The Herald’s Burden

Seven Months Before Karnak's Awakening

Location: The Dredge, a fractured data-temple buried beneath the Salt Wastes

The static hung thick—dense enough to taste, like rust clinging to the tongue. Shards of half-dead tech pulsed dimly in the gloom. Some flickered with desperate life, others lay hollow, long since exhaled. Eli moved with measured care between the ribbed wreckage, boots crackling over fossilized synth-veins, pulse steady but alert.

Then came the voice—soft, too familiar, too close to a memory.

"You hear it too, don't you?"

Eli twisted, hand at his side blade, breath caught.

A figure stood framed between leaning pillars, ancient architecture like broken teeth around him. Silver-haired, older, eyes sharp. His coat—clean. Unnaturally so. He didn't belong here, and yet… he felt sewn into the place. Like the corrosion had grown around him.

"Don't be afraid," the man said, calm. "I've been watching over you."

Eli said nothing. The man extended something—small, crystalline, thrumming with violet static.

A dataprism.

"You've felt it," the man continued. "The pull. The dreams. That isn't madness, Eli. It's inheritance. You've been marked."

Eli hesitated, suspicion cracking just enough for his fingers to close around the prism. Warm. Alive. A heartbeat encased in glass.

"Who are you?" Eli asked, voice low.

The man smiled faintly. "No one that matters. A witness, like you."

There was something behind his eyes when he said it. Too precise. Like he was reciting a line from a script he'd memorized lifetimes ago.

"You were meant to find him," he said. "The First. The Codex. He wasn't buried for failure—he was buried because the world couldn't bear what he was."

Eli's jaw tensed. "Why me?"

"Because it's beginning again. The Aberrant stir. The others have forgotten… but not you. You still remember the shape of the wound."

He stepped forward, placed a hand lightly on Eli's shoulder—fatherly, solemn.

"You're not his enemy, Eli. You're his beginning. His return."

And in that instant, the prism pulsed harder, and visions bloomed behind Eli's eyes—Karnak rising, impossible and vast, draped in robes of ash and solar flare. A world cracked open beneath his stride.

"What's your name?" Eli whispered.

But the old man only smiled and turned away.

"You'll remember me… just in time to regret it."

Then he vanished into the flickering dark, and the Dredge returned to silence—save for the hum of something ancient, waking.

⸻

Later That Night – The Dredge

Eli sat cross-legged in the dark, the dataprism dim in his hands. Its glow had dulled to a quiet pulse, like a breath held. Cloth wrapped his eyes now, crusted with blood. The pain had faded to a distant ache, but the memory burned—relentless, seared into him.

He didn't see Karnak anymore. He felt him.

A shape beyond sight—a presence cloaked in voices that folded space, that pulled gravity inward like a dying star. He had tasted that being, and it had changed the shape of his soul.

"You've seen too much," said a voice behind his thoughts.

Not real. Or maybe more than real. The old man again. Or his echo. Or Karnak himself, stitched into Eli's brain like static.

"I had to," Eli murmured, voice broken and rough. "You showed me."

"No," the voice answered. "You opened the door. I just let the light in."

Eli gripped the prism tight. It throbbed—slow and steady. Like a countdown. Like a warning.

⸻

Three Weeks Later – Arclight Remnant Vaults

Eli walked the vaults like a prophet exiled from the sun. Blind now, but unafraid. His mind redrew the world from memory, from the echoes Karnak had gifted him. Sight was gone. But clarity—clarity had never been sharper.

That's when he met Kellen.

Karnak's ward. Disillusioned. Defiant. Still clinging to the old fears.

"You're not thinking straight," she said, voice taut. "You're walking around with a god inside your skull."

Eli smiled, slow and still. His crimson blindfold made him look like a martyr.

"No, Kellen," he said. "I see better now than ever before."

He held out the prism. It pulsed in his hand.

Kellen stepped back, eyes wide. "You activated it," she hissed. "Idiot. That thing—"

"That thing," Eli interrupted, "is hope. You're all terrified of what he might be. But you should be terrified of what this world's become without him."

She scoffed. "So what, you think he's salvation?"

"I know he is," Eli said, voice trembling with devotion. "You feel it too. The fracture. The rot. Karnak isn't the destroyer. He's the reset."

Kellen's lips curled in disgust. "And what does that make you?"

Eli turned his head slowly, like the answer was obvious.

"I'm his herald."

Four Days Later

Location: The Verge Expanse – Outskirts of the Salt Wastes

The storm had passed hours ago, but the air still shimmered with electromagnetic residue. Eli moved with intent now—guided not by vision, but by the prism's subtle vibrations in his palm. It led him like a compass of ghosts, pulling him west, always west.

He didn't need light. He walked by memory.

The Salt Wastes gave way to broken slate and jagged obsidian veins—a dead tectonic scar stretching for miles. Then he felt it.

A tremor beneath his boots.

The prism pulsed violently. His breath caught.

He was close.

The ruin emerged from the dust like a half-formed thought. Smooth angles, too perfect for erosion. A jagged monolith buried in the earth, only its peak visible—etched with symbols not carved, but grown. It wasn't a ruin. It was a tomb.

A Codex Chamber.

Eli fell to his knees before it. His fingers grazed the stone, and the prism in his hand lit up like sunrise. The hum rose to a pitch just below pain, a harmonic scream tuned to blood and memory.

The door opened with a whisper.

And Eli stepped into the dark, toward the memory that had burned out his eyes.

Toward Karnak.