There were screams in the walls again.
Not the kind you hear with your ears—those would’ve been easier. These weren’t sounds exactly, more like… pressure. A hum at the back of your teeth. Vaelian didn’t flinch anymore when they started. It was like they lived there now. Like the place had decided to remember something it shouldn't have.
He sat slouched outside the infirmary, arms draped over his knees. The synthstone beneath him leached heat from his spine like it was feeding on it. The overhead lights blinked without rhythm. Some kind of short, maybe. Or a bad omen. He didn’t know anymore which mattered more.
Behind the quarantine glass, the recruit he’d hurt lay motionless—too still to be okay, but not still enough to be gone. Tubes anchored him to machines that beeped and hissed in quiet apology. His skin was the color of cheap paper, and his pupils were barely more than dots. Someone had wiped the blood from his mouth. Vaelian didn’t remember seeing it happen.
He watched the boy for a while, because looking away felt like lying.
Something crackled in the recruit’s aura. Not quite Aetheric. Not exactly Thalyss either. A mimicry, maybe—like the world trying to imitate itself and getting the tone wrong. Vaelian’s palm grew warm where the mark lived, but it didn’t glow. Just a reminder. Just… present.
He rubbed absently at his forearm, fingers tracing the lines that spidered beneath the skin. They didn’t hurt anymore. That was worse, somehow.
“You waited.”
The voice was quiet, familiar.
Lysara lowered herself to the floor beside him with the kind of grace that still looked a little painful. Her joints always ached in the cold. She didn’t complain, but she didn’t hide it well either.
“You told me not to,” he murmured.
“Mm.” She nodded toward the glass. “You didn’t listen.”
“Listening’s never really been my skillset.”
They sat in silence long enough for the silence to feel like part of the building. The beeping on the other side of the glass continued, slow and off-tempo. Like it didn’t want to be doing its job anymore.
“You saw the breach,” she said finally.
He nodded. “And the figure.”
She didn’t ask right away. Maybe she knew what he’d say. Maybe she didn’t want to know.
“It didn’t speak,” he said. “Didn’t threaten or warn or… I don’t know. It just showed me something. Like holding up a mirror and walking away.”
Lysara traced a crack in the tile with her fingertip. “It’s been waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you to ask the right question.”
He didn’t like how much that hurt. Maybe because it wasn’t a riddle. Just a truth that had worn a different face until now.
“Is he going to die?” he asked, too softly.
Lysara looked at the boy again, her eyes veiled but not distant. “Not right away.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
He looked at her then, properly. Her skin was paler than usual, and light shimmered off her like she was dissolving at the edges. Not healthy. Not stable. Not safe.
“How much of you is still yours?”
She didn’t answer.
He pulled the scarf from his pocket. The one she gave him last winter. It was frayed now, the color faded, threads unraveling.
“You want this back?”
She smiled, the kind that tries not to be sad. “No. I want you to remember what soft things feel like.”
That night, the voices in the walls came closer.
They didn’t speak so much as press in. Like the walls had grown too thin to keep them out. Vaelian stood shirtless in his quarters, arms slack, eyes closed. Letting the stillness hold him.
“Come on, then,” he whispered. “Show me.”
The mark across his chest pulsed—not in warning, but in rhythm. His bones knew the beat. His blood moved to it. He didn’t fight it.
He didn’t welcome it either.
He just… let it be.
And in the space between thoughts, something answered.
Not the cloaked figure. Not even the breach.
Something older. Deeper. The fracture itself maybe, if it had a voice. It didn’t speak in words. It showed him things.
A room full of mirrors. All cracked. All reflecting someone who was almost him. Some were younger, some broken, some cruel. One of them smiled with blood on its teeth. Another didn’t show him at all. Just darkness.
And a heartbeat.
He woke the next morning in a way that didn’t feel linear. Like time had taken a wrong turn somewhere. The scent of ozone and sterilized blood still clung to the air. He sat slouched, boots still on, the scarf crumpled in his hand.
Still warm.
He stood, groggy, muscles sore. The hall outside was too quiet. Emergency lighting flickered, casting shadows that didn’t line up right. He headed for the upper level.
