"I'm saying it's necessary." I met his gaze. "For humans, forgetting isn't failure. It's how grief loosens its grip. How trauma stops defining every future decision."
He turned away again, slower this time. "We believe remembrance is respect."
"I think it can be," I agreed. "But only if it's voluntary. Only if it doesn't trap what's being remembered in a perpetual state of dying."
Silence stretched between us, filled only by the hum of the ship.
"When you carry a world inside you forever," I continued softly, "you deny it peace. You deny it oblivion. And oblivion… isn't cruelty. It's rest."
Dravok's hands curled into fists at his sides. "We thought forgetting was abandonment."
"And we think remembering is love. We're both wrong sometimes."
He looked back at me, at my too-human fragility, my limited lifespan, my acceptance of endings.
"You survive by letting things go," he concluded slowly.
"We survivebecausewe let things go," I corrected. "Because if we didn't, the weight would crush us. Memory without release becomes obsession. Or worse, purpose."
Understanding dawned in his eyes, dark and terrible and clear, and just as quickly, something else followed it. Not comprehension. Not yet. But something.
"We once had a way." The words sounded old, half-buried. "A cycle. When memory grew too heavy, it was… set down."
"Set down how?" I asked quietly.
He shook his head, frustration flickering through his aura. "I don't know. A kind of reboot. The knowledge was held by the elders. By the females. By those who rememberedwhybalance mattered more than preservation." His jaw tightened. "When they were lost, the practice vanished with them."
I felt a chill crawl up my spine. "So instead of release…"
"We adapted. We suppressed fragments. Partitioned what could not be integrated." His mouth twisted, as if the word tasted wrong.
"But not deleted," I added quietly.
"No," he agreed. "Nothing was ever allowed to end. Only buried."
The bridge seemed quieter, as if the ship itself were listening.
"The new Arkhevari never had to do it," he went on, more to himself than to me. "Never learned how to let memory dissolve. We inherited continuity without context. Power without ritual. Preservation without consent."
I swallowed. "So the Harrowed One…"
"…is what grew in the space between what should have been forgotten and what we refused to release," he finished.
There was no anger in his voice now. Only clarity. And something dangerously close to grief.
"You didn't lose the knowledge by accident. You lost it because the ones who knew how toend thingsdied first."
Dravok closed his eyes, just for a moment. When he opened them again, the fracture in his aura had steadied, not healed, but aligned.
"We haven't beenrebootinga system that was never meant to run indefinitely," he summarized wryly.
"Yes. And now it's overheating."
The implication settled between us, heavy and inescapable. Gods who could not forget. A universe that needed them to. Anda reckoning born not of malice, but of everything that was never allowed to rest. I watched him for a long moment as the pieces began to uneasily slide into place. Then I asked the question that had been circling since he'd saidnew Arkhevari. "Tell me about what distinguishes the old ones from thenewArkhevari. I don't think I understand the difference."
Dravok didn't answer right away. He moved back to the console, resting one hand against it as if steadying himself, not physically, but internally. "We've always been immortal. Truly. Not ageless, not long-lived. Immutable."
I frowned. "All of you?"
