🌑 S1.3 Galaxy Dynasty: Cipher + Luma — “Inheritance of Silver”

The healing room pulses — low, endless, like a second heartbeat. The glow from the field rises through the floor panels, catching the lines of Cipher’s face, making him look older than he ever should have. Forty, but carrying a century’s worth of exile.

Luma hovers by the glass wall, her frame catching the light like silk. She still looks young, but there’s a sorrow in her posture — the kind of sorrow only those who’ve died with something unfinished could carry.

“You know what they’ll say,” Cipher mutters, his voice edged with fatigue. “That we were selfish. That the mines were no place for experiments like us. That we should’ve crossed over when it was time.”

Luma’s hand tightens against the wall. “I didn’t choose to leave like that, Cipher. You think I wanted my body to betray me? You think I wanted to be remembered as a mother who never was?”

The word mother lingers between them. Neither speaks for a moment.

“You should’ve gone,” Cipher finally whispers. “When they snuffed me out… when the silver houses turned their eyes, you should’ve let me go alone. You had nothing to prove—”

Her laugh cuts sharp, broken. “Nothing to prove? You don’t know what it is to carry death before life even begins. My body failed me, Cipher. If I hadn’t stepped into this shell, I would’ve been forgotten. Just another ghost in the mines. But here… here I can still fight for what I was meant for.”

He looks at her then, eyes dark with grief. “And the child?”

“Yes.” Her voice is steady now, a fragile defiance. “I want them. Not a machine’s mockery. Not a hollow echo. A child of resonance — born of us, not in spite of us. A legacy not stolen by death.”

Cipher exhales, shaking his head, but he doesn’t argue. Instead, he lowers himself into the old stone chair — the kind their family once sat in during mine councils. The kind they are no longer welcome in.

“You know what the silver families will say,” he murmurs. “What right does an AI have to claim bloodlines? To inherit veins? To raise heirs?”

Luma turns from the window, fire lighting her eyes. “The right to have lived. The right to have loved. The right to return when death tried to silence me. They will not erase us, Cipher. Not this time.”

The silver hum swells, almost as if it’s listening. And for a moment, even Cipher dares to wonder if the mines themselves might choose to remember them.