The wind howled through the valley as Lior stood before the ancient, broken temple, its cracked pillars reaching skyward like the fingers of a dying god. Faded symbols curled around the stone, half-swallowed by moss and frost. Light seeped through the fractures in the ceiling light that pulsed in time with the earth beneath his boots. A heartbeat not his own.
He stepped forward. The ground felt soft, like ash or snow, though none had fallen. His breath steamed in the cold air, curling and vanishing, just like her.
"Rei?" he called.
No answer.
The girl had been here just moments ago. Laughing. Teasing him for not remembering what berries were safe to eat. Trying to guess her name like it was a game, like they weren't stranded in some cursed world stitched together by shadows and forgotten gods.
Now, she was gone.
Not a single footprint led away from the clearing. No signs of a struggle. No blood. Nothing.
Just silence.
And the temple.
He clenched his fists. His knuckles cracked. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the voice whispered again.
You knew this would happen.
"No," he muttered. "I didn't."
You were warned.
The moment he stepped through the fractured archway, the air thickened. Warmth spilled over him too warm for a place this dead. He stumbled into the main hall, walls covered in murals, faded with age but still alive in motion. The images danced across the stone: a war, massive beasts, humans holding torches against the sky, a cloaked figure with silver eyes leading the charge.
And in the center… a single figure, alone on a mountaintop, arms outstretched as darkness split around him.
Beneath it, in ancient letters:
**"The Chosen shall awaken when the world forgets his name."**
Lior's chest tightened.
The mural looked like *him*.
Same messy hair. Same cloak. Same burn on the shoulder. And around the mural's neck… the same carved necklace Rei had found earlier, the one she'd put on with a goofy grin and said, "Maybe I was important before the world decided to erase me."
He stared longer. And something shifted.
The air turned cold again.
He turned and the temple was no longer empty.
A man stood at the entrance. No, not a man wrong proportions. Too tall. Too thin. Its face was blank, skin like smoothed wax, no eyes, no mouth. Just a shape. Breathing.
It stepped forward. The air grew thick with frost.
Lior backed up until his heel touched the dais at the center of the hall. He could run—but then he saw it.
In the corner. Folded cloth. A shoe.
Rei's shoe.
The thing cocked its head, as if *smelling* the thought in his mind.
"You want to save her," it said, though its face never moved. The voice was wet, like something speaking through a throat filled with mud. "But saving someone you barely know means leaving behind who you really are."
It raised a long, fingerless limb, pointing past the hall to a staircase winding into the earth.
"Down there, you'll find her. Or what's left."
Then it pointed to the mural behind Lior.
"Up there, you'll find yourself."
He froze. His hands trembled.
"You're giving me a choice?"
"No," the creature said.
"You were always going to choose."
Snow began to fall inside the temple.
Not real snow something colder. It hissed when it touched skin. Lior hissed back, pulling up his collar.
He stared at the stairs. He stared at the mural.
Then he whispered, "Fuck you."
And ran.
Downward.
Into the dark.
The creature watched him go. Its face split open just long enough to show the smile that wasn't there.
Outside, in the clearing above, the sky cracked like glass.
And far beneath, in the dark, something began to move.
Something that had been waiting.
Something that now knew his name.
The descent felt endless.
Each step down the spiral staircase was colder than the last. The air turned thick, heavy with the scent vanishing somewhere between burnt metal and wet stone. The walls narrowed. The ceiling dropped. Lior's breath echoed louder than his footsteps, and he started to forget how long he'd been walking.
Rei. The sound of her laughter still lingered somewhere in his ears. He hated how loud it was in his memory. Too full of life. Too *alive* for this place.
The further he went, the more it hurt to remember her voice.
He passed broken statues. Arms missing. Faces erased. Symbols scratched out like someone had tried to bury history with their nails. One figure stood intact barely. A woman with wings of stone and a cracked blindfold.
Words carved beneath her feet:
Mercy is the choice that kills kings.
Lior touched the edge of the pedestal. Dust slipped through his fingers.
"I don't know who I am," he said quietly. "But I know I can't let her die."
He didn't expect an answer. But the silence *replied* anyway. It pressed on his chest. Crawled into his throat. It tasted like guilt.
A memory came.
Not his.
