The world had already begun to bleed at the seams when Elian Marr emerged from obscurity.
A minor archivist once employed at the Alexandria Redux Repository—an underground bunker housing every written, whispered, and digitally encrypted form of human history—Elian had been declared legally dead after the 7th Collapse, when an entire vault of memory drives turned to static and the AI that curated them melted into code-poetry no one could decipher.
But Elian was not dead. Not quite.
He'd been hiding within the records. Not behind a wall or a locked door, but within the redacted layers of forgotten drafts—manuscripts that had never been published, rejected theses, discarded propaganda scripts from wars the public never knew had ended. He made a home in oblivion, living between footnotes and deleted bookmarks. For Elian had remembered Eris. Clearly.
He had loved her.
