Aouli landed with silence, not with impact.
The world around him did not greet him with solid ground or breathable air. It shimmered—a rolling haze of half-formed shapes and fading echoes, as if the space itself were holding its breath, unsure whether to exist. He drifted to his feet slowly, aware that there was ground beneath him only because he didn't fall. The air was cool, dry, but tinged with the scent of ash and ozone—like the memory of a fire long since extinguished.
Kaero landed beside him a beat later, less gracefully. He grunted, shook something out of his cloak, and looked around with immediate suspicion.
"Well," he said, voice quiet but edged, "this is appropriately unsettling."
The Liminal stretched out in all directions—if direction could be said to mean anything here. It was like standing at the intersection of multiple broken dreams. Overhead, two suns flickered, one larger and pulsing like a dying heartbeat, the other skipping in and out of sight, blinking like a broken light bulb. The sky shifted color with every blink—sometimes green, sometimes deep red, sometimes the dull gray of mourning clouds.
To the left, a city floated—entire blocks of architecture suspended mid-collapse, skyscrapers arcing downward in slow-motion free fall, caught just before ruin. Their windows shimmered with static. People flickered inside like ghosts caught in stuttering loops.
To the right, a desert sprawled, but the sand shifted beneath invisible winds. Sometimes the dunes reversed, climbing skyward. Sometimes they dissolved into water, then back into dust.
Behind them, what might have been a forest spread in a fan pattern—trees of crystal, their branches sagging under the weight of frost that shimmered and re-formed endlessly. No wind passed through the branches. No birdsong. Only the subtle groan of gravity reconsidering its direction.
"What is this place?" Aouli asked softly.
Kaero didn't answer immediately. He crouched and picked up a shard of something—it looked like glass, but it wavered in his hand, showing images that weren't his. A planet drowning. A child sleeping in a broken cradle. A tower collapsing into a lake of stars.
"The Liminal," Kaero said. "The in-between. A ghost-layer. When a reality collapses too violently to resolve its energy, it doesn't vanish cleanly. The echoes—environmental, emotional, energetic—they get caught. Trapped between folds."
"Trapped?" Aouli echoed.
Kaero nodded. "Like the space between heartbeats. Not alive. Not dead. Just… lingering."
Aouli turned in a slow circle, absorbing the landscape—or what passed for one. There were no consistent textures, no clear orientation. Gravity was soft here, flexible. Even time seemed diluted. A broken clock floated past, its hands spinning wildly in opposite directions.
Aouli took a step forward—and the ground beneath his foot became a bridge, then a street, then a wooden dock. He stepped again, and the surface turned to marble, cracked and whispering in languages he didn't know. Every footfall summoned a new memory, a new echo.
It was like walking on the bones of forgotten worlds.
"Why did we come here?" Aouli asked, glancing at Kaero.
Kaero tucked the shard away into a pouch and stood. "Because this is where Echoes like to hide. And you need to find them."
A faint wind stirred. Not a real one. More the idea of wind—a memory brushing across skin that wasn't truly there. Aouli closed his eyes. The sensation was strange, but not unfamiliar.
And then, distantly, he heard something.
A voice.
A whisper, carried through time like a forgotten name.
"...Aouli..."
He turned sharply. "Did you hear that?"
Kaero raised an eyebrow. "What?"
"My name. Someone said my name."
Kaero's expression changed. "Then we're in the right place."
They walked.
Or they thought they did. It was difficult to measure time in the Liminal. Hours might have passed. Or minutes. Their path curled through fragmented memories—buildings with only two walls standing, filled with tables still set for dinner; alleyways that ended in oceans; doorways that opened into starfields.
Aouli stopped as they passed a field of statues—each one identical, but each made from a different material. Stone. Bone. Crystal. Rusted metal. Each bore his face.
He shivered.
Kaero glanced at them, and for once, said nothing.
Eventually, the air changed again. Thickened. The haze grew denser, the light dimmer. And then they stepped into a new zone of the Liminal—one less abstract.
A shattered Earth.
Not the Earth—but an Earth. It was unmistakable in its DNA: the curvature of the broken horizon, the familiar stretch of cloud-swollen skies, the cracked pavement of what had once been a street. Skyscrapers here had fallen into rivers. A school bus lay overturned in the median. Trees jutted from window frames.
Aouli's knees nearly gave out.
He reached down, touched the ground. Asphalt. Real. Cold.
"Gaia," he whispered.
He felt her here. Faint, fractured, but present. As if the land itself remembered her voice. Every crumbled brick, every charred tree trunk seemed to hum with the echo of her sorrow.
"This isn't my Earth," he said aloud.
"But it's close," Kaero replied. "Close enough to hurt."
Aouli wandered from the path.
He passed through a playground overtaken by vines. Swings moved gently in a breeze that wasn't there. A mural on the school wall depicted the solar system, but several planets were missing—scrubbed out, names forgotten.
Then he saw them.
People.
Only they weren't people—not really. Holograms. Phantoms. They flickered through repeating loops. A woman crying on a bench. A child chasing a ball that never rolled. A man shouting into a phone that was no longer there.
"They're memories," Aouli realized. "Recorded in the structure of the world."
Kaero nodded. "Grief leaves residue. If it's strong enough… it gets stuck."
One of the holograms turned toward Aouli as he passed. The image trembled, then locked eyes with him.
"Why didn't you stop it?" she said.
The voice was distorted, static-filled.
Aouli froze. "I…"
"Why didn't you save us?" she said again, louder.
Others began turning.
"Why didn't you stop it?"
"Where were you?"
"Why didn't you help?"
Their voices layered into a rising wave.
Kaero grabbed his arm. "We need to move."
"No," Aouli said, shaking free. "I need to face this."
The phantoms surged toward him, not walking but gliding, their bodies still locked in their loops. But now, their eyes turned, all focused on him.
"You watched us fall!"
"You stood above us while we burned!"
"You felt our pain and did nothing!"
Aouli stumbled backward, pain ricocheting through his chest. Not physical. Emotional. Psychic. The accusations were tapping into something buried—guilt. Real or imagined, it didn't matter. The resonance was raw.
He fell to his knees as the world shook around him.
Kaero stepped forward, raising his rifle—not to fire, but to ground himself.
"Aouli!" he shouted. "This isn't real! They're echoes!"
"I know," Aouli gasped. "But they're not wrong."
And then everything stopped.
The phantoms froze.
The light dimmed.
And a new presence entered the Liminal.
The Echo.