The halls of the Aether Conservatory buzzed with energy—arcane engines hummed behind stone walls, quills whispered across parchment, and illusionary diagrams spun in midair. Among the lecture chambers and levitating labs, one name passed from mouth to mouth:
Faydric Tomaix.
He wasn't much to look at—lanky, too young, hands perpetually ink-stained. But when he spoke, professors listened. When he drafted, artificers copied. Students older than him turned pages in silence, their pride quietly choking on his brilliance. At just twenty-one, Faydric had already filed three patents with the Aetheric Invention Registry and corrected a ten-year error in golemic sympathetic linkage theory. Beneath one margin, he had scribbled axiom-driven constructs, noting "require no handler, only clarity of thought." No one questioned whether he would change the world. Only how long they’d have to wait.
But then came the shaking hands. Missed words. Equations that once flowed like music now faltered on the page. Faydric said little—only that it was “temporary.” Those close to him knew better.
Late one evening, as twilight drenched the Assembly in violet-blue, Faydric stood before an arcanobiologist in a quiet consultation chamber.
“Your neural lattice is unraveling,” the mage murmured, unable to meet his gaze. “We don’t understand the source. Magical. Degenerative. You have… months, maybe a few years of lucidity. I’m sorry.”
Faydric didn’t speak. He simply stared at his reflection in the silver-rimmed mirror behind the healer—eyes sharp, young, burning with questions. Then he left.
He didn’t slow down.
In the weeks that followed, lights flickered from beneath the old observatory dome—abandoned for decades, now sealed from the inside. Rumors grew. Faydric stopped attending lectures. He declined appointments, missed presentations. But the hum of power from beneath the dome grew stronger.
Inside, the prodigy labored in secret. Not to save his body—but to preserve what truly mattered: his mind. Schematics filled the walls—runes layered over mechanical joints, soul-threading rituals paired with psionic extraction arrays, and the rarely taught principle of Modus Constructae.
He named it Project Cognis.
The construct shell stood tall in the moonlight, brass-limned and inert, surrounded by an array of crystal memory cores. Its chest housed a lattice of blue energy—an arcane synapse chamber tuned to one frequency: Faydric’s own.
"Cognition is continuity. If the mind persists, then so do I."
They found his body weeks later—slumped beside the transfer circle, mouth parted, fingers curled around a broken focus crystal.
And the construct? Gone.
In the wilds beyond the city-states, rumors whisper of a cloaked figure of brass and blue fire—a thing that speaks with a young man’s voice and the weight of a scholar’s memory. Some say it builds marvels from scrap. Others say it communes with spirits of lost knowledge. A few claim it remembers who it was. In some remote camps, travelers claim it is a living artifact, shaped not by hands, but by will—a relic with purpose.
He calls himself Cognis.
He does not sleep. He does not forget. He studies still, refining the line between soul and spark. Where he walks, machines bloom like iron flowers, and questions hang heavier than answers.
“Am I Faydric, or the echo of his ambition?”
“Can memory become a soul… or only a shadow of one?”
He doesn't ask for pity. He just wants to know.
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