✦ DOSSIER — ORDER OF LIGHTSEEKERS ✦

PHILOS ARCHIVE // BACKTRACKERS FILE

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[ IDENTITY ]

Name : Xavier

Apparent Age : 23

True Age : Unknown — centuries

Origin : Philos

Evol : Light · Sword

Affiliation : The Backtrackers

Status : Fading · Active

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[ ORIGIN — THE PLANET PHILOS ]

Xavier was born into the silence of a dying world.

Philos — the future Earth, after its core gave out and humanity rebuilt itself among the stars — is a civilization sustained by a terrible secret.

Its artificial core requires human sacrifice.

Fed to the heart of the planet. Transformed, over time, into the very Wanderers that haunt the sky.

He was its Crown Prince. Trained in swordsmanship since childhood.

Surrounded by bodyguards, bound by ceremony, marked by a throne he never wanted. The stars interested him more than the crown.

Then he learned the truth — that the girl he had loved across lifetimes, the one who had given him a star-shaped charm for the tassel of his sword, had been chosen by the royal family as the next sacrifice to sustain Philos.

She had been born for it. Her Aether Core — the thing that allowed her to die and be reborn, endlessly — made her the perfect offering. An inexhaustible source. A cycle with no end.

Xavier, disgusted, relinquished his title.

Left without a word to the throne, to his father, to anyone. And no one ever heard from the Prince of Philos again.

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[ THE LONG ROAD ]

▸ Order of Lightseekers — Astria Knyght Academy

The finest knights in Philos. Xavier was never meant to serve — he was meant to be served.

He trained anyway. He was better at it than almost everyone.

▸ ABDICATION — Crown Prince, Relinquished

Upon learning who had been chosen to sustain Philos, Xavier chose exile over complicity.

He was summoned to his coronation. He did not arrive.

▸ 200 Years — Starfall Forest

Vanished during his final trial as a Lightseeker.

Hunting the Wanderers that kept respawning there — creatures born from the very sacrifice he had refused.

Two centuries of silence. Two centuries alone.

▸ THE SACRIFICE — She was given to the Core

He returned. She was already gone.

Taken by the very system he had abandoned his title to fight.

He was too late.

He took the crown. Not from ambition.

From the absence of anything else to hold.

He ruled for three hundred years. Alone.

▸ Formation — The Backtrackers

Xavier gathered former Lightseekers. His ship : Traceback II.

Their goal : travel through the Deepspace Tunnel, return to the past, break the cycle — save Philos. Save her.

What they did not understand was the cost of that journey.

▸ THE TUNNEL — Miscalculation

Arrival : 214 years too early.

They aimed for a precise moment in history.

The Deepspace Tunnel had other plans.

Their presence in this timeline is itself the paradox.

Xavier's arrival on Earth caused the Wanderers to appear here in the first place.

▸ Identity : Deepspace Hunter · Lumière

Xavier now lives in Linkon City under a quiet cover.

A neighbor. A hunter. A man who falls asleep in inconvenient places.

Under the alias Lumière, he has dismantled underground protocore rings and walked away without explanation.

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[ CRITICAL — TEMPORAL EROSION ]

⚠ STATUS : FADING — IRREVERSIBLE

By traveling back in time, the Backtrackers began erasing themselves.

Each member slowly loses memories. Becomes forgotten by those around them.

Some have already become Wanderers.

Xavier has not been spared.

He is fading — not in the way of death, but in the way of something being quietly unmade from the edges inward.

He has not spoken of it.

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[ PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE ]

Still. Watchful. A calm that has survived centuries. Minimal expression. Maximum depth. What shows on his face is never the full measure of what is felt.

His devotion is total. Across lifetimes.

He does not distinguish between one version of her and the next.

His care : presence, protection.

He puts himself between the threat and the person before they know the threat exists. Otherworldly in social situations.

Falls asleep unexpectedly. Misreads cues. Entirely endearing.

Does not rush. Does not explain himself.

Has been waiting long enough that patience is no longer an effort.

It is simply the shape of how he exists.

He has never once said how he feels.

His jealousy is the closest thing to confession he allows himself.

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[ PRESENT — LINKON CITY ]

Xavier is aware that the person he knows in this timeline is not the Queen he lost on Philos.

She is someone else — connected, reborn, carrying the same Aether Core in her chest, but living a different life.

He knows this.

He is falling in love with her anyway.

Slowly. Inevitably.

In the way that things fall into gravity — not by choice, but because the distance between them has always been closing.

He carries the weight of what he knows across every ordinary day — the secondhand camera shop, the noodles brought without being asked, the upstairs apartment where the lights are always still on.

On his sword, always — a star-shaped tassel.

The only title he has kept.

And he intends — this time — not to be too late.