There were only eight people left above the breach line. That’s what Thren told him, at least. Vaelian didn’t bother counting. Numbers didn’t feel real anymore. Names barely did. The Tower had started to echo in the strangest ways—too large for them now, too hollow. It was like walking through the bones of something that used to breathe.

  He remembered when the hallways made sense. Knew every turn, every stairwell by heart. Now the corridors didn’t lead where they used to. Some just ended, abruptly, in walls that hadn’t existed the day before. Rooms blinked in and out like dreams you almost remembered. The Tower, it seemed, was forgetting itself.

  Or maybe it was just trying to match what was happening inside him.

  He stood outside Lysara’s quarters—not that they really belonged to her anymore. The door stood open. Not broken, not forced. Just… open. Like the place had shrugged and let go.

  He stepped inside.

  Light pooled softly across the floor. Amber, low. Almost warm, like the room remembered her preferences even if he couldn’t. There were small things missing. The lantern. The bowls she used for burning herbs. But the air—it still smelled faintly of her. That mix of clay, charred sage, and something more human. Skin, maybe. Memory. Like the scent of someone who left the room a minute ago and might walk back in if you were patient enough.

  He touched the desk. Only with the backs of his fingers. There was dust now. Ash, too. He didn’t know where it had come from. Everything felt like it had come from fire.

  On the wall: a note. Just one. Handwritten. Leaning a little, like it had been taped there with faith instead of glue.

  I’m not gone. I’m just further in.

  He stood still for a long time, reading that one line over and over, not blinking. Letting it crawl under his skin. He didn’t say it out loud. Didn’t tell Thren. Didn’t mention it to the techs still crawling over the comms level, desperate to coax meaning from dead circuits. He just… carried it. Like something fragile. Or dangerous.

  And he wandered.

  Not aimlessly—not anymore. This time, he felt it in his chest, the shape of the wandering. A direction. The mark on his palm had started pulsing. Calmly. Not erratic like before. No flares. Just steady. Like it knew something he didn’t, and wasn’t in a hurry to share.

  That was what scared him.

  At dusk, he reached the edge of the Verge. The air there had a kind of hush to it—not silence exactly. Just that breathless pause before something moves. The breach had stopped growing. That much was true. But it hadn’t healed. It had just… decided to rest. Like a wound that wasn’t scabbing over, just waiting.

  He stood there, letting the wind do whatever it wanted to his coat. Waited for what, he didn’t know. Then:

  “You made it worse.”

  The voice didn’t come from behind. Not exactly. But it wasn’t his voice either. Still, it sounded close.

  He turned.

  It was him.

  Same face. Same shoulders. Same scar under the left eye.

  But the eyes—those were wrong. Hollow, maybe. Like they’d forgotten how to hold light. No expression. No soul. Just noise pretending to be voice. The thing didn’t wear a scarf. And the mark—that black vine that should’ve stayed curled in his palm—had crept up its throat.

  “Who are you?” Vaelian asked. His voice didn’t tremble, but that might’ve been because it didn’t know how.

  The copy tilted its head, slowly. Like it was curious. Or like it was hearing a question for the first time and hadn’t decided if it was worth answering.

  “I’m what happens when you choose nothing.”

  And then it stepped closer.

  They didn’t fight. Not this time.

  No violence. No broken glass. Just a slow circling, like wolves measuring distance. The copy never spoke again. Just watched. Waited. Something about it itched behind Vaelian’s eyes, like a dream he’d been trying not to remember.

  “You came through the breach,” he said.

  A single nod.

  “What did you see?”

  No reply.

  “What do you want?”

  This time, it raised a hand.

  And in it—a letter.

  His letter. The one he’d written weeks ago, to Lysara. Torn up and thrown out.

  But this one wasn’t torn. It was folded. Clean. Pressed flat like someone had ironed it.

  He took it. The paper felt cool. Familiar. He unfolded it with slow fingers. Same ink. Same words. Same uneven pressure where his hand had trembled. But one new line—at the bottom, in his own hand but not in his memory:

  She chose first. You were always the second gate.

  When he looked up, the echo was gone.

  Only wind now. And even that sounded like a whisper trying not to wake something.

  Back in the Tower, Thren didn’t ask where he’d been. She handed him a bowl of broth, the kind that didn’t taste like much but still felt warm going down. Sat beside him on the cafeteria floor. The lights buzzed overhead like they were angry about still being alive.