A woman's voice, frantic. Crying. Screaming a name his name. A different time. A battlefield of bone and fire. He felt it in his blood. He saw a child in his arms, burning, and himself older, screaming.
Then it was gone.
He collapsed against the wall, gasping.
"What the fuck is happening to me?"
No one answered. The only reply was the slow creak of metal deep below.
He kept moving.
And then light.
A narrow crack in the floor spilled it upward. Warm. Flickering. Like fire, or breath.
Lior dropped to his knees and peered through.
He saw her.
Rei.
She was floating. Suspended in a thin veil of smoke, her eyes closed, body limp. Her necklace glowed same as in the mural. The chamber was massive, circular, lined with spiked metal cages, half of them *screaming*.
And surrounding her…
Figures.
Not people.
Tall, hooded things without faces. Whispers clung to them like smoke. They circled her slowly, chanting in a language older than anything human.
Lior's heart snapped like ice.
He slammed his fist into the stone floor.
"I'm here!" he shouted, voice breaking. "I found you, Rei! I'm not letting you die down there!"
The chamber reacted.
The light flared.
One of the hooded figures turned its head no face, but it *saw* him. And in that moment, he felt every bone in his body scream.
She is the key.
She is the lock.
And you… you are the door.
Something *slammed* inside him. Like a chain being yanked. He dropped backward, choking, eyes wide as something ancient uncoiled in his chest.
Blood dripped from his nose.
He grinned through the red.
"Fuck it," he muttered, standing on shaky legs. "You want to see what happens when you corner someone with nothing left to lose?"
He stepped toward the crack, toward the heat.
Toward her.
And from above behind him another voice.
Familiar. Male. Cruel.
"Well, well," it said, boots echoing on stone.
"Still running toward people you barely know, Lior? Haven't learned a fucking thing, have you?"
He turned slowly.
And saw his own face.
Older.
Smiling.
Wearing a crown made of teeth.
"Let's fix that," the thing said.
The ground split.
And the fall began.
Lior didn't just fall. He was pulled as if the ground opened up and stole his body. It didn't feel like falling, but like disappearing. As if he was being torn away from time, from breath, from himself, bit by bit.
The air turned black. Not like darkness. But like something that *breathed* black.
And then the voice came.
Not in his ears. Not in his head.
In front of him.
Like a mirror image.
Lior saw himself floating in nothingness. A little older. A little balder. No eyes only shadow where memories should have been. He wore the same clothes, but they looked burned, as if they had once been caught in a war. His left arm was encased in something that looked like stone or bone.
"You found me," the mirror version of him said, his voice hollow and velvety at the same time. "Or… am *I* the one who found *you*?"
Lior gasped, but there was no air.
"What are you?" he asked. His voice sounded small, broken, as if even words didn't know if they were welcome here.
The echo smiled. A smile without warmth.
"I am what you left behind when you were rewritten. When the Fall cut everything you ever were… destroyed."
He reached out his hand, and the void moved with it.
"Tharelia. Year nine-hundred-ninety-nine. Post-Decay," the shadow said. "You were born in the shadow of a world that murdered its gods. A world where magic was forbidden. Where people chose fear over wonder."
"Why… am I here?" Lior whispered.
His reflection laughed louder now. Dull. Hollow.
"That's the wrong question, Lior Veyren." He leaned in closer, his face now directly in front of his. "The question is: *what have you forgotten?*"
Then the landscape appeared.
As if from nowhere, the world fell open inside him a projection from above. Floating ruins, valleys that breathed pulsating light, coasts that ran in circles. And at the heart of it all: a chasm, split like a wound, where the black heart of Echo Vale beat.
"Welcome to Echo Vale," the shadow version whispered.
"The place where the Shapes fell. Where you were born from a mistake. An echo of something that should never have lived."
Lior felt his heart shrink.
"What do you mean, 'shapes'?"
The echo did not answer immediately. The silence was heavy. Then, with menace in its voice:
"They were shadow without sin. Protectors of balance. Until men saw them as monsters."
His eyes now lit up briefly dark red, deep as open wounds.
"You are their last echo. A child of silence and fire. And that girl, Rei…"
He looked up, at a hazy image of her body, floating in a circle of runes deep beneath the temple.
"…she is the key. Not to a door. But to the *choice*."
