It began without weapons.
No gunfire. No blade clashes. No command signals screaming through Concordium channels.
Just silence.
And then, deletion.
Small at first.
An old man woke to find his vow-token missing. Not broken. Erased.
A girl who had once whispered her belief into the vault walked past it and did not recognize the building.
Entire memories—shared ones—began to fracture.
Zeraphine tracked it first through witness dissonance patterns: cross-node inconsistencies in the Chronicle's timeline. Articles cited but not remembered. Margins corrupted. Names misattributed.
"This isn't a virus," she said. "It's targeted oblivion."
Arlyss gripped her blade but had nowhere to strike.
"Who does this?" she asked.
Sykaion stood before the vault. Its flame shimmered with stress, lines bending and curling like bruised silk.
"Not a who," he said. "A when."
The Room of Witness dimmed.
Entries flickered. Not all. Just the controversial ones.
The confessions.
The regrets.
The revised vows.
"Someone wants to win the Chronicle by forcing it back into singular memory," Sykaion whispered. "One version. One history."
The Mirror Flame cracked.
A sound like memory itself shattering echoed through the shop.
Above the city, Concordium satellites stirred.
A new protocol activated:
> INTEGRITY OVERRIDE: INITIATE
SOURCE: SOVEREIGN MEM_CORE
Far away, in a chamber no one remembered building, a council of ten watched silently.
They did not speak in words.
They issued consensus.
"Too much variance."
"Too much volatility."
"Too much shared power."
Then: "Reset."
Zeraphine's voice broke through Sykaion's thoughts.
"We have to defend the Chronicle. But not through the vault."
He turned to her. "Then how?"
She stepped into the center of the flame. The light licked her skin without harm.
"We move it."
Arlyss's eyes widened. "You mean distribute it?"
Sykaion understood immediately.
"Decentralize the witness."
The vault opened wide.
Not in form, but in presence.
Every individual who had ever contributed now felt a pulse behind their eyes. A heartbeat of memory asking permission to live inside them.
Across Veltrin, one by one, people nodded without knowing why.
And the Chronicle split.
Not into fragments.
Into hosts.
The flame dispersed.
Not to disappear—but to survive.
Zeraphine collapsed.
The Mirror Flame shattered.
Sykaion caught her.
And the vault's last recorded line, before it went dark, burned deep:
> ARTICLE XVII: If memory is worth defending, it must be carried, not stored.
The Chronicle had no home now.
But it had people.
And so the First Memory War began—not to hold a vault, but to protect the truths living inside all of us.