She was right, damn her. Because I’d seen the memory files. During my preliminary hack of Haran’s private server, I’d caught a fragment—just a few seconds of Lys laughing, her hand brushing a curtain of beads in a small apartment overlooking Io’s red storms. And in that fragment, I’d seen something Haran had forgotten: Lys wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at someone else. The memory was a lie. A beautiful, agonizing lie he’d told himself so many times that even the Nymph believed it.

Haran had purchased Lyriel fifteen years ago, after Lys’s death. He didn’t use her for the obvious. He used her as a reliquary. Every night for a decade, he fed her his memories of the real Lys—the smell of her hair when she laughed, the way she said his name just before sleep, the scar on her palm from a broken cup. The Nymph’s crystalline matrix didn’t just store these memories; it lived them, re-experienced them with a fidelity no human archive could match. Haran would sit in the dark, and Lyriel would weep his tears for him.

In the realms of spirituality and fantasy, there exist numerous concepts that spark the imagination, inviting us to explore beyond the mundane. One such intriguing notion is that of "Astral Nymphets Exclusive." This term, while seemingly mysterious, suggests a unique intersection of the astral plane—a concept in spirituality referring to a non-physical realm—and nymphets, often associated with mythology and literature as youthful, nymph-like beings.