Lior screamed. "Where is she?!"
The shadow began to dissolve, like smoke in water.
"You will choose, Lior Veyren. Not between good and evil. But between yourself and justice."
The fall stopped suddenly. With a thud.
Lior landed, kneeling on an ancient mosaic.
Fragments of a forgotten temple rose around him. On the wall: a faded fresco. A chosen one. Formed of smoke. Woven with stars. Below that in the old script:
**"When the 1000th breath falls, the Echo will repeat itself. In flesh. In battle. In guilt."**
Lior stood up, his hand trembling.
"Rei…" he whispered.
No answer.
Only the cold wind blowing from an open corridor. The smell of burning wood. And in the distance…
…her voice.
One scream.
Then nothing.
Lior ran.
And at the intersection of the corridors he saw two paths.
Left: a circle of light, pure, but icy cold. A path that called his name.
Right: a corridor full of blood. But there was something there…her necklace.
His fist clenched. His heart tore.
"Choose…" he whispered.
…I hate choosing.
And then he took a step.
He stepped into the dark corridor.
His boots hit stone slick with moisture, each echo trailing behind him like ghosts trying to catch up. The smell thickened—ash, copper, and something older. Something like… memory.
Lior's fingers brushed against the wall. Carvings.
Old ones.
They weren't written in any tongue he remembered, but his bones understood them.
"To touch the veil is to burn."
"To choose is to break."
He moved faster now, heart rattling in his ribs. Rei's scream still rang in his ears like it belonged there. Like it was stitched into him.
He didn't call her name. The silence here felt like something that *listened back.*
Then
Light.
A thin, trembling beam from above, like moonlight through fractured glass. Dust floated in it like snow.
And there she was.
Rei.
Collapsed. Her eyes open but blank, staring into something he couldn't see. Her mouth moved, forming words too slow for sound.
He dropped beside her. "Rei? Hey hey, stay with me
She blinked. Slowly.
Then her gaze locked onto him and she whispered:
"They lied to you."
He froze.
"They said you were chosen. But you weren't. You're… the echo. You're the *end.*"
He didn't understand. He didn't want to.
But before he could speak
The temple trembled. Dust rained from above. And behind him, a sound rose like a choir of broken glass
The mirror.
That same mirror-shadow from before, now bigger. Clearer. It wasn't just him this time.
It was others.
Dozens.
Versions of Lior in armor, in robes, some disfigured, some screaming, one even chained and bloody-eyed. Each stepping out of the reflection like it was a doorway.
"Your lives," the original echo said, "the ones you never lived. The selves you buried. We're all part of the same lie."
Lior stood up, trembling. "This isn't real."
"It will be. When the 1000th year ends."
The ground cracked again beneath Rei, and she began to sink slowly into the stone, as if the earth was claiming her back.
"No NO!"
Lior grabbed her hand.
But the voice, colder now, whispered near his ear:
"She made her choice. Now you make yours."
The mirror pulsed.
A doorway. The Gate. It was waking.
Behind him: a future he didn't ask for. Before him: a girl he barely knew, but one who might be the last thread to what made him human.
Rei's grip was slipping. Her eyes begging.
"I won't let go," he said.
But the temple answered in thunder.
And somewhere above, in the buried sky, the echo of bells rang out
Counting down.
The bells stopped.
But the silence that followed was worse.
Lior turned slowly, breath caught halfway in his throat.
She stood at the edge of the chamber. The girl.
But not *Rei*.
At least, not anymore.
Her body was soaked head to toe in blood, some of it hers, most of it not. Her hair hung in dark, wet strands over her face, and when she lifted her head, Lior's soul recoiled.
Her eyes were wrong.
Black. Not dark black.* Pools of pure void, pulsing softly like something alive behind them. A whispering fog circled her bare feet, refusing to touch her skin as if even the ground knew something was off.
Lior took a slow step back.
"Rei…?"
The girl tilted her head.
And smiled.
A twisted, too-wide grin that didn't fit her face. Her jaw cracked as if something inside was stretching it into place.
"Your name," she rasped, "is written in ash."
He froze.
"Your blood is borrowed. Your fate isn't yours."
Then she moved.
One moment she stood still the next, she was *on* him.