Outside, the dome sky was frozen. Cloud patterns suspended mid-shift. The Aether haze over the towers looked like dust trapped in syrup. Nothing moved.
In the north quadrant, techs moved like ghosts in matte suits, poking at the breach’s energy sink with tools that didn’t look like they trusted their own functions anymore.
The pit didn’t respond. It pulsed, slow and thick. Like it had learned.
Thren waited at the edge. No armor. Just her fatigues and the pistol she never went anywhere without. Her face looked carved out of worry.
“They’re calling it a collapse event,” she said without turning. “Verge site’s core strata destabilized. Feedback loop.”
“Lie,” Vaelian said.
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Containment?”
“Half-holding.”
“And the Council?”
She brushed ash from her palms. “Splitting. Old faction lines. The kind they pretend don’t exist. Half want to shut the extractors down. The rest want to flood the system with more Aether. Burn the Thalyss out.”
He blinked. “And you?”
She gave a bitter half-laugh. “I think no one knows what they’re doing anymore. We stopped asking the right questions ten years ago. Now we just repeat the same ones louder.”
He stared into the pit.
“You ever wonder if we’re the Echoes?”
She didn’t answer.
“Is it speaking to you again?” she asked.
He nodded. “It says… come home.”
Later, he found himself standing outside Lysara’s quarters without really knowing how he got there. His body remembered the path better than he did.
The door was ajar.
Bad sign.
Inside, the room glowed soft with paper lanterns. Shadows moved like they belonged there. Lysara sat in a circle of bowls—water, feathers, bits of crystal and glass. Ritual. Maybe protection. Maybe mourning.
She didn’t look up. Just said, “Don’t cross the line.”
“I know.”
She tilted her head. “You brought the river with you.”
That stopped him.
He looked at his hand. The mark shimmered faintly, like heat distortion. Except cold.
“Did you call me?”
“No,” she said. “But something did.”
He stepped forward only enough to sit. Mirrored her.
The silence got heavier. Like sound was afraid to interrupt.
She picked a shard of mirror from the water and held it up. It caught no reflection. Not his. Not hers. Not even the lanternlight.
Just black.
He stared.
“There was a room,” he whispered. “Filled with mirrors. One didn’t show me. Just shadow.”
Lysara nodded slowly. “That one isn’t missing you.”
He looked at her. Really looked.
“It’s what’s left after everything else forgets.”
He didn’t remember leaving Lysara’s room. Just that afterward, the corridors felt longer. He walked without a destination, hands in his pockets, the scarf folded and half-forgotten. The air had grown stale again, like it was tired of being breathed.
At some point, his path bent. Not turned—bent. There wasn’t really a difference anymore. The Verge had a way of rearranging space that didn’t always ask for permission.
The guards at the blockade didn’t stop him. One of them glanced up, saw his face, and just… stepped aside. No salute. No question. Just a quiet kind of permission.
The Verge District smelled like old electricity and rain that never fell. Metal walls sweated condensation from the breach’s hum. The pit itself glowed faintly now—not bright, not loud, just there. Breathing.
He stood at the edge.
It didn’t call this time.
It waited.
That felt worse.
He stepped forward.
No ceremony. No echo. Just motion.
No falling. No wind. The pit wasn’t a descent; it was a fold. A slip through the fabric of the world like sliding your hand between pages that weren’t supposed to open.
Inside, color twisted. Not gone, but wrong. More like memory of color than actual light. He kept walking. It felt like the only thing left to do.
The corridor—or what passed for one—shifted with every step. The walls weren’t walls exactly. Just space reacting to his presence. Trying to figure out what shape it needed to be.
There were mirrors. Everywhere.
Some broken. Some whole. Some breathing.
Each one held a version of him. Some wore uniforms that didn’t exist. Some looked feral, mouths stained with something that might’ve been blood or memory. One of them sobbed with a kind of grief that made Vaelian look away.
And one… had no reflection at all.
It waited.
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At the far center of the chamber stood a mirror taller than the rest. Untouched. Clear.
He walked toward it.
In the reflection: a man. Tall. Shrouded in smoke and something that wasn’t quite bone. Masked. The mask was ivory, carved with spirals that hurt to look at too long. In one hand: a book. In the other: a blade. Behind him, rivers flowed in reverse and stars winked out like someone had lost the thread of time.
