BLOODCAPE
Chapter 76: They Are Already Coming

Chapter 76: Chapter 76: They Are Already Coming

What Echo released into the sky wasn’t a signal. It was an echo of a forgotten covenant. And now, something ancient—older than language and untouched by time—has stirred. It does not land. It does not roar. It simply arrives.

POV: Rook Vale

3:12 a.m.

The sky went dark, but not like nightfall. Not like a storm.It disappeared in pieces.

One star blinked out.Then five more.Then a whole quadrant of the sky — erased in silence.

Rook Vale had stood watch over the Resistance compound for countless nights, seen the curve of the Earth under a thousand colors. But this wasn’t weather. It wasn’t war.

It was presence.

And it had weight.

He keyed his comm. "Aya. You seeing this?"

Aya’s voice was flat. "Eastern sky blackout confirmed. Multiple points. Not satellites. Pattern too wide. Too clean."

"What is it?"

A pause.

"Not one thing. Many. Moving as one."

POV: Aya Sparks

In the Archive command node, screens glitched in waves. The sky’s change was causing orbital feedback—compasses twitching, satellite feeds looping garbage frames. Starlink pings failed. Drone telemetry spun like an unplugged compass.

But the strange part?

No energy signature. No weapons lock. No comm channel breaches.

Just... silence.

And then, something worse.

The Archive woke up on its own.

Node lights flickered in synchronicity. Core memory drives—usually quiet unless accessed—began spinning. Not overheating. Not failing. Warming.

As if the system had remembered it was alive.

Aya watched in horror as classified logs unearthed themselves. Sensitive memory streams unlocked. Private testimony clips burst onto main displays—entries even she had never decrypted.

One line blinked on the central monitor:

"ECHO RECEIVED. ECHO RETURNED."

POV: Echo

She felt it in her chest before she heard it.

Like a vibration under her ribs. Not sound, but memory shifting.

She stood in the atrium of Archive Tower Four, watching light move wrong across the walls.

They weren’t here.

They had always been here.

And now they were paying attention.

A whisper unfurled behind her teeth. A phrase in a tongue she never learned, but always knew:

"Vasht’rehn vurelakai."

She didn’t know what it meant, but the Archive did.

Every screen within a hundred meters blinked to life and pulsed with the symbol she had drawn days earlier in her sleep.

A vertical eye. Surrounded by concentric rings.

Then:

A second symbol.Thirteen points surrounding a void.

POV: Fall

Fall stood in the courtyard, alone.

The others were still inside. Whispering. Rushing. Repeating numbers as if logic would keep the dark from swallowing them.

But Fall? She remembered.

At age six, a training dome blackout had failed for exactly three seconds.She’d seen a curve of black, etched with glowing glyphs.Not a ship.A shape.

She had drawn it into the floor dust.The instructor struck her across the mouth for it.Called it hallucination.

But she had remembered.

And now, it remembered her back.

She looked up at the sky and whispered:

"You’re real."

The black above shifted. Just slightly.

And thirteen lights blinked on—not beams. Eyes.

POV: Ava Spire

Ava felt the pressure before she understood it. A weight between her shoulder blades, like standing at the edge of a deep cliff blindfolded.

Her ears popped, and she fell against the wall of the command center.

Aya caught her before she hit the floor.

"They’re not jamming us," Aya said. "They’re... syncing with us. Pulling directly from our neural networks."

Ava gritted her teeth. "Is this an attack?"

"No," Echo’s voice said from behind them, quiet but piercing.

"This is judgment."

Across the Earth, lights dimmed.

But not because the power failed.

Because the sky eclipsed the sun.

In every city still connected to the Archive network:

Monitors flipped to white static.

Holograms showed forgotten memories.

Billboards across abandoned buildings lit up with footage from other people’s pain.

One teenager in New Geneva screamed as his dead sister’s laugh echoed from a speaker mounted on a ruined wall.

A grandmother in East Lagos wept as she saw her childhood playground crumble in a memory that wasn’t hers.

It wasn’t a psychic attack.

It was total recall.

Forced remembrance. World-scale empathy. Or exposure.

POV: Rook Vale

Back in the tower, Rook watched it unfold. The command line scrolled without input.

Aya’s voice was shaky now. "They’re not hacking the Archive."

He didn’t look at her.

"What are they doing, Sparks?"

She swallowed hard.

"They’re reading us."

"Every lie. Every choice. Every deleted fragment."

The central screen showed a numeric stream.

Not code.

A tally.

RATIO: 73% REGRESSION / 27% REMEMBRANCE

Ava said it aloud.

"They’re judging how much of us still clings to fear...and how much tried to grow."

Rook’s voice was steel.

"And if that ratio slips the wrong way?"

Echo answered:

"Then they’ll decide we’re not worth keeping."

POV: Echo

She knelt in the center of the atrium, and felt the Eye blink through her.

They weren’t aliens.

Not exactly.

They weren’t gods either.

They were the first archivists. A species that long ago realized memory outlived flesh. And chose to live only in stories.

And now they’d come back.

To see what Earth had done with the power to preserve its soul.

Echo whispered:

"We called them by remembering.Now they want to know if we remembered enough."

Across the World...

In Russia, military satellites failed in unison. Commanders opened fire on unknown targets in low orbit—nothing landed. Nothing responded.

In São Paulo, a rogue Concord weapon system reactivated and broadcast coordinates in symbols no one understood.

In Johannesburg, a child with no implants looked to the sky and drew the vertical eye into the dirt.

In deep space, long-dead signal relays blinked to life. Coordinates reoriented. Memory nodes once buried beneath lunar crust vibrated.

Back in the Archive, the alien presence sent a final phrase:

It displayed across every surface.

"WE ARRIVE TO COLLECT WHAT WAS PROMISED."

Aya stared at it.

"What did we promise?"

Echo stood.

Ava took her hand.

And Rook, quietly, finally said:

"That we’d be better."

"That we’d remember what it meant to be more than broken."

The sky was watching.

And for the first time in a thousand years...

It blinked.

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