The pain didn't come all at once.It crept in like smoke under a locked door—soft at first, then suffocating.
Karael's lungs seized. His limbs twitched.
Something was wrong.This wasn't death.
He opened his eyes.
The world above him was dark and endless, filled with drifting motes of silver dust that shimmered like stars. He was lying on cracked stone, in the center of a room that breathed.
The walls—if they were even walls—expanded and contracted like lungs.
A cold wind spiraled around him, though there were no doors, no windows. Just the slow, steady exhale of something unseen.
He sat up, heart pounding behind his eyes.The memories of his last life blurred like oil in water.
An alley. A knife.Blood that wasn't his.The scream of a train horn that didn't stop.And then—nothing.
But here…Something ancient waited.
At the center of the chamber stood a monolith—black and jagged, jutting up from the ground like a broken fang. It was covered in carvings—fractured symbols that bent when stared at too long. Some seemed to shift beneath his gaze. Others… blinked.
He stepped toward it, barefoot on cold stone.
As he approached, the air thickened.Whispers bled in around the edges of the silence.Not voices, exactly—more like the suggestion of voices, the kind that linger at the edge of dreams.
"Karael… Karael… You have come late… but you have come…"
He froze.
"Who's there?"
No answer.Only the sound of the wind, curling across the face of the monolith.
It felt like it was breathing, too.
Drawn by a force he didn't understand, Karael reached out—and touched the surface.
The moment his skin made contact, reality shattered.
He fell—not through space, but through memory.
Visions slammed into him like storms.
A battlefield where soldiers wept as they forgot why they fought.A city whose name had been erased from every tongue.A woman, crucified in silence, whispering:
"Remember me. Remember me."
And then: darkness.
Karael awoke again—on the floor, gasping.
Something had changed.
The monolith had crumbled into dust. But his hand still glowed faintly, etched with a burning brand in the shape of an eye turned inward.
You have stolen from the forgotten.
The thought wasn't his.
He could feel it now—an echo buried in his soul, something that had reached back through time and memory and marked him.
He had touched an Echo.
And it had touched him back.