Vaelian didn’t speak. Neither did the figure.
They just… stared.
Then—behind him—a whisper.
Not from the mirror.
From the world.
“You’re walking too far forward.”
He turned.
Lysara stood at the threshold, but changed. Older. Her eyes uncovered. Twin moons in a face that still remembered warmth, but had long since stopped expecting it.
“You have to stop,” she said.
“Stop what?”
“Becoming.”
The word hit harder than it should have. As if it had waited its whole life to be said.
The pit trembled.
Mirrors screamed—not audibly, but through pressure, like grief finding a crack to pour through. Vaelian dropped to his knees. The mask in the mirror fractured. A hairline crack, clean and unmerciful.
And from the other side—something crawled out.
He woke at the edge of the pit, coughing up blood that wasn’t all his. His hands stung. Nails split. Dirt under skin.
A child crouched nearby. No older than ten. His eyes were hollow. Not empty. Just… echoing.
“You saw it,” the boy whispered.
Vaelian couldn’t answer. Couldn’t find his voice.
“It’s almost time,” the boy said, stepping back into the dark. “You won’t remember what you were.”
Then he was gone.
Vaelian didn’t tell anyone. Not Thren. Not Lysara. What would he even say?
That night, he filed a transfer request to the Core. Volunteered for a solo survey mission. Deep Verge.
He didn’t need permission. The command clearance came through within the hour. They knew. They just wanted to see how far he’d go before he stopped being theirs.
He didn’t say goodbye.
Lysara would understand. Or she already had. That was the trouble with oracles. You were already gone before you left.
The descent was mechanical, industrial. No sacred design. Just a rusting lift that groaned and sputtered its way into the earth like it regretted every floor. The air turned thick and mineral-soaked. Old.
Sub-Level Nineteen. The lowest anyone officially went.
The doors opened.
And the world bent sideways.
The floor was sloped when it shouldn’t have been. Light flickered amber. Not emergency. Not stable. Something else. He walked.
Not forward.
Through.
The Verge felt older down here. More itself. Less tamed. Less translated. The records said it was engineered. They lied.
He passed collapsed shelves. Metal warped with time or pressure. Pages rotted, corners curling. One journal sat half-submerged in grime. He picked it up.
Sketches. Of machines. People. Echoforms.
And one: a child. Black-veined. Eyes like moons.
Beneath it: “He remembers too much.”
He closed the book. Left it where it was.
The farther he went, the less space made sense. Rooms stretched, then shrank. Halls curved, then didn’t. The only thing that stayed was the pressure behind his eyes.
Then—a door.
No hinges. No seams. Just space that decided to be something else.
It didn’t open.
It un-happened.
And he stepped through.
A chamber.
Huge. Round. The walls laced with mirrored ore, veins of it humming with fractured light. In the center: a spire of something that wasn’t stone. Not quite energy. Suspended above it—her.
Lysara.
But not.
Her form floated, suspended mid-air. Not breathing. Not dead. Her face flickered through emotions like channels in a storm. Her eyes were blank mirrors.
“You’ve arrived again,” the voice echoed. Not from her mouth. From the chamber.
Vaelian froze.
She rotated slowly, weightless.
“You fractured once. You’ll fracture again.”
He took a step forward.
“What are you?”
“I am the moment you failed to choose.”
The mark on his chest pulsed. Lit up. Neck to jaw. Veins of it reaching through him like a second skin made of memory.
“You’re not real,” he whispered.
“Neither are you.”
The walls cracked.
Faces emerged.
His faces.
Older. Younger. Wild. Empty.
One had no mouth.
One had Lysara’s voice.
He turned, but the chamber didn’t let him leave. It folded again. Brought him back to the start.
“You came to stop this,” she said. “But there is no this to stop.”
“Then what do you want?”
“A question.”
“What question?”
“The one you haven’t asked.”
The room collapsed inward.
He fell.
Not down.
Just… away.
He woke in another part of the Verge. Alone. Still marked. The glow gone, but the pattern grown. His neck now. His jaw.
He climbed back to the surface after two days.
No one asked where he’d been.
No one needed to.
