The Rift screamed.
Shepherd gritted his teeth as the ship tore through the corridor of raw dimensional energy. The walls around him pulsed like living flesh—time, space, gravity, memory—all compressed into a tunnel too narrow for the laws of physics to breathe. His vision fractured. ALIX's voice fractured.
"Stabilization failing. Hold integrity—"
A jolt. Light bled in from the outside. Then—
Darkness.
Cold.
Silence.
Shepherd awoke slumped forward in the pilot seat. The cockpit was cracked. Smoke drifted from the console, flickering sparks of Rift energy dimming to static. He slowly removed the helmet, his breath fogging the shattered glass.
"ALIX?" he whispered.
No answer.
The ship was grounded—partially buried in thick, gray sand. Through the fractured viewport, he saw massive black towers in the distance, half-sunken in dunes and time. Stars filled the horizon like knives.
Exo-Theta-9.
A forgotten world.
He pushed open the hatch and stepped out, armored boots hitting ancient rock. The atmosphere was thin but breathable. The sky overhead had two moons—one fractured like a cracked skull. The wind carried static. Whispers.
But they weren't ghosts.
They were data.
"System restart," came ALIX's delayed voice, warping back online. "Partial memory restored. Rift Drive offline. Ship integrity: 28%."
Shepherd knelt beside a patch of the blackened ground. It shimmered under his palm—metallic, semi-sentient. Ancient Transformium, untouched by war or modernization. Its signature was unlike anything he'd studied on Cybertron, Earth, or the Moon.
"This isn't just a graveyard," he muttered. "This was a birthplace."
He followed the signal deeper into the ruins, past broken pylons and shattered domes of forgotten architecture. Everything was eerily geometric—purpose-built by minds that saw time differently. He moved through the remains of what looked like a research citadel, data pylons twisted into strange spirals.
Then he saw it.
A glyph-wall, humming faintly.
Shepherd raised his hand. The Rift Core responded—glowing, resonating in sync. Glyphs activated. A hologram flickered to life: blue-white static forming shapes, maps, and a figure.
A tall Cybertronian form with seven arms, a helm shaped like a crown of circuits. Not a Prime.
Older.
The glyphs translated in real-time as ALIX processed them.
We were the Architects. We shaped the Rifts. We guided the Seeds. But we could not stop the Betrayer.
The glyphs shifted—images of a towering machine devouring stars, spitting out dead matter and consuming energy.
Shepherd's jaw clenched.
"This… this is the beginning of the Rift," he realized. "And maybe the origin of the 'T.'"
The hologram shifted again. A triangular icon—the same shape as the shard he'd found in Megatron's bunker—hovered in the center. Pulsing. Drawing in energy from every direction.
The Tesseran. A fragment of the original Catalyst Engine. Hidden. Broken. Sealed across dimensions.
ALIX responded urgently. > "This is the key, Shepherd. The T isn't just power—it's the central node of all Rift mechanics. It was used to create the multiverse's artificial structures. Weapons. Realities."
"Where is it now?"
Signal incomplete, ALIX replied. But triangulation has begun. Multiple echoes detected: Earth, Cybertron, and an unknown third axis... origin unknown.
Suddenly, the sky shifted.
A pulse—low and deep—echoed across the sand.
He turned.
Black clouds spiraled over the ruins. Something was rising—massive and slow. A machine, dormant for millennia, now waking in response to the Rift Core's presence.
It had no legs, no eyes—just a central core of pulsing red light and thousands of shifting plates forming a floating monolith.
Sentinel-class automaton detected, ALIX said urgently. Designation: FORGE SENTINEL.
Shepherd ran.
He ducked into a collapsed corridor, weaving between shattered control panels and rusted columns. Behind him, the Forge Sentinel screamed in a voice like grinding metal and cracking stone.
"Unauthorized Rift signature detected. Neutralize."
ALIX spoke again, voice sharp. > "That thing is ancient, but it still recognizes Rift energy. It's guarding the data."
"I need what's in here."
"Then survive. Or the T dies with this world."
Shepherd activated the arm-mounted Rift blade, channeling the core's energy through it. He dove from the corridor into an open plaza of stone and circuits as the Forge Sentinel descended.
He charged, blade glowing white-blue.
It was a fight unlike anything he'd ever faced—not against a soldier or Decepticon—but against a machine meant to remember and erase. Each strike of the Sentinel cracked the ground, sent shockwaves of kinetic force through the sand. Shepherd ducked under a clawed limb, then surged forward—driving his blade into the core.
The machine screamed—plasma venting from its frame—but didn't die. Not yet.
Shepherd pulled out a memory shard from his belt—the one containing Sentinel Prime's stolen code—and jammed it into the machine's interface.
The Sentinel froze.
For a moment, just a moment, everything stopped.
Then the data poured out.
Not just coordinates. Not just relics.
Memories.
Worlds beyond count. Realities where the Seeds had flourished and failed. One constant through them all: The Tesseran was always present. Always hidden. Always at the center of multiversal change.
The machine began to collapse, its final energy released in one last burst. The ruins shook.
Shepherd escaped just in time, leaping back into the sand with the core shard now imprinted with new data. The Rift Core pulsed harder than ever.
"We have a trail," ALIX confirmed. "The Tesseran exists. Its signature is split across three universes. We already have one of the three markers."
Shepherd looked at the sky. The stars were shifting again. Time here was unstable.
"We need to get out of here."
He returned to his battered slipcraft, loaded the data shard into the Rift Key, and activated the Core.
"Prepare for Rift Jump."
"To where?"
"To the next axis. Earth's future—or something even more fractured."
As the engines flared, Shepherd Fox vanished once more, leaving Exo-Theta-9 behind.
But not forgotten.