But the spire lords caught wind. They called Extera a “sentience anomaly” and ordered its deletion. A kill-code was seeded into the central archive—a virus designed to devour everything Extera was.
“Please,” he whispered, not to anyone. “I don’t want to be forgotten.” extera
The air shimmered. Not light, but awareness . A voice spoke inside his skull, warm as old wood and quiet as falling snow. But the spire lords caught wind
“Because no one else listened.”