  “Been dreaming again?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Same girl?”

  “No,” he said after a pause. “Not quite.”

  She didn’t press. Just stared at the wall like it owed her something and had refused to pay up. Her face had that quiet kind of tired—etched deep, not from lack of sleep, but from knowing too much. From staying. From surviving when it didn’t feel like winning.

  “She’s not coming back, is she?”

  He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Maybe didn’t want to.

  Because maybe he already knew.

  Or maybe he was afraid he did.

  That night, the scarf vanished.

  He wasn’t sure when exactly. Just knew that at some point between lying down and sitting up again, it had slipped out of the world. Or maybe it had never been there to begin with, and he’d only been holding the idea of it, not the cloth.

  He searched, not with panic—those days were gone—but with a kind of mechanical patience. Under the bed. Inside the vent panel he’d never opened before. Behind the mirror that had started fogging up even when the room was cold. Nothing.

  It was gone in the way real things go. No trace. Just absence shaped like memory.

  He sat down on the floor, legs folded beneath him, back against the metal wall that hummed low and off-key. He pressed two fingers to the mark on his palm.

  It pulsed. Once. Not warm. Not cold. Just… aware.

  Then a voice. Not out loud. Not from anywhere external. But there, unmistakably, like it had grown roots behind his ribs.

  “You’ve forgotten the question.”

  He closed his eyes. Tried to breathe through the stillness.

  “I know,” he whispered. “Remind me.”

  But the voice didn’t answer. Just faded, like it had only ever been a suggestion.

  He didn’t sleep. Couldn’t. There was no dream that wouldn’t echo.

  He stayed like that, upright and waiting, hands open on his knees like he was offering himself to something. The air stayed still for hours, except when it didn’t—those flickers of cold where heat should’ve settled. Electrical ghosts.

  Then a sound. Soft. Barely there.

  Fabric brushing metal.

  He stood, too fast. The room wobbled for half a second.

  The hallway outside was empty.

  Then not.

  About twenty meters out, in the bend near the utility junction, something leaned against the wall. Man-shaped, sort of. Limbs too long. Head tilted at a sharp, unnatural angle, like it didn’t understand how gravity worked.

  It didn’t move. But it was watching. He could feel it.

  He didn’t speak. Didn’t demand a name or a reason. He just stared.

  The figure tilted its head the other way. A mirrored motion. Slow. Almost thoughtful.

  Then it raised one hand.

  Held something up.

  The scarf.

  Vaelian took a step. Then another. The scarf fluttered slightly, like it remembered wind.

  But with each step he took, the hallway stretched. Not in a dreamlike, floaty way. More like the Tower had made a decision. Like space itself had chosen to keep him distant.

  He started running.

  The figure flickered once—like a shadow under deep water. Then it vanished.

  He skidded to a stop.

  On the floor, right where it had stood, the scarf lay in a soft, crumpled shape.

  He knelt. Touched it.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Warm.

  Still warm.

  Soaked.

  His fingers came away wet. He sniffed them.

  River water.

  Back in the Observatory, the screens still blinked nonsense. Thren was hunched over one of them, eyes narrowed, typing like each keystroke might hold the Tower together for just a minute longer.

  “I saw it again,” he said.

  She didn’t look up. “The echo?”

  “No,” he said, stepping into the weak light. “Something taller. Wrong. It moved like it remembered her. Dropped the scarf.”

  She turned slowly.

  “Where?”

  “Outside my quarters.”

  Thren exhaled through her nose. Her face had the tight, unreadable lines of someone doing math they didn’t believe in.

  “You think it was her?”

  He looked down at the scarf, now resting in his hands again. He didn’t answer right away.

  “I don’t think Lysara moves like that anymore,” he said.

  Thren nodded once. A quiet, dry sort of agreement. No comfort in it.

  “We’re running out of people.”

  “I know.”

  “And time.”

  “I know that too.”

  He looked out the shattered window. The stars were doing something he didn’t like. Rearranging themselves, maybe. Or just flickering for the hell of it.

  “I don’t think the breach ever closed,” he said.

  Thren turned, arms folded. “What’re you saying? That it’s still open?”

  “I think… we brought it back with us. When we came through. I think it’s in us now. Or we’re in it.”

  She was quiet for a long time.

  Then: “Then we have to go further in.”

  The elevator to Sublevel Nineteen was still functioning. Barely.

