[Samar Highlands – Three Days Later]
The forest welcomed them with silence.
Not the peaceful kind—but the kind that presses on your skin, humming low in your bones, like something just beneath reality is watching. The deeper they moved into the Samar wilds, the stranger it became. Time felt unstable here. Daylight shifted too quickly. Trees whispered in voices no wind could make.
Valencia led the way. Her steps were sure, even when the path wasn't. Behind her, Sam and Rael followed closely, each bearing the weight of their own spiraling thoughts.
"Are we sure this is the place?" Sam asked.
Valencia nodded, pausing by an ancient balete tree. "The Vein readings spike here. We're close."
Rael's brows furrowed. "I feel something... old. But not alive. Like memory trying to breathe."
Sam reached out and touched the bark of the tree. A jolt shot through him—visions flickering: a war long forgotten, a child crying in the rain, an offering buried beneath stone.
Then darkness.
He staggered back.
Valencia caught him. "It's the Well."
[Flashback – Unknown Era]
Two tribes clashed in the same forest—one bound by blood magic, the other sworn to memory. They fought not for land, but for remembrance. Only one could persist.
The last Memorybearer wept as he sealed the Resonant Core deep beneath the forest floor. "Let the world forget us, if it must. But not the truth."
The ground swallowed his name.
[Present]
They reached a clearing where the trees formed a perfect circle. In the center, a pool of still, silver water shimmered despite no sunlight.
"The Well," Rael murmured.
Sam stepped toward it, but the moment his foot hit the grass, the air cracked open—and the forest screamed.
Figures rose from the earth like smoke: faceless, silent, armed in golden bone.
Guardians of the Well.
Rael moved instantly, spinning into Veinform: Wind Shard, slicing through the first figure. But the Guardian reformed, its shape knitting back together like silk in reverse.
"They're memory-echoes," Valencia warned. "You can't kill memory with violence."
Sam gritted his teeth. "Then how?"
"By understanding it."
He stepped forward—ignoring Rael's protest—approaching the nearest echo. It didn't attack. It simply stood, head tilted.
Sam took a breath. "What are you guarding?"
No answer.
But in that silence, a sound rose.
Whispers—not in words, but feelings.
Loss.
Grief.
A promise.
Suddenly, Sam saw himself—no, not himself, but a past life? A resonance fragment? A warrior-child clutching a blade too heavy, standing in the ruins of a burned-out city.
He looked down at his hand. The scar on his palm pulsed.
The Guardians dropped their weapons.
The water stilled.
Then, a voice rose from the pool—soft, feminine, layered with centuries.
"Bearer… you have returned."
Sam knelt instinctively. "What are you?"
"I am the Core… fractured across time. And you, Sam, are my Echo."
Valencia and Rael looked on in stunned silence as the pool began to rise—not splash, but levitate, forming a shape midair. Glyphs circled Sam's body, spinning faster.
"The final rewrite is near," the voice said. "And you, my last bearer, must choose: preserve what was… or sever it for what must be."
Sam's eyes burned. He saw Rizal. He saw the Court. He saw timelines unraveling, rewriting, decaying.
He saw Valencia—crying as she lost her brother.
He saw Rael—betrayed by the Vein monks who raised him.
And he saw himself—standing at the edge of a choice no one should have to make.
[Cut to – Court HQ, Rift Monitoring Division]
Sirens blared.
"We've located the Core Signature!" an agent shouted.
The Director appeared behind him. "Samar?"
"No, ma'am. Samar was a decoy."
He turned the monitor.
A glowing symbol pulsed… not in the forest, but deep within Metro Manila.
The old ruins beneath Luneta.
The Heart Well.
The true rewrite point.
The Director smiled.
"Prepare the Requiem Heralds. We end the story at its beginning."
Sam unlocks a truth about his deeper connection to the Resonant Core, but the Court has found the real rewrite origin point—and is already moving.