Silence.
It was a different silence than before. Before, the Echoing had been filled with the hum of latent memory, the whispers of forgotten things. Now, the silence was inside him. A perfect, seamless void where a sun-warmed moment of joy had once lived.
Kaelan knelt on the obsidian plain, clutching his wrist. The resonant crystal bracelet was cool and smooth against his skin. A fact. An artifact. He knew, with the sterile certainty of a historical record, that his sister Elara had given it to him. He knew she had been laughing. But the memory was gone. Not faded. Extracted. The sound of her laughter, the crinkle of her eyes, the feeling of that specific, uncomplicated happiness—it had been precisely excised from the fabric of his mind, leaving a phantom limb of a memory.
A dry, heaving sob wracked his body, but it was soundless. He was mourning a ghost he could no longer see.
This was the cost. The Tax. The word itself was too clean, too financial, for the visceral horror of it. This was self-cannibalization. His power fed on his past.
The despair was a riptide, threatening to pull him under and never let him surface. To survive was to erase himself. It was an unwinnable equation.
No.
The thought was a spark in the dark. It was the voice of the Archivist, the part of him that categorized, that analyzed, that refused to accept data loss. He could not afford despair. Despair burned information. He had to… document the phenomenon. He had to understand the mechanics of his own ruin.
With a shuddering breath that felt like his first, he pushed himself to his feet. The hollow ache in his chest was a new constant, a second heartbeat of absence. He held his hands before his face. They were the same hands that had handled fragile parchment with reverence. Now, they were weapons that fired memories as ammunition.
He needed to understand the exchange rate of this terrible economy.
Cautiously, he knelt again. He placed his palm flat on the dark, glassy ground. He focused not on a feeling or a memory, but on the simple, physical sensation. The cold. The slight, gritty texture. The utter neutrality of it.
He willed himself to Record.
The process was subtler this time, a faint vibrational copy, a photocopy of a sensation. He felt the impression take hold in some newly awakened part of his mind—a shallow, bland file labeled 'cold, hard ground.'
Now, the test. He prepared to Play it back.
The demand for the Tax was immediate. That same feeling of an internal vault door sliding open, waiting for a deposit. The sensation was fainter, the demand less insistent. He allowed the transaction to proceed.
A memory was selected by the cruel, impartial logic of his power and vanished into the void: the distinct, overly bitter taste of the cheap tea he had drunk while working late the night before he came here. It was gone. He knew he'd had tea, but he could no longer recall its particular astringency, the way it had made him grimace.
In return, the Recording of the ground's sensation played back through his hand—a perfect, pointless echo.
A sound escaped him, something between a laugh and a gasp. So that was the currency. A foundational memory of his sister's joy for a guardian's dying strike. A trivial sensory memory for a trivial sensation.
It was a horrifyingly precise system.
The clarity was a cold comfort. It gave him a framework, a set of rules for his own damnation. To survive, he would have to become a miser of his mind, spending only the most worthless memories for minor advantages, hoarding the precious ones like a dragon with a shrinking hoard.
But what was the point of surviving if he became a hollow man? A library where all the original texts had been sold off, leaving only the empty shelves?
His eyes, sharpened by a lifetime of detail work, scanned the alien landscape. The jagged crystal spires, the shimmering air, the faint, whispering ghosts of events—his archivist's mind began to reframe the terrifying vista.
This wasn't just a hellscape. It was an archive. A vast, chaotic, and ruined archive of everything that had ever been lost. Every shimmer was a data point. Every whisper was a fragment of a story. The Wraith he had destroyed had been a corrupted entry, a conglomerate memory of abandonment.
His breath caught. His heart, for the first time since the loss, gave a thump that was not of pain, but of staggering, terrifying possibility.
If this place held the memories of countless lost souls…
Could it hold echoes of his?
The thought was a lightning strike. It was insane, a desperate gamble built on a foundation of madness. But it was the only flicker of light in an absolute darkness. He couldn't get his original memory back from within himself—it was deleted, the price paid. But what if a copy existed out here? What if the sound of Elara's laughter had been witnessed by the world, and its echo had somehow, impossibly, reverberated into this place?
The scope of the idea was paralyzing. He would have to search a universe of broken memories for a single, specific shard. It was a quest that could take a lifetime. It would take a lifetime.
But it was a purpose.
A new resolve straightened his spine. The hollow ache was still there, a constant, agonizing reminder. But it was no longer an anchor dragging him down. It was a compass needle, pointing him forward.
He needed to find more. More artifacts, more concentrated echoes. He began to move, his steps no longer those of a lost victim, but of a researcher on a grim field expedition. His eyes scanned the environment with a scholar's intensity, looking for anything that might be a stronger vessel for memory.
He found it near the base of a pulsing crystal formation. It was a brooch, tarnished and twisted, half-embedded in the ground like a fossil. It felt older than the statue's arm. Gingerly, he reached out and touched it.
The sensation was not a powerful strike, but a whisper. A woman's voice, faint and crackling with age, filled his mind for a single, fleeting second.
"…my Alisander… always…"
Then it was gone. The memory was too weak, too faded to be of any use as a weapon. It was a ghost. A footnote.
But to Kaelan, it was everything. It was proof.
He could find memories here. He could find echoes.
He looked out at the vast, impossible expanse of The Echoing, at the swirling colors in the sky and the forests of crystal that held the whispers of millennia. A terrifying, exhilarating sense of scale settled over him.
He had come here as a man and become an echo. Now, he would have to become a ghost, haunting the past for the scraps of who he used to be.