Lysara was already in his quarters. She sat cross-legged by a single lantern.
She didn’t scold.
Didn’t ask.
Just held the scarf between them. Like it was still a question neither of them knew how to answer.
The next morning, Vaelian tried to write.
It was clumsy. He hadn’t picked up a pen in months, maybe longer. Words didn’t come easy anymore—not the ones that mattered. But they had to go somewhere. Thoughts like his couldn’t live in mirrors. Too dangerous.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, scarf around his shoulders, paper creased from where it had lived under his mattress.
Lys,
I found something under the Verge. A voice, wearing your face.
It told me I’d failed. I didn’t argue. Not because I believed it—but because I couldn’t think of a reason it might be wrong.
I think the fracture isn’t a place. Or a breach. Or power.
I think it’s a memory. A choice I didn’t make. A version of me I keep running into, hoping it’ll forgive me before I figure out what I even did.
Maybe I am the fracture.
He stopped there. Could’ve gone on, maybe. But the words didn’t feel like his anymore. He folded the page in thirds. Didn’t seal it. Didn’t hide it either. Just left it tucked where no one but her would look.
Thren called for him a few hours later.
Her voice, over the comm, was sharper than usual. Not panicked—she didn’t do panic. But urgent. Coiled like something waiting to snap.
He met her in the upper observatory.
The room was cold. Not from temperature. From silence. Too many screens. Too much white noise pretending to be information.
She pointed.
One of the displays flickered. Not static, not quite. The shapes on it moved like smoke under glass—reaching, shifting.
“This is from Site Twelve,” she said. “Deepest shaft. Dormant since the first incursion.”
“What happened?”
“No one knows. Team’s gone dark. No breach detected. No conflict. No signals.” She looked tired. “Just this.”
He squinted. Moved closer to the screen.
The smoke rearranged.
Symbols. Letters.
His name.
VAELIAN
His blood ran cold. Not metaphor. Actual. His veins tingled like they were trying to shrink away from his skin.
“Shut it down,” he said, too fast.
“We can’t.”
“Then burn it.”
She stared at him. “It’s a billion-ton site. Half the grid’s tied to it.”
“It’s not ours anymore.”
They didn’t burn it.
They quarantined it. Put out a press alert about a gas leak and quietly started pulling senior engineers from the roster. Reassigned the rest. Everyone knew what that meant.
That night, Lysara came again.
She didn’t knock.
Just appeared, slow and quiet, like she’d always been part of the room and was only now choosing to be seen.
She lit a lantern and placed it between them. Same way she used to when they were younger. Before the fractures. Before they stopped pretending time moved forward.
“There’s another breach,” she said.
“I know.”
“I saw it.”
“Where?”
She didn’t answer. Not right away.
Instead, she reached into her sleeve and pulled out a stone.
Black. Smooth. Misshapen.
Vaelian stared.
“I’ve seen one like that,” he said slowly. “Used in a ritual. To bind an Echo to a spine.”
“It didn’t work,” she said. “I remember.”
She placed the stone on the floor between them.
“This came from inside me.”
He blinked. Once. Twice. “What?”
She didn’t repeat it.
“I’m changing, Vael.”
He looked at her—really looked. Her skin shimmered faintly in the lanternlight. Not like it used to. Not the radiant shimmer of someone holding power.
This was cracking.
Fraying.
“You always were,” he said, gently.
“No.” Her voice shook. “This time, I won’t survive it.”
He didn’t argue. Just reached for her. She didn’t flinch.
They sat like that. No titles. No prophecies. No war stories. Just two people too tired to keep pretending there’d be a normal to come back to.
Dawn came with no warning.
The sky didn’t light up gradually. It tore open.
Not a breach. Not this time.
A wound.
Something stepped through it.
Not fully. Not yet. But enough.
Its shadow hit the Verge like a tide.
Vaelian stood on the platform, scarf in one hand, mirror shard in the other. His neck burned with the glow of the mark. He didn’t hide it anymore.
Didn’t try to.
This was his face now.
The shard in his hand trembled—not physically, but in presence. Like it remembered something he hadn’t lived yet.
Somewhere below, the pit pulsed.
It was waiting.
He closed his eyes.
