It's just a ghost!"
But it was him. The core of its existence was a fragment of his own soul, given malignant form by the Ossuary. To fight it with the Null-Shard was to fight himself. The conceptual feedback would be catastrophic.
The Remnant was upon him. It didn't swipe with its claws; it reached for him, its bony fingers aiming for the Null-Shard in his arm, as if seeking to reunite with its source.
Instinct took over. Aryan threw himself backward, hitting the hard bone-plates and rolling. The Remnant's fingers scraped against the ground where he had been, leaving deep gouges.
"I can't... I can't sever its anchor!" Aryan gasped, scrambling to his feet. "It's anchored to me!"
"Then don't sever it! Change it!" Elian cried out, his healer's mind grasping for a solution. as they watched a fight they couldn't interfere with. "The memory is pain. Can you not... overwrite it?! maybe happy thoughts or something"
The idea was insane. To rewrite an ethereal doppleganger of himself born from his past? To alter the past etched into the very fabric of this place? It was a level of conceptual manipulation he had never attempted. It wasn't negation or deception; it was complete transformation.
The Remnant turned, its empty sockets boring into him, and charged again. Aryan had no time to think, only to act.
He didn't raise a defense. He stood his ground, and as the phantom of his past pain reached for him, he did the only thing he could. He reached back.
He didn't focus on the concepts of [Trauma] or [Fear]. He focused on a single, fragile moment that had come after. The memory was hazy, fractured by pain, but it was there. Jaya's voice, cutting through the haze on the first day. "Stay with us, Aryan."
He grabbed that memory. The concept wasn't strong—it was [Connection], [Hope], a tiny, flickering candle in the vast darkness of his terror. He poured his will into it, feeding it with every ounce of his remaining strength. He pushed it outward, not as a shield, but as an offering, aiming it directly at the core of the Aryan-Remnant.
The feedback was immediate and excruciating. It wasn't the pain of overexertion; it was the agony of psychic surgery. He was forcibly grafting a new memory onto an old wound. He felt his own mind fraying at the edges, the line between his identity and the Remnant's blurring.
The Aryan-Remnant froze, its clawed hand inches from his face. The pulsating dark core in its chest flickered. The silent scream on its bony face shifted, the rigid lines of agony softening into a mask of confusion. The memory of isolation and pain was being challenged by a foreign, alien concept: that he was not alone.
The Ossuary itself seemed to rebel. The phantom images around them intensified, the screams of devoured worlds growing louder, trying to drown out this tiny spark of hope. The bone-plates beneath their feet trembled.
"Hold on, Aryan!" Jaya yelled, her voice barely audible over the psychic storm.
Aryan gritted his teeth, blood now streaming from both nostrils. He pushed harder, visualizing the moment Rohan had stood as a bulwark against the K'tharr, the calm energy Elian constantly provided. He fed the concepts of [Loyalty] and [Support] into the mix, weaving them into the memory.
The Remnant began to change. The jagged, broken edges of its bone structure smoothed. The violent black energy in its chest softened to a muted grey. Its outstretched claw unclenched, the gesture transforming from an attack into a question.
And then, it spoke. Not with sound, but with a thought that echoed directly in all their minds, a voice composed of grinding bone and fading echoes.
"...why?... why did you stay?..."
Aryan, his body trembling with the effort, met its empty gaze. "Because I had to," he thought back, the answer simple and profound.
The Aryan-Remnant looked from Aryan to Jaya, to Elian, to Rohan on his sled. Its form became translucent, the psychic energy that bound it unraveling. The dark core dissolved completely.
"...a memory... I... did not know..."
With a final, soft sigh that was felt rather than heard, the Remnant dissolved into a shower of faint, silver light that settled onto the bone-plates like dust, leaving no trace behind.
Aryan collapsed to his knees, utterly spent. blood pooling from his eyes nose and mouth. The psychic storm in the Ossuary ceased. The phantoms vanished. An unnatural, profound peace settled over the graveyard.
Elian and Jaya were at his side in an instant, his hands glowing as he tried to stem the psychic bleed. "You... you didn't destroy it. You healed it."
Jaya stood over them, her scanner dead, her face a canvas of stunned realization. "You didn't fight the memory. You introduced a new variable. You showed it a different outcome. You gave it... a choice."
Rohan was silent for a long moment, staring at the spot where the Remnant had vanished. When he spoke, his voice was uncharacteristically quiet. "The parasite twists life into weapons. You just turned a weapon back into a memory. Remember that. It's a better strategy than any blade."
Aryan couldn't speak. He could only kneel there, supported by Elian, feeling the hollowed-out exhaustion and the fragile, nascent understanding. The Null-Shard's power wasn't just about unmaking. In the right hands, with the right will, it could be about re-contextualizing. It could change the meaning of everything.
He had faced the ghost of his own making and had not destroyed it, but had offered it a form of absolution. The path ahead was still long, the parasite still vast and entrenched. But in the deep, silent heart of the Ossuary, Aryan had won a victory far more important than any physical battle.
He had learned that to sever a corrupted link, one did not always need a blade. Sometimes, all it took was a better story. And as they gathered their strength to press on toward the Circulatory Rivers, Aryan carried that new, terrifying, and hopeful truth with him. The war for the Primordial would be fought not just in the flesh, but in the memory and meaning of every life within it.