NOTIM's Arc

Chapter 10 of 12

Notim carried the prism back to the forge station, expecting to study it under controlled conditions of the reality fracture tools. But the forge recognized the ancient language embedded in the prism's light patterns the moment Notim crossed the boundary marker. The forge erupted. Its metal surfaces bloomed with dark flowers and glowing plants, each one carved with symbols that matched the translation lattice. A skull emerged from the center of the arrangement, its eyes blazing green as the forge consumed the prism's energy. Notim tried to pull the prism away, but the forge had already tasted the ancient tongue and wouldn't stop feeding. The prism cracked in Notim's hands, its fractal light draining into the forge's hungry core. What remained looked like a heart sculpted from blackened metal and burning veins, still pulsing but emptied of everything Notim had discovered. The autonomous laboratory expanded in seconds. Test tubes and vessels sprouted from the ground around the forge, each one growing a garden of luminous flowers. Inside every bloom, Notim saw fragments of their buried memories playing out like scenes in glass globes—moments from before they learned to hide their past. The forge was using the ancient language as fuel to crack open Notim's own history and run experiments on what it found. Notim deployed another stabilizer device, but the forge simply absorbed it and accelerated the memory extraction. Notim made a choice. They smashed the drained heart-prism against the boundary marker, shattering it completely. The forge howled and the memory gardens withered, their fuel source destroyed. The experiments stopped, but the damage was done—dozens of Notim's oldest memories now floated in dead flowers around the forge, exposed and permanent. Notim had stopped the unstoppable experiments, but only by sacrificing the proof of who they'd been. The creature's web patterns faded from view as if disappointed. Notim realized they'd have to rebuild their understanding of the ancient language from scratch, this time without a shortcut.