And stepped forward.
He didn’t feel the transition.
No wind. No blur. One moment he was standing above the Verge, the next… inside.
Only this time, there was no structure. No spire. No chamber. Just darkness. And mirrors. And a path that wasn’t a path until he walked it.
They whispered.
Not in words. In memory.
Every step felt like choosing.
Or not choosing.
Some mirrors shimmered with scenes he didn’t remember. Some with ones he didn’t want to. One showed Lysara. Crying. Alone. Another showed him laughing. Blood on his lips. Another… silence. Nothing but the reflection of a world without him in it.
He kept walking.
The mark on his chest pulsed with each footfall. Not pain. Not heat. Just recognition.
Then, he heard it again.
The voice.
Not hers.
But close.
“The question,” it said. “You still haven’t asked it.”
He slowed.
The air grew dense.
“What question?” he said aloud. “What do you want me to know?”
The mirrors around him flickered.
One by one, they shattered.
Behind each: a piece of something else. A city submerged. A body half-formed. A child with silver bones. A map of stars written in bone.
And then—silence.
Not emptiness.
But arrival.
Ahead of him stood the masked figure. No blade. No book.
Just the mask.
No features now. Just smooth white.
Vaelian stepped closer.
“You again,” he said, almost laughing.
The mask tilted, as if curious.
“Why me?” Vaelian asked. “Why not someone else? I’m no one. Just broken enough to pretend I understand what I don’t.”
The figure didn’t answer.
Instead, it turned.
And gestured.
A ripple of light stretched behind it, revealing a chamber. Not of stone this time. Not of metal.
Of memory.
Memories not his.
He saw Lysara. Younger. Terrified. Holding something in her chest that glowed too bright.
He saw Thren. Alone, knee-deep in blood, refusing to cry.
He saw himself.
Younger. Before the mark.
Before the fracture.
Sitting under a stairwell, humming to himself. Just a kid. Waiting for someone who never came.
And then—one more memory.
Not real.
Not quite.
A future that hadn’t happened.
He stood beside the breach.
Not as he was now.
But different.
Eyes hollow. Skin gleaming with the full glow of the Twin Mirror. Behind him, the world burned quiet.
And he was smiling.
Not cruelly.
Just… resolved.
The figure turned back toward him.
And said nothing.
It didn’t need to.
Vaelian understood.
This wasn’t prophecy.
It was warning.
It was invitation.
He dropped the shard.
It didn’t fall. It dissolved.
The chamber—if that’s what it was—began to fade.
Like fog after sunrise.
He opened his eyes.
He was back.
Standing at the edge of the Verge again.
Not untouched. Not the same.
And Lysara was waiting.
Again.
Lysara didn’t speak when he returned.
She just moved aside so he could sit. The scarf was still between them, folded into a soft square like it had never been worn, never clutched in fever or grief or cold.
The room smelled faintly of paper smoke and rain.
He didn’t ask her if she knew where he’d been.
He knew she knew.
That was the thing about oracles. They didn’t miss you. They mourned you while you were still standing.
She reached across the space between them. Not to touch—just to rest her fingers on the edge of the scarf.
“You’re changing,” she said.
He looked down at his arms. The mark reached his throat now. Wrapped around it like a quiet truth. He hadn’t even noticed the spread.
“I think I already did.”
She didn’t argue. Just nodded, like she’d been waiting for him to say it himself.
He looked at her, and for a moment the weight between them wasn’t heavy—it was whole. Shared.
Then she broke it.
“There’s something else,” she said softly.
She stood. Her knees trembled, just slightly, but she didn’t falter. Reached again into her sleeve.
Another stone.
This one smaller. Greyer. Humming softly like it remembered light.
She set it on the floor.
“This one didn’t come from me,” she said.
He looked at her.
“It came from you.”
It wasn’t a metaphor. He felt it. The moment it hit the floor, the mark on his skin pulsed once, hard enough to make his spine jolt.
“What is it?”
“An anchor,” she said. “Or a key. Or maybe just a wound that remembers how to open.”
Vaelian stared at it. “Is this the breach?”
“No,” she said, voice quieter now. “It’s the part of you that wants one.”
He didn’t sleep that night.
