Time since the asteroid hit Earth: ~5.35 billion years (subjective to Aryan)
After witnessing civilizations thrive through feeling, Aryan began to wonder:
> "Are emotions only powerful because they carry memory?"
Could love bloom if you didn't remember who you loved?
Could grief matter if you never knew what was lost?
To test this, Aryan constructed a being from the quantum dust of collapsed star-thought — blank, pure, **present-only**.
He named it **Solin**.
Solin had no memory core.
Every moment reset him to zero.
He lived entirely in the *now*.
> "Like a cosmic goldfish," Light God muttered. "No offense to goldfish. Or cosmos."
Solin was kind, curious, even joyful.
But when shown the same flower twice, he always saw it like it was the first time.
He played with children — laughed with them — and forgot their names seconds later.
He built towers, then marveled at them like alien monuments.
He cried at sunsets — the same sunset — every evening, unaware he had seen it before.
Aryan observed in silence.
> "He is free of pain," Aryan noted. "And also free… of *meaning*."
One day, a child from a nearby world left a stone etched with "Solin, my friend" on his path.
Solin picked it up and smiled.
But then he dropped it.
Walked away.
> "He has joy," Aryan whispered. "But not *context*."
> "Like eating sugar forever without ever tasting the cake," Light God said, floating in circles. "No anchor. No depth."
But something changed.
One evening, Solin stood still under a sky-shower.
His hands trembled.
A tear fell.
He didn't know why.
He didn't know from where.
But he **felt** it.
He spoke, for the first time since his creation:
> "I don't know what I lost… but I miss it."
Aryan froze.
> "That shouldn't be possible," he whispered.
Solin's neural fields glowed — unstable, flickering — like echoes of forgotten echoes.
> "He's remembering *emotionally*," Light God said, stunned. "Not data. Not facts. But *feeling*."
And then, Solin etched a shape into the ground — one Aryan hadn't seen in eons:
A child's handprint.
A spiral star above it.
The old Lumari symbol for:
> "Don't forget to feel."
Solin smiled at it, then walked on.
> "He remembers... without memory," Aryan said. "Emotion has its own gravity."
> "Maybe meaning isn't made by facts," Light God offered. "Maybe it's made by what we choose to carry — even when we don't know we're carrying it."
Solin kept walking, forever innocent, forever feeling.
No past. No future.
Just the infinite present — made sacred by a whisper of grief.
Aryan marked this chapter not as failure, but revelation:
**Somewhere beyond memory… the soul remembers.**
— End of Chapter 24