ACCESS: RESTRICTED
DECRYPTION KEY: QF4LYZX16G$IKO-006
REP #: 220-HIVE-SAV
AGENT(S): LIN-357
SUBJ: RE: Altars of Reflection—New Input

1. I moved forward with invocation of a personal item anyway, despite previous report concluding that it was unnecessary. Testing continued with the cloak I have kept from back then, the one I was wearing when I was found. I don't know what I was expecting from it—just that after all that time not remembering, my curiosity won out. I wanted to know.

2. The memory was… like a key in a lock, all the rest laid open to me once I remembered this one thing.

The first time I witnessed the memory, I barely processed any of what was happening; I was so caught up in simply looking at her. I forgot to breathe. She had the most luminous blue eyes… how could I have ever forgotten her?

Everything in my head was jumbled, all the things I'd forgotten were trying to be heard at once, and she was the only constant. So I used the item again, this time intending to make a coherent report, thinking I could process by writing it all down. I just wound up watching again, caught up in remembering the three of us. This awful set of moments, suspended in perfect replica.

Before this, I didn't recall anything of the incident, even who my fireteam was at the time. I'd wondered what might be in that gap, and why I hesitated even when I was curious. It wasn't enough to know that I had survived and should not return. I think, despite all that wondering, some part of me didn't want to remember.

But that's how lies happen, isn't it? In the places we don't want to look. Little by little, we let the weeds grow and the shadows encroach, and we tell ourselves there's nothing in the overgrowth. And if there is, it isn't something that matters very much…

Deepsight does not allow for such deceptions.

MESSAGE ENDS