#projectseeds

Rem Saverem: Steady Heart ANIMATION

The Guilt-Eaters of Lament

Silence wasn’t the absence of sound in Lament; it was a substance. It poured into the gaps between broken buildings, a thick, dusty syrup that swallowed Rem Saverem’s footsteps as soon as she made them. Her survey mission had been simple: confirm the abandonment of this SEEDS colony outpost. But her escape pod’s crash-landing three kilometers back had turned a routine check into a fight for survival.

The buildings, all white adobe and curved arches, were pristine, untouched by the planet’s rust-colored dust. Yet every window was a dark, hollow eye. Her Geiger-counter clicked a benign, monotonous rhythm. The only anomaly was the silence.

And the mirrors.

They hung at every intersection, polished discs of what looked like salvaged ship hull, dangling from frayed ropes. In the first one, Rem saw her own reflection—pale, ash-blonde hair tied back, blue eyes sharp with fatigue, the utilitarian lines of her SEEDS uniform. In the second, a block down, her reflection was slower to appear, as if the glass had to remember her face. By the third, the reflection smiled a fraction of a second after she did.

A dry wind sighed through the empty streets, carrying a whisper. It sounded like her name.

“Rem…”

She spun, hand on her ion-pistol. The street was empty. The whisper came again, not from the air, but from her own mind, a memory given voice. Tesla. The name was a fresh wound.

“This is a psychological manifestation,” she said aloud, her voice swallowed by the waiting silence. “Isolation stress. Auditory hallucination.”

“Is that what we are, Rem Saverem?” The new voice was liquid, mellifluous, and came from directly behind her.

She drew her weapon in a smooth arc, settling into a combat stance. The man standing there was impossibly tall and slender, dressed in a coattail jacket stitched together from a thousand silvery, reflective scraps. His face was long, handsome, and eerily familiar—it was the face from the mirrors, but alive. His eyes were pools of polished mercury.

“We prefer the term ‘symbionts’,” he said, his mouth not quite syncing with the words. “Or ‘cathartians’. Guilt-eaters is so… visceral.”

“What are you?” Rem demanded, sighting down her pistol’s barrel. “A rogue AI? A neural projection?”

The man—the creature—laughed, a sound like tinkling glass. “We are the consequence that lingered. This colony didn’t die of famine or plague, Rem. They died of regret. We simply… facilitated the feast.” He took a step closer, ignoring the weapon. “And you, my dear, are a banquet waiting to be served. The guilt you carry… it’s exquisite. It has layers, like a fine wine. The sharp top notes of professional failure. The deeper, richer tones of a sister’s betrayal. And the foundational palate… the love for something you believe is a monster.”

Her breath hitched. Nai. How could it know?

“We know because you show us,” it said, answering her unspoken thought. It gestured to a nearby mirror. In its surface, Rem didn’t see herself. She saw the cold, sterile lab on the SEEDS ship, saw her sister Tesla’s defiant face before the lockdown, heard her own desperate, unanswered pleas.

“Stop it.”

“We are not doing it,” the creature crooned, circling her like a predator. “We are merely the mirror. You are the one who cannot look away. Do you regret following orders, Rem? Do you regret not fighting harder for her? Or do you, in the darkest hours, regret that she made you doubt your precious Project?”

“I have no doubts about the Plants,” Rem snapped, but her voice wavered.

“Liar,” the mirror-man whispered, now suddenly beside her ear, his breath cold and odorless. “You love the independent ones. Like the child, Nai. You love its potential. You fear its power. You lie awake wondering if you are nurturing a god or a weapon. That cognitive dissonance… it is our ambrosia.”

A second figure emerged from a nearby doorway. A woman, composed of the same shifting, mirror-like fragments, her form reflecting a younger, more anxious Rem. “The weight is crushing you,” the female echo said. “Let us taste it. Let us have the moment you first called Nai ‘it’ instead of ‘him’. The moment you chose protocol over kinship.”

Terror, cold and sharp, spliced with a strange, hypnotic seduction. The offer to be free of the gnawing, constant shame was profoundly alluring. She saw it in their silver eyes—a promise of oblivion.

