The sky over Nehkara was a bck vault, unmarred by moonlight or stars. Only the sickly pulse of crimson auroras shimmered across the heavens, leaking from the rent in the sky that locals called the Maw Above—a scar where the world had once wept out a god. Beneath its bleeding light, the nd twisted into nightmarish shapes: forests of petrified bonewood, rivers that ran uphill, and mountains that howled during the dusk. Even the wind smelled wrong here, like burnt parchment and dried blood.

  Atahsaia Vire moved through the skeletal trees, each footstep carefully measured. His cloak, now stitched from the hides of sin wraith-dwellers, merged with the ndscape. Nothing about him remained soft or unshaped; he was a creature carved by necessity, made cruel by consequence.

  The nd he tread was the Cindergorge, a dead zone between the fractured dominions of two warborne factions: the Pale Vespers and the Shatterveil Cult. It was a pce avoided by even the desperate, home to instinct-born predators that hunted thoughts, not flesh.

  His Echoform pulsed faintly beneath his skin—a hybrid manifestation known as Ash-Walker, drawn from a version of himself that had lived feral, survived off carrion, and developed a sixth sense attuned to danger. With it, Atahsaia could smell hostility. He could taste deception like a metallic tang on the wind.

  And right now, the air reeked of it.

  A rustle.

  Atahsaia turned just enough to let his peripheral vision capture movement. A small figure crouched behind a crooked bonewood trunk. Not hiding. Watching.

  "You followed me for three miles," Atahsaia said, voice low, even. "If you meant to kill me, you failed. If you meant to talk, then do so."

  Silence. Then the figure stepped out.

  A child.

  But not entirely. She bore the stature of a ten-year-old, but her eyes glowed with the pale gold sheen of an Echo-touched. Her limbs were too precise, her steps too silent. Atahsaia's Ash-Walker instincts screamed.

  "I am not here to kill you," she said. Her voice echoed—not in volume, but in tone, like several versions of herself were speaking together. "I was sent by a Remembrancer."

  Atahsaia narrowed his eyes. "They know I live?"

  "They remember."

  He frowned, but gave nothing more away.

  The girl reached into a satchel made of stitched fingerbones and pulled out a sealed scroll, bound by sigil-wax. Atahsaia recognized the rune: an Unforgotten Thread. Only those who remembered ancient selves—from before the Echoverse was fractured—could send these.

  He opened it.

  'The Shard of Instinct has awoken. The Pale Vespers march. If it finds a host, the Weave will shift. Let it not fall to their Echo-priests. You, Atahsaia Vire, are the only Self capable of harmonizing with it. Do not fail.'

  A pause.

  Then, below the main message: 'You will find it at the Cradle of Bone. Beware the Hollow that guards it. It echoes with the voice of who you once were.'

  Atahsaia's throat tightened. For the first time in weeks, something like emotion brushed his chest.

  The girl watched him. "Will you go?"

  "I will."

  The Cradle of Bone was not a pce. It was a memory of one. The nd itself had forgotten its purpose, and thus it existed between pulses of the Weave—a half-real location that shimmered in and out of perception. Atahsaia reached it by sacrificing a piece of his certainty, invoking an Echoform known as Drift-Truth, one who had mastered cognitive dissonance.

  He stood now on cracked marble ground, in a vast hall open to the sky. Massive ribs arched overhead like cathedral columns, each etched with names in a dead tongue. Light here was wrong—not dim, but dreamlike, as if it was remembering how light used to behave.

  At the center, nestled in a cradle of ivory stone, y the Shard of Instinct: a fragment of raw Echoverse, glowing with primal orange light. It pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.

  Then came the whisper.

  It was not in words. It was a voice made of sensation—rage, hunger, fear, survival.

  Self.

  The Hollow emerged. A monstrous figure. Shaped like him. Moving like him. But its eyes were empty, its mouth constantly shifting through a thousand expressions. A version of him that had given up too much, lost too many selves.

  The fight was not physical. Echo-versus-Echo.

  His Ash-Walker Echoform surged. He remembered the version of himself that hunted rats in alleyways, that survived the freezing wastes by gnawing on his own dead reflection. That Atahsaia was not a thinker. He was an instinct.

  But the Hollow was faster. Stronger.

  Until he gave something more.

  Atahsaia drew on a locked Echoform: The First Memory. A version of him that had refused to forget Earth. The man who had cradled his dying mother, who had kissed his lover beneath cherry blossoms. That self surged into him. Not power. Not strength. Humanity.

  The Hollow screamed. Its form convulsed, writhing between identities.

  "I remember who I was," Atahsaia said, stepping forward. "You only remember the pain."

  He touched the Shard.

  And it accepted him.

  The moment he bonded with the Shard, the Echoverse shifted.

  His mind expanded. He saw new paths open within the Weave. Possibilities that had never existed now danced on the periphery of fate. A Resonant Instinct was born in him—a synthesis of rationality and primal survival.

  He could feel the Pale Vespers approaching now. Echo-priests, dozens of them, each bearing twisted forms drawn from martyrdom and self-destruction. They wanted the Shard. They would burn the Cradle for it.

  But Atahsaia stood taller now. Not because he was stronger.

  Because he remembered.

  He turned to face the horizon. "Let them come."

  To be continued…