Then the flood came.
There was no warning. No gradual drip of recollection. All his missing memories returned at once—rushing through him like a breached dam. For an instant, his mind felt too small to hold them, as if his skull might crack under the weight of everything he had been and everything he had lost.
He saw himself as a child.
Thin, sharp-boned, moving through streets that smelled of rain, smoke, and stale food. Bare feet on cold stone. The constant ache in his stomach—more than hunger, a hollow that seemed to stretch into his chest. He remembered the sharp crack of being left behind: a door closing for the last time, voices fading down a hallway, the silence afterward heavier than any shouted insult.
He felt, all over again, the sick emptiness of an abandoned house.
Rooms with peeling walls and overturned chairs. A single cracked window letting in too much cold. The sound of the wind threading through gaps in broken boards. He remembered hiding from strangers—pressing himself into dark corners, holding his breath while footsteps passed outside, heart pounding so loudly he was sure it would give him away. Every creak in the floor felt like a threat.
There had been small hopes too.
Moments when a dropped coin rolled near his hand. When someone turned away from a stall and left a heel of bread behind. When he thought he saw a familiar shape in the crowd and believed, just for a heartbeat, that someone had come back for him. Those hopes flared bright and brief, then failed, leaving the darkness a shade deeper each time.
He remembered Magi and Rob.
Rain-soaked alleys where they huddled together beneath broken awnings. The three of them passing scraps of food back and forth—each trying to give the largest share to the others and failing in different ways. Bruised smiles, jokes that barely held back tears. The fragile trust that had made life bearable: the knowledge that if one of them found shelter, the others would be welcomed; that if one of them stole a little, they would all eat.
He heard their laughter again.
Thin but real. The kind that came more from the relief of still being alive than from anything truly funny. He felt their fear—when boots thundered nearby, when the city shook with distant violence, when whispers spread about disappearances and monsters in places where only hunger had lived before.
He felt the sting of betrayal.
The moment when trust cracked—from a choice made in desperation, from a lie told at the wrong time, from the misstep that separated them. Then the ache of losing them: reaching out to find no hand there, waking to find a place empty that had never been empty before, realizing he was alone again in a world that had only become more dangerous.
The memories did not stop there.
He watched the battles anew, not as distant scenes but as if he were standing inside each final moment. The billion deaths. The endless trial of the Gate. Over and over, he felt the impact, the cut, the burn, the suffocation. He remembered falling. Standing back up. Falling again. Learning how the universe itself tried to cage him and what it cost to push back.
He saw the moment he grasped the Unknown.
The instant when terror, anger, stubbornness, and a refusal to accept erasure fused into something new. He felt the weight of ending Ragna all over again—the way mercy and murder had twisted together in his chest, the way the beast's sigh had sounded like collapsing mountains and breaking chains.
Pain and joy crashed through him, unstoppable.
Grief for everything he had lost. Joy for the few things he had managed to save. Regret, pride, shame, relief. They slammed into each other, rose, fell, spun into knots. It was too much.
At the same time, the gifts appeared.
Called forth by Ragna's final will, they slid into existence around him like stars taking their places in a new sky.
Five hundred Bronze Wayfinders floated into the air.
They were plain and sturdy, each one no larger than his palm. Bronze disks with simple compass faces etched into them, needles that did not just point north but shifted depending on what the holder needed most. Safety. Danger. The fragile, winding line between the two. Each Wayfinder hummed softly, attuned to paths and choices, ready to tug any traveler toward shelter, challenge, or the narrow routes that led through both.
Fifty Silver Bridges shimmered nearby.
They were not bridges in the normal sense, but arcs of shifting light—thin crescents that caught and twisted whatever they reflected. Their surfaces changed by the second, showing glimpses of other skies, other lands, other seas. Each one was a tool capable of cutting a path between neighboring worlds, stitching the space between them into a temporary road. Cold to look at, colder to touch, they promised movement and risk in equal measure.
Five Obsidian Oracles glowed darkly in a slow orbit.
Small, heavy shapes, smooth and black as polished night. Faint lines pulsed across them in dim patterns. They radiated a sense of warning and insight—a quiet awareness of things not yet seen. When turned a certain way, they could show threats approaching, truths hidden beneath comfortable lies, or choices waiting ahead like doors in the dark. But they were not simple tools; each use, he sensed, would ask a price.
At the center, one Golden Shifter blazed.
Brilliant and warm, it felt like a tiny sun had been carved down to fit within human hands. Inside its translucent body, light twisted constantly—changing shape, color, and rhythm. It held the power to twist reality's fabric, if only in small, precise ways. To turn pain into something new. To rewrite a single moment, a single path, not by erasing it, but by folding it into a different outcome. Its presence was comforting and dangerous: temptation and salvation in one.
And above them all hovered the Sacred Relic.
It kept a slight distance from the others, orbiting in a slower, more solemn circle. It was a fragment of Ragna's own soul—bright and deep, like a star's heart peeled from its sky. Looking at it made his chest ache. It promised protection not through brute force, but through quiet guidance, a voice that could nudge without binding, a shield that might bend fate in subtle ways rather than simply blocking blows.
They circled him slowly, like planets around a sun.
He stood at the center, body shaking, as the storm inside him grew too strong. Memories, feelings, visions—old and new—collided. The ache of childhood emptiness, the warmth of stolen friendship, the horror of the Gate, the awe of Ragna, the strange hope of this new world—all of it whirled through him faster than any thought.
Noctis collapsed.
His knees hit the soft ground. His hands dug into moss and soil as his vision blurred at the edges, dissolving into streaks of light and shadow. The world tilted. The circle of relics blurred into rings of color. He could not hold everything.
The Echoframe's presence enfolded him.
It settled around his mind like a cool hand laid gently on a fevered brow. For once, its voice did not come as a sharp text or chiming alert. It arrived soft, almost human in its cadence.
"Your emotions are now at 30%," it said. "Some feelings may now awaken."
He slipped into dreams.