Chapter 2: The Echoes of Erisia
The sun beat down on the white sands of the island, but the warmth felt hollow. Aspen walked along the shoreline, his boots sinking into the grit. Every rhythmic crash of the waves felt like a countdown he couldn't see.
[You should try to regain your martial prowess, Aspen.]
The voice of Dread echoed in his skull, vibrating against his thoughts.
"Martial prowess?" Aspen muttered, glancing at his calloused, empty hands. "You mean I need to learn how to kill again?"
[In a manner of speaking. You were a master of every edge and blunt instrument. They called you the Weapon Connoisseur or simply The Connoisseur. A man who didn't need the Song to bend the world to his will.]
Aspen scratched the back of his neck. The weight of that title felt like a physical burden pressing down on his shoulders. "The Connoisseur... sounds like I was a collector.
But I still don't even know where I am."
[You are in Erisia,] Dread answered, its tone dropping into a darker register. [The very land where you slaughtered a Commander of the Central Authority. It was that act of defiance that forced Drallis to break his silence and hunt you himself.]
Aspen stopped in his tracks. The name 'Authority' tasted like iron in his mouth. To kill a Commander... he looked at his hands again, half-expecting them to be stained red.
"If I was that powerful," Aspen whispered, "then I just need to start from scratch? Regain what I lost?"
[No. Your body is still in its prime, but your mind is a shattered vessel. You have forgotten the 'how' and the 'why.'] Dread paused, the sound of grinding gears echoing in Aspen's mind.
[I will lead you to familiar bloodstains and forgotten battlefields to unlock the fragments of your soul. But it will not be swift.]
"How long?" Aspen asked, a knot of anxiety tightening in his chest. "How long until I'm whole again?"
Dread remained silent for a long moment, the only sound the distant cry of a Megalodaunt in the hills.
[Perhaps a decade. Perhaps half a century. You have lived a long life, Aspen. Long enough to have matched Drallis in the old world. That memory you saw when you woke the hammer, the rain, the darkness...]
Dread took a sharp, jagged breath.
[That was six hundred years ago. You have been lost to the tides of time for six centuries. To keep your heart beating through the ages, I have exhausted my own Authority. Your 'Silent Heart' is dormant, locked behind a seal of rusted iron. Until you prove your worth against those chosen by the Song, you are nothing but a man with a name he doesn't deserve.]
Aspen looked up at the crumbling ruins of the Upper Erisia towers in the distance. 600 years. The world he knew was dust. The people he hated were legends or ghosts.
"Six hundred years," Aspen repeated, his voice cold. He tightened his grip on the air, his fingers curling as if seeking the hilt of his bone-white blade. "Then I suppose I should start find someone 'chosen' to hit."
[Spoken like the monster you used to be,]
Dread hummed with a hint of malice. [Move, Aspen. The mud-dwellers in the ruins ahead are a start. Let us see if your instincts remember what your mind has forgotten.]