The sky was screaming again.
Not with thunder. Not with wind.
With voices.
They came in waves—memories not his own, whispered in dead languages, folding over each other like pages from a burning book. Silas Virell stood at the edge of a rusted balcony, staring into the twilight horizon where fractured towers leaned like drunk giants and the clouds hung too low, too still.
The sun had never returned.
Not since the Silence.
Below him, the city fragment known as Veritas-9 flickered. Entire buildings phased in and out of sync, their structures corrupted by residual Echo bleed. What had once been part of Manhattan now hovered hundreds of feet above the Abyssal Wound, its underbelly scraping against the boundary of unreality.
And tonight, it would fall.
He could feel it in his bones—the way the echoes in the air screamed louder with each passing minute. The pressure behind his eyes was building again. A warning. A countdown. A memory trying to claw its way back.
Silas didn't flinch when the black lightning split the sky in the distance, carving a hole in the clouds.
He'd seen it before.
He'd died to it before.
—-
Ten years ago, Silas had been a Whisper Trader—a man who dealt in forbidden relics and forgotten truths. Back then, he'd thought knowledge was a currency that made him untouchable. He'd worn gloves made of dream-skin and read tomes written in reversed time. He'd drank from chalices carved from memory.
He thought he understood the Echoes.
Until his partner slit his throat and threw his body into The Maw Beneath—the oldest Anomaly in Veritas-9. A living pit that devoured not just flesh, but timelines.
He should've died.
Instead, he woke up two weeks ago, in his younger body, ten years before his death. Same scar. Same face. But something inside him had changed.
There was a voice now. Not a parasite. Not an Echo.
Something worse.
Something that remembered everything.
—-
Silas stepped back from the ledge as the wind picked up, stale and iron-tinged. He pulled his coat tighter, the dark fabric stitched with null-thread, resistant to minor Echo influence. It wouldn't save him from what came next.
The city shuddered.
One of the anchor pylons below cracked like brittle bone. A low moan echoed through the ground, not from machinery, but from the city itself.
He had minutes.
Silas reached into his coat and pulled out a worn silver pendant. Oval-shaped. Cracked down the middle. His Anchor. A memory made metal.
He held it tightly.
"You're not ready," the voice inside him whispered. It was layered—feminine and masculine, young and ancient. It spoke in riddles and warnings.
"I don't care," Silas muttered. "It happens here. I remember now. This is where I die."
"And yet, you're here. Again."
He dropped from the balcony, landing two stories down on a tilted skybridge. His boots scraped against rust and Echo-slick residue. The wind howled with thoughts. A thousand people had died on this bridge during the Silence. Their memories had soaked into the steel.
Silas walked through them like smoke.
As he neared the center, his skin prickled. The Convergence point was close. This was where the real nightmare began.
—-
Ten years ago, the tower in the center of Veritas-9 had cracked open, and something had stepped through.
A Monarch-Class Echo—code-named Chanter of the Final Note—had emerged. It wasn't large. It had no claws, no fangs, no scream. It simply sang, and people bled words from their eyes.
It erased over three hundred Echo-Bearers before the Barons nuked the area with Anti-Concept bombs.
Silas had been there. Powerless. Afraid.
This time, he had a chance.
This time, he had the Vault.
—-
At the edge of the broken plaza, the air shimmered. Time ticked wrong here. Birds flew backward. Footsteps echoed before being made.
Silas knelt and traced a sigil into the ground—one he'd learned in a life that technically never happened. The glyph pulsed, not with light, but with remembrance. The world stilled.
Then the scream came.
Not a human one.
A soul-scream. Ancient. Agonized. Beautiful.
From the center of the plaza, the air peeled back like wet paper, revealing a sliver of something that should not be. A gap in reality. A void in the shape of a man.
And from within it stepped the Chanter.
It looked like a child made of bone-glass, with strings of faded music sheets wrapped around its limbs. Its mouth was stitched, but the melody poured out regardless—an aria that summoned grief from the marrow of all who heard it.
Silas staggered.
His Anchor pulsed. A memory: his sister laughing in the ruins, before the fire took her. The Chanter tried to take it. Feed on it.
But Silas had prepared.
He reached into the Vault—his mindscape, his paradox engine—and pulled out something impossible: a weapon made of future loss.
A blade shaped like a memory that hadn't happened yet.
"Not this time," Silas said, stepping forward.
The Chanter turned its eyeless gaze toward him.
Then the ground erupted.
Something else emerged from beneath the plaza—not part of this event. Not part of the memory. A new variable.
A hand. Human. Armored in obsidian glass. Its fingers clawed into the stone, and a second figure climbed out of the earth.
Tall. Wrapped in rags that shimmered with static. A face hidden behind a bone-mask carved with mirrored runes.
Silas froze.
This wasn't part of the past. He didn't remember this.
"What the hell…?"
The masked figure turned toward him—and spoke his name.
"Silas Virell. Memory-Touched. Vaultbearer. You are not supposed to be here."
The voice came from all directions. From the sky. The stones. Inside his skull.
The Chanter screeched, its song warping into static, enraged at the intrusion.
Silas raised his blade. "Who are you?"
The figure tilted its head. Then whispered:
"I am the one who remembers you from the end.
And I have come to ensure… you never reach it."
Then he vanished—no sound, no light—just the smell of burnt memory.
And in that instant, every timeline Silas held in his Vault… went silent.
He dropped to his knees, gasping.
The world around him collapsed.
And the sky—once again—forgot how to breathe.