Time lost meaning. Kaelan sat in the fine white dust of his victory, the twin voids within him howling a silent symphony of absence. He was a living palimpsest, his original text scraped away to make room for borrowed, violent words. The memory of his father's face was gone. The fact of its former existence was a tombstone in an empty graveyard.
A soft, deliberate click broke the silence.
It wasn't the organic hum of the Echoing or the coalescing of a new horror. It was metallic. Precise.
Kaelan's head snapped up. Across the clearing, a figure was crouched near the base of the scarred archway. They were clad in close-fitting, practical leathers scoured by use and dust. Their back was to him, their attention wholly consumed by a small, dark-metal device in their hand, which they were using to scrape a residue of shimmering energy from the ground—the last fading remnants of the Shard-Hound.
A person. A living, breathing human.
The shock was so profound it was physical. Relief, hot and dizzying, flooded him, followed an instant later by a spike of ice-cold fear. His experience had taught him one unshakeable truth: in the Echoing, everything came with a cost. What would another person cost him?
He must have gasped, because the figure went perfectly still. Not with fear. With the absolute, predatory stillness of a cat that has heard a mouse stir. Slowly, with an economy of motion that spoke of deep familiarity with danger, they turned.
It was a woman. Her face was all sharp angles and focused intensity, her dark hair shorn close to her skull. Her eyes, a pale, piercing grey, found his immediately. They held no shared relief, no camaraderie. They were the eyes of a assessor, scanning him, inventorying his dust-covered clothes, his shaken posture, the spot where the Hound had died. The calculation was cold, swift, and utterly impersonal.
"You are making," she said, her voice a low, rasping thing, like stone grinding on stone, "a remarkable amount of noise."
Kaelan could only stare, his voice a prisoner in his throat.
She stood in a single, fluid motion, tucking the scraping device into a bandolier. She held a strange, dagger-like tool made of a non-reflective black metal. It wasn't raised in threat, but its readiness was a palpable thing in the air.
"That was a structural echo," she stated, her gaze flicking to the shattered remains of the pillar. "A stable, latent memory. You used it as a bludgeon. It's… inefficient. Like using a sacred text to start a fire. You broadcast your presence to every tuned ear for a league."
The words were alien, but the meaning was clear. He had been clumsy. Loud.
"Who are you?" he finally managed, the words scraping raw.
She ignored the question. "Your Affinity. It's kinetic? A concussive discharge?" Her head tilted. "A brutalist approach. But the energy signature was… odd. Tainted."
"I… I take memories," he said, the explanation feeling foolish and inadequate. "I can use them. But it takes something from me. A… a Tax."
Her eyebrows lifted a fraction. It was the first crack in her impassive facade. "A Tax? You pay a personal Tax to manifest an echo?"
The way she said it—with a spark of genuine, clinical interest— chilled him more than any threat could have. "You know what this is?"
"Know of it," she corrected, her gaze turning speculative, almost hungry. "A theoretical expression. Most of us are Weavers." She gestured with her free hand, and a thread of silver light, like captured starlight, spun from her fingertips for a moment before dissolving. "We manipulate the ambient resonance. We bend what is already here. It is draining, but it does not… consume the weaver." She looked at him not as a person, but as a fascinating anomaly. "You are a Scribe. I thought your kind were myths. Cautionary tales for children who ask too many questions about the deep echoes."
A Scribe. The word landed with the weight of truth. A cursed copyist. A thief of moments.
"And you?" Kaelan asked, the archivist in him clawing for a term, a category, a box to put her in.
"A Weaver," she said, as if it were the only sensible answer. "Morwen." She offered the name like she was stating a fact, not making an introduction. Her eyes cut past him, toward the archway, with naked avarice. "Weavers can only touch the surface resonance. The free-flowing energy. But you… you can read the deeper stories, can't you? The ones locked in stone and memory. You touched that archway. I felt it."
She knew. She couldn't tap into its stored memories, but she knew they were there, and she knew he could.
"My name is Kaelan."
"Kaelan," she repeated, the name sounding like a data point on a ledger. "You have a unique and costly gift. You are burning your own history for fuel. How much of you is left to burn?"
The question was a knife twisted in the fresh wounds of his spirit. He had no answer.
Morwen took his silence as its own answer. "You need a guide. Someone who knows how to move through the Echoing without announcing themselves to every predator and poacher from here to the Silent Sea. Someone who can find the strong, quiet echoes that might be worth that price."
"And what do you need?" Kaelan asked, the archivist recognizing a transaction being proposed.
A slow, sharp smile touched her lips. It was a cold thing. "I need a key. There are vaults in this place, Scribe. Chambers sealed by memory-locks that Weavers cannot unravel. Echoes too deep for us to reach. I believe a Scribe can open them."
She wanted to use him. She saw his curse not as a tragedy, but as a utility.
It was a terrifying proposition. To trust this sharp, calculating stranger. To become a tool for her ambition.
But she knew things. She had words for the madness. She moved with a confidence he desperately lacked. She was a map in a world where he was hopelessly lost.
He looked inward, at the two silent voids where his family used to be. He was erasing himself anyway. Would it be worse to do it with a purpose? To be used in exchange for knowledge, for direction?
He was a hollowed archive. Perhaps he could let someone else read from his empty shelves, if they could tell him where to find the missing books.
"Alright," Kaelan said, the word tasting like ash and a desperate, thin hope. "Show me."