He tried. He laid down. He closed his eyes. The room even pretended to be still for a while.
But the shadows under the door grew restless.
And the mirrors in his head refused to quiet.
At dawn, the emergency sirens started.
No howling. No red lights.
Just a soft pulse.
Rhythmic.
Measured.
Calling.
The Council didn’t call it a breach this time.
They called it a veil-slip.
A term that meant nothing. A phrase to make the unknown feel like something you could chart. Contain. Bury in a report.
It came from beneath Site Twelve.
The smoke hadn’t stopped. The symbols hadn’t stopped.
They just started answering.
Not with words.
With requests.
Vaelian was already dressed when the summons came. He met Thren in the corridor. Her face was tight. Her coat hung unevenly on her shoulders. She hadn’t slept either.
“We’re being pulled in,” she said, skipping the greeting.
“How far?”
“Hard to say. The field’s not growing—it’s layering. Folding on itself. Every scan reads like a different version of the same place.”
“They’re letting us in?”
“No. We’re going anyway.”
He nodded.
She didn’t smile. Just led the way.
At Site Twelve, the air had changed. Not pressure. Not temperature. Just… intent. It felt aware now.
The smoke in the observation bay curled in symbols even the Echo linguists didn’t recognize.
One of them matched the scar on Vaelian’s chest.
No one commented.
They descended by freight lift—no guards, no techs. Just the three of them.
Lysara had joined.
Her presence didn’t surprise him.
She carried no weapons. Just her scarf. And the smaller stone.
The lift groaned.
The shaft stretched too long.
The lights flickered blue.
And then—
Darkness.
But not empty.
When they reached the bottom, the world folded again.
Not a twist.
A breath held too long.
Vaelian stepped off first.
The corridor ahead didn’t match any blueprint. It was smooth, bone-colored, etched in silver lines that pulsed when you looked too long.
Lysara followed. Then Thren.
They walked without speaking.
Words felt fragile here.
The breach waited.
Not a pit. Not this time.
A room.
No—an echo of one.
Suspended. Faceted. Turning slowly in dimensions that didn’t obey.
And in its center—
The masked figure.
Again.
Still.
No book. No blade.
Just its presence.
And around it, floating: reflections.
Of the three of them.
Not as they were.
As they could be.
Vaelian stepped forward.
The mark on his neck flared.
One of the reflections rippled.
In it, he saw himself.
Older. Alone. Eyes lit like stars. The Verge behind him torn wide.
He didn’t speak.
Didn’t have to.
The figure turned to him.
“You’ve seen the question now,” it said.
Vaelian’s voice was low. Raw.
“Then why do I still feel like I’m waiting for it?”
The figure tilted its head.
“Because it’s not yours yet.”
Thren stepped forward. “Whose is it?”
“The version of him who doesn’t return,” it said. “He’s almost here.”
Lysara trembled.
The scarf she held dropped to the floor.
It caught fire.
No heat.
Just light.
She fell to her knees.
Vaelian moved, but she raised a hand.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
Her body shimmered. The edges of her face blurred.
“It’s inside me now,” she said.
The stone at her feet pulsed once.
Cracked.
From the fracture spilled not light—
—but memory.
Lysara screamed. Not in pain. In recognition.
And vanished.
Gone.
Not vanished—absorbed.
Like she had become what she always was.
A map. A hinge.
A door.
The breach opened.
The real one.
Not light. Not fire. Just presence.
It wasn’t a hole.
It was a choice.
Vaelian looked at Thren.
She didn’t speak.
Didn’t stop him.
He turned toward the breach.
Stepped once.
The world didn’t ripple.
It sighed.
And accepted him.
When he woke, he was back in his quarters.
The mirror on the wall was cracked.
His arms ached. His jaw itched where the mark had finished its climb. He was himself. And not.
Lysara’s scarf was folded on his desk.
Next to it: the note he never gave her.
He opened it.
The words were different now.
Written in his hand.
But not his memory.
I remember.
And I forgive you.
Outside, the sky was beginning to bleed again.
Not red.
Not fire.
Just… a slow unraveling of everything that once pretended to be held together.
He stood.
Picked up the scarf.
Looked at the mirror.
And this time—
It looked back.
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