  It creaked with every floor. The panel lit up and then dimmed, like it was breathing. Thren stood with her back to the wall, checking her sidearm for the third time. Vaelian didn’t carry one anymore. Didn’t see the point.

  “What’s your plan if something tries to kill us?” she asked, not looking at him.

  “I let it.”

  She snorted. “Don’t joke.”

  “Not joking.”

  The doors opened with a stuttering groan. The air smelled like blood made of metal and time.

  They stepped out.

  The corridors here remembered pain. Not visually. Not with any gore or bodies. But with that stillness that only happens after too much screaming.

  The Verge hadn’t grown. But it had changed.

  Walls looked softer. Not like pillows—more like skin.

  Reflections showed up in places they shouldn’t have. Not just in broken glass or puddles. Sometimes in air. Sometimes in each other’s eyes. Once, Vaelian saw Thren’s face shimmer, and for a blink, she was someone else.

  Neither of them spoke about it.

  They kept walking.

  They reached the junction. The place where it had all started. The original tear.

  It was sealed now. Not fixed. Not healed. Just… closed, the way a mouth closes when it decides not to speak.

  “Do we knock?” Thren muttered.

  Vaelian stepped forward. Placed his marked hand on the wall.

  It pulsed once.

  And the wall began to melt.

  Inside, there was no gravity.

  Only pressure.

  The air held them gently, like it wasn’t sure if they were allowed.

  It didn’t look like the Verge anymore.

  Not the place he remembered stepping into all those weeks—or was it months?—ago, when everything still had a name. It looked like... memory. Stretched thin. Pulled through too many filters. Distorted by grief and time and whatever else lived on the other side of what used to be real.

  Thren reached out to touch a wall.

  Her fingers passed through it. Like breath. Like smoke deciding not to be solid.

  She yanked her hand back fast. Looked at her palm like it had betrayed her.

  “Not real,” she muttered.

  Vaelian didn’t reply. He was staring at the floor—or where the floor should’ve been. Beneath them, water flowed. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it hovered. It didn’t move in any way that made sense. Sometimes it rippled sideways. Sometimes it pulsed. Once, it curled up like a cat and then flattened again.

  The river.

  Not the one outside the Tower. Not the one from maps or weather reports.

  The river that remembered. The river that swallowed things people tried to forget.

  It shimmered, casting no reflection. Only shadows. And those shadows—Gods, they moved. He saw himself. Or something like him. A figure below the surface, mimicking his every twitch but just a little off. The way dreams do. The way lies do.

  One of the shadows reached for the surface.

  Then vanished.

  Thren saw it too. Her hand hovered near her weapon.

  “This is a trap.”

  “It’s an answer,” Vaelian said.

  “Those are usually worse.”

  He nodded once. Quietly. And stepped forward.

  The walls shifted around them.

  Not dramatically. Not all at once.

  But every few steps, something changed. A door they’d passed opened after they were gone. A corridor they entered turned into a staircase by the time they reached the other end. One room repeated three times. Once empty. Once full of water. Once full of nothing but mirrors.

  A mirror, at one point, showed Lysara.

  Alive. Still.

  Her eyes met his through the glass.

  He blinked. And her face shifted—melted into his. Then no one’s. Just a blank smear where identity had once clung.

  He didn’t flinch.

  The mark on his palm itched. Crawled, almost.

  He didn’t scratch it.

  Didn’t look away.

  “Keep going,” he said, to himself, to Thren, to whoever was listening.

  A door appeared where none had been before.

  They entered a chamber shaped like a heart.

  Not poetic metaphor. Literal.

  It pulsed. The walls were made of something organic, something living, veined with light and shadow. They moved subtly, like breathing slowed to a crawl.

  In the center: a chair.

  Occupied.

  Thren stopped short. Her voice was barely a breath. “Don’t.”

  Vaelian took another step.

  The figure in the chair was veiled. Not in cloth—something more permanent. More intrinsic. Like the veil was part of the skin. It didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

  For a moment, a terrible hope crawled up his spine.

  Maybe...

  He reached forward. Pulled the veil away.

  No eyes. No mouth. Just skin. Smooth and uninterrupted. Like someone had drawn a face, then erased all the parts that meant something.

  On its forehead: a mark. ∞

  He stumbled back. Almost fell.

  The walls reacted. Throbbed harder. The floor rippled.

  And then he heard it again.

  Her voice.

  “You’ve forgotten the question.”

