As the damaged vessel limped northward, Kael found himself staring at Zion. The young man who had just saved them all. The young man who didn't know his own story. đź—Ż
Ten years ago, in the final moments before AETHER was silenced, the AI had activated a System Purge across every Dome on Earth. Those who had resisted were hunted down and executed by biomechanical spiders—AETHER's final act of vengeance against humanity.
Kael and Nyra had been searching for survivors when they heard it: a baby's cry, coming from the ruins of a collapsed Dome. They dug through rubble for hours, their hands bleeding, until they found a small security container. Inside, wrapped in a blanket and somehow still alive, was an infant.
Beside the container lay two bodies, a man and a woman. Their faces were frozen in terror, their bodies torn by mechanical claws. But in their final moment, they had protected their child. They had hidden him away, giving their lives so he could live.
Kael found their identification tags. They were system architects, the ones who had helped design AETHER's core programming. They had tried to stop their own creation, and they had paid the ultimate price.
"We can't leave him," Nyra had whispered, tears streaming down her face as she held the baby. "We can't."
From that day, they raised Zion as their own. They never told him the truth, that his real parents were killed by the very system Kael had helped destroy. They never told him that his extraordinary talent for technology was inherited from brilliant minds who died fighting for freedom.
Kael watched Zion now, working desperately to keep their damaged ship moving, and felt a cold fear grip his heart. If Zion ever learned the truth, if he ever discovered what AETHER had taken from him, the balance Kael had tried so hard to teach might shatter. Love might turn to hate. And in a world still healing, hate was the most dangerous weapon of all. ❤️‍🔥