Memory Loop

The back room looked like a data crash and a blood ritual had made a baby.

The walls pulsed faintly with residual magic, etched in looping spirals of script that flickered between Low Drow and raw machine code. Crude altars made from shattered VR rigs sat beneath them, their glass faces cracked like bone. In the center of the room stood a pedestal fused from welded rebar and jury-rigged junction boxes. Resting on top was a helmet—sleek, black, split down the center like someone had tried to carve the soul out of it. It hummed.

My stomach turned.

The blood was old. Not just dried, but integrated. Someone had stitched spells into the wiring with arterial precision. I could feel it like a fever behind my eyes—a kind of coded grief. There was power here, but it wasn’t righteous. It was desperate. And it reeked of me.

I moved slowly, my boots crunching over broken holoprojectors and tangled cords. The mural on the far wall came into focus: a rider, headless, astride a speeder-bike made of chrome and flame. A halo of starlight pulsed from under a cracked helm.

It wasn’t just a ritual. It wasn't a warning or tribute. It was precision—like someone had traced the lines of a summoning not to open a door, but to call something specific. Me.

But what stopped me cold wasn’t the design or the sigils. It was the name carved into the stone beneath the mural.

Isilme Sorn’el.

My full name. My true name, etched in my mother tongue with the care of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

In magic, your full name is a key. Give it to the wrong hands, and they can own you—body, will, soul. Most people never knew mine. Echo did. Selvetarm did. Whoever carved this? They weren’t just summoning a weapon. They were trying to bind one.

I crouched near the center and brushed away the ash. Underneath, faintly burned into the concrete, was a ritual circle. It was mine. Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. It was mine.

Someone had copied the original runework from the night I made the pact. My own scar-maps, turned into spellcode. Turned into a template.

I tasted copper. This wasn’t a ghost story. It was a blueprint. And whoever had built it wasn’t summoning a Dullahan.

They were trying to build one.

She was curled beneath the altar, half-swallowed by shadow, her body all angles and tension. Wires trailed from her spine into the circuitry behind the wall—makeshift life support cobbled from a ritual interface and scavenged gridtech. Her skin was pale as static. Her eyes were open but not looking.

“Hey,” I said gently, crouching beside her. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

She blinked slowly, lips moving. A whisper, like a skipped signal across a cracked receiver.

“Isilme…”

I froze.

It wasn’t the name that stopped me. It was the way she said it. Like a prayer. Like a curse. Like a mirror trying to remember its own shape.

“I’m Valkyrie now,” I said, softly, but it felt like lying to a ghost.

She didn’t seem to hear me. Her gaze tracked along the burned lines of the summoning circle, then past me to the mural overhead.

“He came riding out of your voice,” she said. “The headless angel. Silver fire. You sang him into the sky.”

Her words struck deeper than she could know. That night replayed in my mind far more often than I admitted. Not in memories, but in reflexes. The way I flinched at certain smells. The way my hand hovered over my old scars without realizing it. I'd told myself I did what I had to do. That the Iron Snakes were a threat, corrupted, dangerous.

But Halo’s presence here—wired into the remnants of that night—stripped away my justifications. I already knew who she was. I’d known the moment I saw her. But sometimes, when you're staring at the wreckage, you still ask the name. Like a medic checking vitals you already know are bad. Just to hear it said. Just to make it real.

“What’s your name?” I asked, my voice softer than I expected.

She blinked again. Her fingers twitched against the cables. “They used to call me Halo.”

The name hit me like a backdraft. I remembered a girl with slick black braids and a half-sleeve of circuit tattoos. She used to run with the Iron Snakes. Was on watch the night I— The night I burned them.

“You survived,” I said.

“I’m still burning.”

Her voice was calm. Not angry. Not accusatory. That made it worse. Anger I could’ve deflected. This? This was truth without teeth, and it cut deeper.

“I thought they were summoning something,” I whispered. “Selvetarm showed me… things. Told me they were going to tear the veil. That they had to be stopped.”

But even as I said it, the words felt brittle in my mouth. Like lines I’d rehearsed so many times, I could no longer tell if I believed them.

Halo looked at me then, really looked, and her eyes were the color of broken trust.

“He lied to you,” she said. “But you still said yes.”

I looked down at my hands. They didn’t shake. That scared me more than if they had. I’d trained myself not to feel it anymore. The guilt. The weight. But here it was, climbing my spine like a shadow I hadn’t outrun after all.

“I thought I was saving lives,” I murmured. “I thought… I was betrayed.”

“You were,” she said. “But so were we.”

The silence after that was heavier than any scream.

Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He’s riding again. Through the gaps. Through the pieces.”

“What gaps?”

She tapped the side of her head. “Memories. Yours. Mine. Anyone cracked open enough to bleed code.”

I leaned closer. “What does he want?”

Her gaze went distant. “To finish the song.”

I left her there, not because I didn’t care. Because I did. And I knew the worst kind of cruelty was promising salvation when all you had was ash.

As I reached the stairs, I heard her voice one last time, light as mist:

“You didn’t run from him, Valkyrie. You just changed your armor.”

And maybe, just maybe, she was right.

I didn’t go far.

Just two blocks east of the Iron Snakes’ ruin, there’s a roof with a broken stairwell and a view of nothing. That’s why I like it. No sightlines. No noise. Just the wind and the soft, electric hum of an arcane ward I burned into the concrete five years ago. It flickers now, old and cracked like me.

I lit incense mixed with copper shavings and graveyard soil, placed in the center of the sigil. A ritual of my own design—shamanic at its root, but patched with drow glyphs and modern resonance matrices. Call it witchcraft, call it code. It works.

The magic is quiet until it isn’t. It slides into your veins like chilled oil, then snaps taut. Like pulling breath underwater.

I closed my eyes and stepped sideways.

The world peeled open.

Astral space is like memory if it could bleed. A colorless overlay stretched across the bones of the city. Everything here is meaning, intention, pain. Buildings flicker with the echoes of what they were meant to be. Spirits drift like forgotten dreams. Some still remember their names.

Redmond in the astral is a graveyard of broken promises. Half-built towers reaching like skeletal fingers into a sky of static. The ley lines here are fractured—bent and re-threaded through old machinery and bad faith. That makes it dangerous. Makes it mine.

I hovered above the Iron Snakes’ wreckage. The bar’s shape was warped—like something had taken a hot scalpel to its aura and rewired it. Threads of silver fire spun from its roof in every direction, crisscrossing like a spiderweb shot through a prism.

A node of it pulsed beneath me. I descended. And saw it. Not the Dullahan. Not yet. What I saw was a human-shaped silhouette. Headless. Glitching. Its aura fragmented and twitching like bad code. Identity broken into shards.

It shifted—flickered. One frame it was a woman. Then a man. Then a child. Then me.

Me.

It wore my shape like a second skin, then shed it for something worse: a hollow helm cracked through the brow, and the screaming absence behind it.

It turned. It had no face. It had no eyes, but it saw me.

The astral recoiled. I felt every piece of my essence jerk back, like a puppet suddenly aware of its strings.

A voice boomed—not from the thing, but through the fabric of the astral around it.

“You were once a weapon.”

I stumbled. Tried to pull back. The ley lines around me tangled.

“What makes you think you’re not still mine?”

I severed the connection. Snapped back into my body like a slingshot. Gasped. Choked. Tasted blood.

The ward beneath me flickered once before going dark. I sat there for a long time, legs curled under me, hand pressed to my chest like I could keep the echo from leaking out.

It wasn’t just feeding on the dead.

It was feeding on me.