EPISODE 14: The Memory Seed
1187 Words
The descent from the mountain took hours.
It wasn’t the terrain. It was silence. Not one of them spoke until the trees swallowed the light, and the snow turned to dirt beneath their boots.
Seviah led the way.
No map. No compass. Just a feeling tugging at the base of her spine, guiding her like a tide under her skin. A pulse that didn’t beat like a heart, but like something older. Something is buried.
Behind her, the Threadbreaker walked with a quiet ease, as though he knew exactly where they were going. Nali followed closely, one hand resting lightly on the edge of her coat, her gaze scanning the trees. Renn went up the rear, muttering under her breath and glancing behind them every few minutes, still unconvinced they weren’t being followed.
At some point, the forest opened to reveal a dead field. Black grass. Cracked earth. Everything is still.
Seviah stopped.
“This is the place,” she said softly.
“How do you know?” Renn asked.
“I don’t. But something inside me does.”
At the center of the clearing, a small pedestal stood. Obsidian. Smooth. Dustless.
On top of it was a single seed. No bigger than a thumbnail. It pulsed gently, a soft pink light fluttering with every beat.
“What is that?” Nali asked, stepping forward.
Seviah didn’t answer. Her hand moved without thinking. She touched the seed.
And the world around them shifted.
Not visually. Not physically. But inward. Like a memory washing over a forgotten wound.
They all staggered slightly, except the Threadbreaker. He watched her, unmoving.
Seviah saw flashes. Not of herself, but of others.
A child with silver eyes locked in a dark chamber.
A scientist’s hands shook as he wrote her name in a file labeled: Subject Zero.
Two girls are standing beneath a broken moon, one holding a knife, the other weeping.
And fire. So much fire.
Then, everything went still.
The seed spoke.
Not out loud, but into her.
“Do you wish to plant what you lost?”
Seviah gasped. “What does that mean?”
“Everything you are came from what was taken. This is what remains. Plant it, and begin again.”
She pulled her hand back. The others stared.
“What happened?” Nali whispered.
“It asked me if I wanted to start over.”
The Threadbreaker moved closer. “And?”
“I don’t know what starting over even means. Does it reset me? The world? The Archive?”
“Maybe it grows something new,” said Nali.
“Or maybe it buries what we can’t undo,” Renn muttered. “I don’t trust it.”
Karo stepped out from behind a tree.
They all turned in surprise.
“I followed your signal,” he said. “Your choice echoed.”
“You knew this was here?” Seviah asked.
“I knew something was there. Not what. Not how.” His eyes fell on the seed. “That’s not from their world.”
“Their world?” Renn asked.
“The Architects. The ones who designed the Archive. This isn’t science. It’s something older.”
Seviah looked down at her hands. The marks on her skin had changed since the orb cracked. They weren’t glowing like before. They were humming, like silent echoes under her skin.
“I think… it wants me to rewrite the Gift,” she said. Not just use it. Change it.”
“That would make you the new source,” Karo said.
“The new Archive,” Nali added.
Seviah looked back at the seed.
“What if I fail?”
The Threadbreaker’s voice was quiet. “Then we start again. But this time, you decide the rules.”
Renn let out a breath. “We’re really going to let her do this?”
“She already did,” said Karo. “The moment she remembered.”
Seviah knelt beside the pedestal. The seed pulsed stronger.
Then she took it and pressed it onto the ground.
It didn’t sink. It didn’t vanish.
It burned.
A slow, violet glow rose from the soil, spreading in perfect spirals around her feet. The earth pulsed. The trees shivered. The sky seemed to bend in reverence.
And for the first time since waking up in Room Six, Seviah felt whole.
The gift wasn’t something inside her anymore.
It was hers.
The others stepped back as a wave of light rippled through the field. The pedestal cracked. The wind sang.
And in her mind, a voice whispered:
“You are no longer a subject.”
“You are the seed.”
From far away, inside a cold metal chamber deep beneath the dead cities, a man in a red uniform stood before a wall of screens. His hands trembled. One of the screens went dark. Another blinked.
“She found it,” he whispered.
A woman beside him closed her eyes.
“So what now?”
He didn’t answer.
Because deep beneath them, the dormant subjects were beginning to stir.
And one of them—
One marked with the same sigil as Seviah—
Opened her eyes.
The girl in the chamber blinked slowly, her eyes adjusting to the low light. Tubes still ran along her neck, and cold fluid dripped steadily into her veins. But her body no longer accepted sedation. Her heart rate, once erratic, had stabilized.
She sat up without permission.
Monitors wailed.
Technicians scrambled.
But the girl did not flinch.
A nearby nurse shouted something into a commlink, her voice trembling.
“Subject Delta-09 is awake—no prior stimulation. I repeat, she woke up on her own!”
In a dark surveillance room two levels above, the man in red turned to the woman beside him.
“The resonance effect. We theorized it could happen if the Source was re-established.”
“Then she planted the seed,” the woman said grimly. “And now it’s spreading.”
“We have to contain it.”
“Or accelerate it.”
He looked at her sharply.
“Excuse me?”
“If we can't control Seviah… we can create a counter-force. A twin.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“You want to wake her?”
“She’s already waking. We might as well choose how.”
Back in the clearing, the spiral of light faded, leaving only a faint hum in the soil and a single, white bloom growing where the seed had burned.
Seviah reached down and plucked it.
The petals dissolved in her palm, and in their place, a mark formed. Not the sigils of the Archive, but a living symbol — a spiral with no center, inked in glowing gold.
Nali stared, wide-eyed.
“That’s new.”
The Threadbreaker smiled.
“She’s rooted now.”
Renn crossed her arms.
“Rooted in what?”
Seviah stood slowly, her voice calmer than it had ever been.
“In myself.”
Behind her, the bloom regrew. This time, three more joined it.
And far above, in the sky no one remembered painting, a star blinked into view.
- Writer