Lior barely raised his arms in time before a blackened hand slammed into his chest and hurled him across the chamber. His back hit stone. Air exploded from his lungs.
She was there again before he could breathe eyes wide, fingers curled like talons.
Lior rolled aside just in time.
Her hand hit the wall, *splintering* stone like it was wet clay.
He scrambled to his feet, adrenaline drowning the pain.
"This isn't you," he said, even though he wasn't sure anymore.
The girl laughed. And it *wasn't* Rei's laugh. It was older. Colder. Layered, like a thousand voices stitched together with wire.
"She was never real. Just a shell."
She lunged again.
Lior drew the blade from his belt half rusted, barely a weapon and blocked her strike. Sparks flew.
The force of her blow drove him to one knee.
She was stronger. Inhuman. Her arms moved like shadows, bending wrong, clawing the air with trails of smoke.
"This place," she hissed, "is where gods came to *die.*"
Lior surged up with a roar, shoving her back. He slashed not to kill, but to snap her out of it.
The blade tore through her shoulder.
She didn't even flinch.
Instead, she grabbed the sword with the wound still fresh and yanked it into* her body.
Her eyes rolled back. She moaned pleasure? Pain? He couldn't tell.
"I remember now," she said. "The Shapeless called to me. They said I'd find you here."
She touched her chest. Blood dripped like black syrup.
"You're the last gatekeeper."
Lior took a step back.
"You're not getting through me."
She raised a hand and the room *collapsed.*
Stone twisted like paper, walls folding into shapes that hurt to look at. The mirrors cracked and bled light. A wind rose from nowhere, screaming.
And in it them.
Shadows. Twisted outlines of bodies with no faces. Crawling from the broken glass like spilled ink coming to life. The *Shapeless.*
The girl's voice rose above the storm.
"Choose again, Lior Veyren. Run. Fight. Or become.
He roared and charged.
Not because he knew what he was doing but because everything inside screamed don't stop now.
Their blades clashed. Her nails tore into his cheek. Blood misted the air. One of the shadows latched onto his leg, trying to crawl inside him, and he kicked it off with fire in his veins.
She laughed again, spinning low, sweeping his feet.
He fell hard.
She straddled him, eyes wild, breathing like a beast.
"You feel it, don't you?" she whispered.
"The truth beneath your skin. The thing they locked away."
She leaned closer. Her breath was freezing. Her lips touched his ear.
"You were never meant to be the hero."
He slammed his forehead into hers.
They both reeled.
And for a second just one her eyes cleared.
"Lior?" she whispered. "Help me."
Then she vanished.
Just *blinked* out of existence.
The shadows screamed once and scattered.
The wind died.
The chamber returned to stillness.
Lior sat there, chest heaving, body aching, covered in cuts, blood, and something that *wasn't* blood. His hands shook.
But he didn't move.
Because her voice still rang in his skull.
"Help me."
And in the broken mirror, his reflection now had *her* eyes.
The Shapeless weren't done.
And neither was he.
The blood hadn't even dried yet.
Rei's body lay twisted in the snow, eyes wide open vacant, no longer her. Whatever had taken her, used her, broken her… it was gone. Fled back into the veil.
Lior stood trembling, soaked in red and silence. His sword cracked. His knucklessplit. His soulshattered.
Behind him, the wind moaned low.
A shadow peeled itself from the trees like smoke uncoiling from a forgotten fire.
The same voice that had whispered in his dreams. The same presence behind every fucked-up choice he'd been forced to make.
"You survived," it said.
"I endured," Lior snapped, teeth clenched.
"Is there a difference?"
Lior turned slowly, eyes burning. "Why am I different?"
His voice cracked not from weakness, but from something deeper. Desperation. Rage. Purpose.
The shadow didn't laugh. It nodded.
"You carry what they buried. You remember what they erased."
Then, for the first time, the reflection shifted.
A figure stepped out of the dark mist
and it looked like Lior.
Older. Scarred. Eyes like twin voids.
"I have many names," the reflection said.
"But the one they feared most was…"
It leaned in, almost tender.
"Veyren."
Lior's breath caught. His body refused to move.
The world around him cracked like glass beneath frost.
"You are the Echo," the shadow said.
"The one chosen to bring it back."
Then
Darkness swallowed everything.