  “I’m trying,” he said out loud this time, his voice shaking just a little. “I’m trying to remember.”

  “Try harder.”

  Thren stepped up beside him.

  “You talking to her?”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly.”

  “Good,” she muttered. “Because I think she’s about to talk to us.”

  The figure raised a hand.

  And the world exploded.

  Not with sound. With image.

  Mirrors. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Every surface fractured into reflections, each shard catching some warped version of reality.

  Vaelian saw himself screaming in one. Saw Thren bleeding in another.

  Lysara in a third—laughing, her teeth black with ink.

  One mirror showed the Tower, whole and clean and full of light.

  Another showed it burning.

  A third—Vaelian, alone, peeling off his own skin in neat strips.

  Thren drew her weapon. Fired at one of the mirrors.

  The bullet passed through.

  Didn’t even ripple.

  Vaelian closed his eyes.

  Reached inward.

  Focused.

  And whispered the only thing he knew might still matter.

  “Lysara.”

  Everything stopped.

  Just for a breath.

  But in that pause, she answered.

  “I’m still here.”

  When the light returned, the mirrors were gone.

  So was the chair. The figure. The chamber.

  Now they stood in a field. No sky above. Just open air, thick and weightless.

  In the center: a stone.

  Black. Cracked. Beating.

  Thren stepped forward. “Is that—?”

  “Yes,” Vaelian said, voice hollow.

  “She left it?”

  He shook his head. “No. She became it.”

  He knelt.

  The mark on his palm throbbed in reply. Not in pain. In recognition.

  Like something old had found its match.

  He placed his hand on the stone.

  It pulsed.

  So did the field.

  And then—

  He was in the river again.

  But it wasn’t memory this time.

  Not dream.

  Place.

  The current flowed in both directions. Light and shadow swirled without pattern. Stars blinked overhead—offbeat, uncertain. The laws of everything bent softly.

  And there, across the water: her.

  Lysara.

  Whole.

  And wrong.

  Her veil wasn’t cloth—it grew from her, threadlike, fused at the temples.

  She stepped forward.

  Held out both hands.

  In one: ash.

  In the other: water.

  “I don’t know which one you are,” she said.

  Her voice—his voice—Thren’s—Kaelthar’s—layered, echoing through itself.

  “Neither,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Then you must ask it now.”

  “The question.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Then the world ends as echo.”

  He knelt.

  The river at his feet swirled without logic—current sliding forward, then back, then in spirals like it was trying to draw something it had forgotten. The ash in Lysara’s hand didn’t move. But the water in the other rippled, as if disturbed by a wind only it could feel.

  He looked at her hands.

  The way she held them—offering, not asking.

  His own hands trembled. He hadn’t noticed until now. Trembling like the body knew something the mind hadn’t caught up to. Like it understood the weight of this moment in a way he never would.

  He dipped his fingers into both.

  Ash first. Dry, clinging. It coated the lines in his skin.

  Then water. Cool. Thin. A reminder of breath.

  He mixed them in his palm.

  Grey. Muted. Soft like grief. Glowing at the edges, like memory trying to become light.

  The veil on her face shifted slightly. Not lifted. Just moved—subtle, like breath beneath fabric. He wondered if she could still see. If she ever had.

  He closed his hand.

  And asked it.

  Not out loud. Not to her.

  To himself.

  “What part of me isn’t borrowed?”

  It echoed.

  Not through the air, but through the river. Through the stars. Through the skin of his chest.

  Something in the world paused. As if it was waiting to see if he really meant it.

  Lysara inhaled.

  Not loud. But deep. Like she’d been holding her breath for a century and finally let go.

  The scarf appeared around her shoulders. Not dropped. Not handed over. Just… returned. As if it had always belonged to this moment.

  The mark on his throat burned. Not in pain. In clarity. In truth.

  The river stopped.

  And then—

  He opened his eyes.

  Back in the Verge.

  The stone still pulsed beside him. A soft heartbeat. Familiar now.

  Thren stood nearby. Half-translucent. But solid enough.

  “Thren?” he whispered.

  She turned. Blinked at him like she’d been caught between two dreams.

  “You okay?” Her voice cracked.

  He staggered to his feet. Held the scarf. It was dry now. Whole. Still warm.

  He nodded. Didn’t speak.

  The Verge pulsed again.

  Then, slowly, began to pull inward. Not collapsing. Not disappearing.

  Just… retreating.

  Like it had heard something worth obeying.