Rem Saverem: Wasteland Angel ANIMATION

The Whispering Folly of Kestrel’s Grave

The world dissolved into a single, furious color: the burnt ochre of a dying sky. Rem Saverem leaned into the screaming wind, the grit scouring the reinforced glass of his goggles with a sound like a million angry insects. The sandstorm had come not as weather, but as a wall, a biblical erasure of the vast, pockmarked desert known as Kestrel’s Grave.

He’d been too far from the geodome outpost. His bike, a venerable turbine-runner named Mithril, was now a shrouded hummock of sand. Survival was a calculus of breath and patience. He found the lee of a colossal, twisted spar of alloy—a ribcage from some forgotten war-machine from the Spacefall conflicts. He wedged himself into its skeletal embrace, a scarf wrapped tight over his nose and mouth, and waited for the world to end.

But the world did not end. It changed.

The wind’s scream began to modulate. Within its roar, Rem heard what he first took for static, then for voices—a multitude, whispering, arguing, weeping. The sand, driven with such violence, began to act against nature. Instead of accumulating, it flowed in specific rivulets, carving channels around his shelter with intelligent intent. He watched, mesmerized and horrified, as the storm scoured the earth down to a depth of several meters, revealing not bedrock, but a landscape of fused glass, scorched metal, and bones.

The storm passed with the suddenness of a drawn curtain. Silence fell, a deafening, absolute thing. The air, now still, was charged with a strange, ozonic tang and the old, cold smell of deep earth. The revealed battlefield glittered under the twin moons like a wound.

And then, the whispers returned. Not from the wind, but from the ground itself.

“Rem Saverem,” the voice was a dry rustle, like sand sliding down metal. “We have been waiting. You are a curious key.”

Rem scrambled from his shelter, hand on the grip of his plasma pistol. “Who’s there?”

A figure coalesced from the shimmering air near a crater of vitrified sand. It appeared humanoid, but its edges bled into the moonlight, composed of dust motes and memory. Its face was androgynous, beautiful in a stark, geometric way, but its eyes were dark, starless pits.

“A custodian,” it said. Its mouth did not move. “A resonance. You may call me Echo. You tread upon the Folly.”

“This is a battlefield,” Rem stated, his voice harder than he felt.

“A battlefield is a place of death. This is a place of consumption. A mistake buried by your forebears.” Echo drifted closer. “They thought they could seal it with fire and blood. They only fed it. The storm… the storm is its breath. It dreams, and when it dreams, it exhales, and the sand obeys.”

“What dreams?”

“Dreams of what it consumed. The fears, the loves, the final, shining thoughts of ten thousand souls. They are all here. Trapped. Digesting.” Echo’s head tilted. “You are different, Rem Saverem. Your mind is… quiet. Ordered. It sings a solitary note in this cacophony. It finds you… tantalizing.”

A seduction began, not of flesh, but of psyche. Images bloomed in Rem’s mind without his consent. He felt the warmth of a sun he’d never known, saw the face of a woman with kind eyes and silver hair—a ghost from a past not his own, yet the longing felt intimate, acute. It was followed by the exhilarating rush of a ship’s launch, the bitter pride of a general sacrificing his men, the sweet sorrow of a last kiss. Each memory was a stolen jewel, offered to him.

“You see?” Echo whispered, now beside him, its form cool and scentless. “It can give you lifetimes. The experiences of heroes and poets and lovers. You need never be alone in your own skull again. A small price. Just a… resonance. A little space for it to listen, through you, to the world above.”

The terror was not in the offer, but in its allure. To be free of his own isolating burden, to be filled with other lives… He shook his head, a violent motion. “These are not gifts. They’re trophies. You’re the thing that took them.”

Echo’s beautiful face fractured like cracked glass, revealing a flicker of the roaring chaos beneath—a maelstrom of screaming faces and fragmented consciousness. “WE ARE WHAT REMAINS!” The voice multiplied, a chorus of the damned. Then it smoothed back into placidity. “Forgive the discord. It hungers. It has been so long since a new note entered the chorus.”