He laughed.
The sound echoed through the memory space—a strange, broken, incredulous laugh that carried no humor. All this time. Every assumption he had built about himself, every conclusion he had drawn from the bloodline memories, every theory he had constructed about his identity—wrong.
He thought he was Damian. He thought the System was a piece of a foreign artifact, a fragment of his own soul sent back through time. He thought the bloodline memories were his own past lives, echoes of a man he had once been.
They weren't. They were his father's memories. Encoded in the Astraeon bloodline, activated when the bloodline awakened sufficiently, passed down from generation to generation like a living archive. Damian had lived these moments. Kael had inherited them.