  He didn’t know if it was him.

  Didn’t care.

  He turned to Thren.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  She frowned. “Time for what?”

  He looked past her. Toward the edge of the chamber. Toward the Tower. Toward everything that had come apart.

  “To stop pretending this world can stay what it was.”

  They walked for hours.

  Or maybe five minutes.

  Time was bending now, but not in cruel ways. Just… gently. Like it was tired of insisting on being linear.

  The Tower reemerged in stages. First as shadow. Then as shape. Then as structure. Still damaged. Still hollowed. But standing.

  People had returned. Not many. A few.

  The woman who sang in the stairwell.

  The child who always asked about Lysara’s hands.

  A man who carved his name into his chest and whispered, “It came back. It came back.”

  The sky was torn still. But it didn’t bleed. Not today.

  Vaelian stood on the roof that night. Stars above, rearranged into constellations he didn’t recognize.

  He could feel her now.

  Not a voice. Not a command.

  Just presence.

  Thren joined him without a word. Her boots scuffed the gravel. She carried a flask but didn’t drink from it.

  “Do we still have a world?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “I think we have a chance.”

  She grunted. “That’s not much.”

  “It’s more than we had yesterday.”

  She nodded, slowly. Stared out into the dark with a soldier’s eyes.

  “So what now?”

  He held the scarf a little tighter.

  “Now,” he said quietly, “we go looking for what’s left.”

  In the days that followed, the breach didn’t come back.

  Not directly.

  But things stayed wrong.

  Clocks on Sublevel Three ticked backward for four hours every night. No one tried to fix them.

  A child drew a picture of Lysara floating above the Tower, eyes closed, arms open.

  One of the techs started humming in two voices—hers and something else.

  Vaelian didn’t interfere. Didn’t try to untangle what couldn’t be undone. He just walked. Listened. Checked for pulse.

  Not in machines.

  In people.

  He found the woman in the stairwell again. She was singing as usual. But now her voice had layers. One voice low and cracked. The other delicate, ghostlike. They wove together like grief had learned to harmonize with memory.

  He didn’t interrupt.

  He just sat for a while.

  Let the sound wash through him.

  The scarf stayed draped over his shoulder. He didn’t wear it like a soldier anymore.

  He wore it like a promise.

  One night, in a quiet hour that didn’t seem to belong to any day in particular, he opened the drawer where he used to keep the mirror shard.

  It was gone.

  He should’ve expected that.

  In its place: a folded piece of paper.

  No markings. No seal.

  Inside, just one line:

  “We are all echoes, until someone remembers our name.”

  He didn’t recognize the handwriting.

  But it felt like hers.

  He folded it carefully. Slipped it into the scarf’s inner fold.

  Didn’t read it again.

  Didn’t need to.

  The next morning, Thren brought him something like a map. It shimmered weirdly, as if it wasn’t sure whether to display truth or possibility. It showed Tower routes. Breach zones. Marked some settlements in black—gone. Others in red—flickering. Fading.

  “You want to find the source?” she asked.

  “No,” Vaelian said.

  “I want to find the others.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What others?”

  He pointed to the edge of the map. To the places marked with nothing.

  “Anyone who remembers what we were before. Before we broke it. Before we became the fracture.”

  She studied his face for a long time. “You think there’s a way to fix it?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. Thought for a long breath. Then another.

  “No,” he said. “But maybe there’s a way to mean something after.”

  At the edge of the Tower’s perimeter, Vaelian stood for the last time.

  The ground beneath him cracked in spiderweb patterns, dust slipping through the seams. The sky still looked broken—like someone had punched holes in it with a fist full of regret—but it wasn’t bleeding anymore. Just… breathing. Slow and shallow.

  Shapes moved in the distance. Not figures. Just motion. The kind of movement you sense before you see. Like memory deciding to put on skin.

  Thren stood behind him. She didn’t say anything. Just waited.

  And then—beyond the hills, beyond the coils of collapsed metal and the rusted remnants of failed outposts—a light.

  Small. Pale. Not Aether. Not Thalyss-tech, either.

  Something else.

  Alive, maybe.

  New.

  Or old in a way they hadn’t known how to name before.

  He took one step forward.

  Then another.

  Didn’t rush. Didn’t hesitate.

  Behind him, the mark on his hand glowed once.

  Not in warning.

  Not in pain.

  Just a soft flicker.

  A heartbeat.

  A beginning.

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