The sky above Nehkara was an inverted ocean—bck, roiling, and veined with crimson light. Each pulse in the heavens resonated like the tolling of a silent bell, an ancient signal that the Weave of Resonance still breathed beneath the crust of the world. Beneath that dying sky, Atahsaia Vire walked through the ruins of Marrowhollow, where bones were bricks and grief was mortar.

  The ruins had not been made by time—they had been devoured. A fracture in the world, a moment in the Echoverse where a pce was half-forgotten and half-consumed. Buildings crumbled inward, not from decay, but from disuse by memory. Where there was no remembrance, matter turned brittle.

  Atahsaia walked between decaying structures, the soles of his boots crunching over the white dust of forgotten bones. Not just human. Not just animal. Something deeper—echoes of entire species that no longer existed anywhere but in a few unspoken dreams. He held no torch. The light was ambient here, phosphorescent memory-mist that coiled through alleys and clung to doorways.

  He stopped before a stone arch with no building attached. An echo stood there.

  It took the form of a child. Emaciated, eyes hollow, body twitching as if jerking between countless memories of how to move. Its skin peeled and reformed in pulses. Atahsaia didn't flinch. Instead, he whispered.

  "You were a war orphan in a branch that colpsed. Your story was never told."

  The echo stilled, as though relieved to be known. Then it dissolved into blue vapor, absorbed into the Weave. His Resonance Index flickered in his vision—an involuntary mental flicker. +0.003. A whisper gain. Meaningless to most. Crucial to him.

  He stepped through the arch. The act completed a fragmentary ritual. The door led nowhere, but the moment had structure—a story. Echoforms only bloomed where memory had weight.

  The space beyond the arch warped as he stepped. He didn't emerge into the street beyond. He stepped into himself—another version.

  Echoform: The Ashwright

  His skin bckened. Not burnt—carbonized. His blood became smoldering sap. His breath hissed with heat, but his heart beat cold.

  This version of Atahsaia had become a myth during the Rupture Wars—a man who burned cities not from vengeance, but necessity. Who incinerated allies when their thoughts wavered. Who calcined his own father to keep a secret. The Ashwright was not evil. He was consistent.

  And he had made a choice once—to survive by becoming the fme that consumed hesitation.

  This power surged through Atahsaia now. In his chest: a starved furnace. Around his arms: threads of radiant carbon folded like cloth. His eyes saw heat signatures, but more importantly, they saw emotional residue—what had been burned into memory. That was the real gift.

  He had come here to hunt something. Not a creature. A moment. A memory misaligned with reality, buried in the ruins and threatening to destabilize the region.

  They were called Resonant Knots—points where too many Echoes converged in the wrong pce, drawn to a focal grief or trauma. When left unattended, Knots became Rifts. And Rifts birthed anomalies.

  He found it beneath what had once been a shrine. The shrine now resembled a half-melted spine. But under it, memory was thick as resin.

  He knelt. His palm pressed into the ash.

  The Resonant Knot unfolded.

  Sudden light. Sound. Scent.

  He was not in Marrowhollow.

  He was in a battlefield from another version of his life. A war where his Echoform had failed. Bodies stank of boiling marrow. Screams echoed backward in time. His hands—smaller—trembled as they pressed against the neck of a dying woman.

  Mother.

  Not his real one. But it didn't matter.

  "I didn't mean to..."

  The Echo-at-13 cried out, blood misting from a wound he never remembered taking. This moment wasn't real. But the emotion was.

  The Knot was baiting him. Testing his mind's cohesion.

  Atahsaia, the real Atahsaia, watched the scene. Then he walked into it.

  As the Ashwright, he burned it.

  Fmes devoured falsehood. He incinerated the battlefield, the woman, even the boy who cried for her. Not out of cruelty, but crity. This moment could not be allowed to fracture further. His own weakness, buried in some tent branch of his life, could not be permitted to anchor an anomaly.

  When the fire faded, only him remained. Alone. Unmoved. Strong.

  The Knot unraveled.

  +0.12 Resonance Index.

  Significant.

  And with it came crity: the memory was pnted. Artificial. Not native. Which meant someone had seeded it. Someone else was maniputing Echoverse topology. That was forbidden magic. Even Remembrancers were not allowed to impnt trauma. Not anymore.

  He left the ruin with his Echoform dissolving into cinders. His skin cooled. The cold of reality returned. But the sky pulsed differently now.

  A second sun had ignited at the horizon. Tiny, pale, and sharp-edged.

  Not a sun.

  A beacon.

  Someone had opened a Door of Echoes. Not a minor portal, but a Grandgate—a mythic construct requiring an entire identity's worth of sacrifice to unlock. What could justify such loss?

  He walked faster.

  He would find it. He would know. And if it threatened his path to Echoform ascension, he would erase it.

  Even if it had once been a version of himself.

  To be continued…