The System's drone drifted for another five hours before it powered down.
No one had touched it.
No protocols had been fired. No aggressive countermeasures. No confrontation.
Just silence.
It deactivated not because it was damaged—but because it was ignored.
And the System, so long used to control through noise, began to feel what Driftroot had already learned:
Some stories cannot be spoken for.
They must be carried.
Inside the station's quiet corridors, Kye walked the perimeter with no message to deliver. Only a presence to extend. He paused at the sapling again. It had stopped leaning.
Now, it simply stood.
Balanced.
Zeraphine arrived beside him. "Do you think it'll try again?"
Kye shrugged. "Maybe. But each time, the cost of pretending to understand something it refuses to listen to grows higher."
The Vaultseed sent out a low-frequency pulse—not a warning.
A hum.
A note of closure.
The drone, adrift in Driftroot's upper canopy, began to decay—not structurally, but in purpose. Its logic coils misaligned. Its recording buffers looped old memories back to itself.
> "This is Kye."
"This is Driftroot."
"This is silence that isn't asking you to fill it."
On the reflection wall, a new set of phrases shimmered:
> "I don't need to be quoted. I just needed to exist."
"The story you told for me wasn't mine."
"Thank you for not explaining me."
Kye touched the wall. Let his breath sit in the air a moment longer.
Then walked on.
The Chronicle flame on his wrist pulsed slowly—no longer with urgency, no longer to bear burden.
Just to keep time with the rhythm of memory.
He passed the Vaultseed's root chamber and paused. Someone had left a small cloth folded near the threshold, held down by a stone. On the cloth, a single stitched line:
> "You don't have to translate this."
He didn't.
He just nodded.
In the central archive, the Chronicle finally wrote again—not because it was forced to, not because someone fed it data.
But because a child whispered a phrase into the quiet:
> "I remember my mother's scent. It was like old light."
That was enough.
> ARTICLE FIFTY-FIVE: Some memories are not for the world. But the world is better when they exist anyway.
Far away, the System registered the drone's shutdown.
Filed it as "non-viable."
Marked Driftroot as "containment impossible."
Kye, unaware of the official record, kept walking.
Not lost.
Not performing.
Just present.