Morwen moved through the Echoing not like a visitor, but like a part of its ecology. Kaelan followed, a clumsy ghost in her wake. She didn't walk paths; she read the currents of the air, her head tilted as if listening to a song he couldn't hear, her steps avoiding patches of ground that hummed with a wrongness only she could detect.
"The resonance here is stratified," she said, her voice low, not breaking the silence but weaving into it. "Older. The newer wails are on the surface. The deeper griefs are buried. We're looking for the buried ones."
Kaelan said nothing, storing every word, every term. Stratified. Resonance. He was building a lexicon of his own damnation.
They moved for what felt like an hour, descending into a canyon where the crystal spires gave way to structures of smoothed, black basalt. This was not a natural formation. This was architecture. Ruined, alien, but purposeful. The air grew heavy, the psychic hum deepening into a bass note that vibrated in Kaelan's molars.
Morwen held up a closed fist. He froze.
Ahead, the passage between two monolithic basalt slabs was blocked by a shimmering, intricate web of light. It wasn't a curtain like the last ward. This was a complex, three-dimensional mandala of silver energy, rotating slowly in mid-air. It emitted a low, threatening drone that spoke of razor edges and screaming alarms.
"A Sophic Ward," Morwen murmured, a hint of professional respect in her tone. "Not a fence. A mind. It doesn't just alert its creator; it learns, it adapts, it retaliates."
"Can you quiet it?" Kaelan asked, the memory of the last ward's gentle unraveling fresh in his mind.
"Quiet a mind? No. You can only distract it." She sheathed her dark dagger and held her hands out. This time, the threads she spun were not silver, but a deep, mesmerizing indigo. They didn't weave into the ward; they danced around its periphery, weaving a new, simpler pattern—a glamour of empty air and silent stone. "It will see what I want it to see for a few seconds. A blind spot. Move the moment I step through."
She stepped forward. The sophisticated mandala of light didn't change, but its slow rotation hesitated for a fraction of a second. Morwen slipped through the gap. Kaelan followed instantly, a cold sweat on his neck. As he passed, he felt the ward's attention, a vast, intelligent pressure, brush over the illusion and dismiss it.
On the other side, the world changed. The air was still and tomb-quiet. They stood in a circular plaza. At its center stood a single, perfectly preserved door of white wood, sealed within a swirling, violent vortex of black and purple energy. It pulsed like a trapped heart, and each pulse emitted a wave of pure, undiluted emotion—a devastating, soul-crushing sense of betrayal.
This was no Weaver's ward. This was something raw and native to the Echoing.
"A memory-lock," Morwen breathed, her usual coolness replaced by a covetous awe. "Not a defense. A scar. The echo of a trauma so powerful it sealed itself in a coffin of its own pain. A Weaver cannot unravel this. It is a knot with only one end." She turned to him, her grey eyes alight with a fire that was almost fanatical. "This is what I need you for. A Scribe can Read it. You can live the memory that formed the lock. And if you can live it… you can open it."
Kaelan stared at the pulsating wound in reality. It felt actively malignant. "You want me to touch that?"
"It's just a story, Scribe. The most painful kind. It can't break your bones." Her gaze was relentless. "It can only break your heart. The cost of doing business."
The transaction was clear. His sanity for her prize.
He approached the lock. The air around it was frigid. The emotion radiating from it was a physical weight, pressing on his chest, making it hard to breathe. He steeled himself. He was an archivist. His duty was to preserve stories, even the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones.
He reached out a hand that trembled not with fear, but with a profound, empathetic dread.
"Find the key," Morwen urged, her voice a tense wire from behind him. "The moment it all turned."
His fingertips touched the swirling darkness.
The world dissolved.
He was no longer Kaelan. He was Valerius. The stone of the rampart was cold under his palms. The trust of the man he guarded was a warm cloak on his shoulders. He saw the torches of the approaching host, their numbers staining the valley like a plague. The weight of the gold in his pocket was a cancer. His hand, traitorous and steady, fitted the iron key into the lock. The turn was smooth, well-oiled. The groan of the great gate opening was the most horrifying sound he would ever hear. He did not see the fire or hear the screams. He only saw the Elder's face in the flickering light—not anger, not hate, but a deep, unforgivable, heartbreaking sadness. The betrayal in those eyes was the last thing he ever saw. It was the memory that defined him. It was the memory that followed him here.
Kaelan gasped, wrenching his hand back as if burned. He stumbled back from the lock, falling to one knee. He coughed, the taste of copper and guilt thick in his mouth. He had not observed the memory; he had been Valerius. The shame was his own. The weight of the gold felt real in his own pocket.
"Well?" Morwen's voice was sharp, impatient. "What is the key? What is the memory?"
"It's… it's a betrayal," Kaelan choked out, the words ash. "He was the guard. He opened the gate. The key is… the turn of the key. The moment of his choice."
Morwen's face split into a sharp, triumphant grin. "There. You see? Now. Open it. Be him in that moment. Replay the memory into the lock."
The thought was abhorrent. To willingly embody that traitorous act. To make it his own.
But he had agreed. He was a key.
He closed his eyes, grasping for the vile, crystalline memory. He focused on the specific, damning motion: the hand reaching out, the cold iron, the definitive turn.
He Played the Recording directly into the heart of the vortex.
The Tax was immediate and brutal.
The internal vault did not open—it screamed open, demanding a memory of equivalent, devastating weight—a memory of a profound, personal failure.
It took the memory of the day he failed his final archival examination. The crushing heat of shame that had flooded his face. The way the parchment had blurred before his eyes. The look on his mentor's face—not anger, but a quiet, profound disappointment that had said, "I thought you were more." The feeling of being a fraud in the one place he had ever felt he belonged.
It was gone. Erased.
The memory-lock shuddered violently. The swirling darkness convulsed, condensed into the phantom image of a large, iron key for a single, agonizing second, and then shattered into nothingness with a sound like a dying sigh.
The white wooden door was now just a door.
Morwen strode past him without a glance, her focus entirely on the prize. The chamber beyond was small and bare. On a simple pedestal rested a single, perfect, crystallized tear. It glowed with a soft, profound, and endless sorrow.
She picked it up, holding it to the faint light. "A memory of pure, uncorrupted grief," she breathed, a reverent tone in her voice. "Incredibly potent. A Weaver can distill this into a shield that turns aside any weapon born of rage. Or a blade that can sever the threads of despair itself." She pocketed it, her transaction complete.
She turned to leave, then paused, glancing down at Kaelan, who still knelt on the ground, hollowed out by a shame that was not his own and the loss of one that was.
"You'll learn to measure the hollow places," she said, and for the first time, her voice held no mockery, only a flat, brutal truth. "You'll learn to judge which echoes are worth the space they leave behind. That one was."
She walked away, leaving him alone in the silent plaza with the ghost of a traitor's choice and the new, fresh void where his own failure used to be.
He was learning. The path wasn't just paved with loss. It was paved with the memories of others, and each one cost him a piece of his own map to himself. He was becoming a collection of curated absences.
And he had only just opened the first door.