The first time Kael used his power, he nearly killed everyone in his village.
It was supposed to be a simple raid—twenty men on ragged horses with rusting swords and a taste for fear. Bandits. The kind that crawled out of the waste-hollows and blood-sands looking for settlements too small to be defended and too weak to fight back. Kael's village, Torren's Hollow, was both.
The elders had always told them to stay quiet during a raid. Hide. Don't fight. Offer tribute—food, cloth, tools—whatever it took. Survival was more valuable than pride. But this time, they wanted more. They wanted bodies. Laborers. Breeders. Fighters for their growing warband.
When Kael's mother resisted, they broke her arm.
When the blacksmith spat in their leader's face, they cut out his tongue and fed it to the dogs.
Kael had hidden like the others, curled behind a shattered forge in the center of the square. He could still smell the iron, blood, and smoke. His hands trembled as he held a broken blade—blunt, useless, a toy against men who'd tasted death and grown drunk on it.
Then the chief noticed him.
The man's face was a leather map of scars and sunburns, eyes bright with cruelty. He stepped forward, dragging a girl Kael knew—Sera. Fourteen. Too young to scream the way she did.
"You'll make a fine little lesson," the chief growled, raising his blade.
Kael didn't remember what happened next—not clearly.
There was a sound. Not a scream. Not a roar. A pulse. Like the heartbeat of the world had just skipped a beat. The air shimmered. The ground buckled beneath him. And then—light. Cold, white-blue light, like starlight made solid. It erupted from his chest like a geyser, forking through the sky in jagged, celestial veins.
Then came the silence. The kind that hums in your bones.
When Kael opened his eyes, the world had changed.
The village square was scorched glass. Not burned—changed. Trees were crystallized. The old fountain floated three feet above the ground, frozen mid-collapse. Bodies, bandits and villagers alike lay in twisted positions, eyes wide and empty. Sera was gone. So were the others.
Only Kael stood in the center, barefoot, his tunic burned away from the chest. And across his skin, glowing softly through the grime and ash, were markings sigils that pulsed like dying stars. His hands were slick with starlight, dripping upward instead of down.
He hadn't screamed. But something inside him had.
That night, as he stood at the edge of the ruins, the scavenger arrived.
A wiry old man in patchwork armor, riding a one-eyed ox and carrying more bones than food. He studied Kael from a distance, then offered a water flask without a word.
Kael drank until he coughed. "What… what did I do?"
The man didn't answer. Not right away
"You awakened," he finally said, voice like gravel and old wind. "Or something inside you did. Either way, boy, you ain't normal anymore."
Kael looked back at the village his home, now a grave
"I didn't mean to."
"No Echo ever does," the man said. "And the world doesn't care."
They traveled together for three weeks. The scavenger's name was Grell. He taught Kael how to hide his markings with bandages and ash. How to sleep light. How to listen to the wind for signs of danger.
He told him about the Echoes.
After the Sigil War, when the seven relics shattered, their fragments scattered across the world. But not all fragments were physical. Some burrowed into bloodlines. Into souls. Into the bones of unborn children.
Echoes were born rarely—and always in chaos.
Each one carried a spark of a lost Sigil's power. Fire that melted cities. Shadows that whispered in dreams. Time that ran backward. The world feared them. Hunted them. Used them.
"Some Echoes go mad," Grell warned one night, as they sat by a fire made of silent blue flame. "Some get recruited into the Ardent Courts. Others become mercenaries. Gods help the ones who get caught by the Hollow Priests."
Kael didn't ask what the Priests did. He could see it in Grell's eyes.
After the third week, Kael woke up to find the scavenger gone. Just a note carved into a rock near the cold firepit:
"Run fast, stay hidden. Don't trust your dreams."
Kael kept walking.
He passed through dead zones—places where reality buckled, where birds flew backward and rivers flowed uphill. He crossed the Bone Dunes, where the wind screamed in a language only nightmares spoke. He avoided cities. Wore hoods. Told people his name was Corin.
But the dreams still came.
In them, a woman with silver eyes stood atop a tower of glass and ash. She wore a crown of thorns and spoke in riddles. Behind her, a door. Always closed. Always pulsing.
Come find me, she whispered.
Sometimes, Kael saw himself in the dream—older, dressed in armor stitched from stars. Sometimes, he was bleeding from the eyes. Sometimes, he was the one opening the door.
He didn't know which scared him more.
One night, while camped near the ruins of Caelrath—an old fortress shattered during the war—Kael heard it again. The pulse. Soft, distant, like a drumbeat beneath the soil.
He stood, heart racing. The markings on his chest began to glow, faint and restless.
A whisper tickled the edge of his hearing.
Kael.
He turned. No one there.
Kael.
He drew the bone-dagger Grell had left him, stepping slowly into the ruin's shadow.
And then he saw it.
At the center of the crumbled keep, half-buried in stone and starlight, was a blade. Not rusted. Not broken. It hovered just above the ground, humming with the same pulse he had felt in his chest since the day of the raid.
He stepped closer.
A gust of wind blew through the fortress. The stars above seemed to flicker.
As Kael reached out, a figure stepped from the shadows—tall, robed, face hidden behind a porcelain mask marked with a crescent moon.
"You shouldn't be here," the figure said, voice like steel wrapped in silk.
Kael froze. "What is this place?"
"A graveyard," the figure replied. "And a cradle. You are not ready."
"I didn't come here on purpose."
"No Echo does."
The blade pulsed again.
And Kael realized—this wasn't the end of his journey.
It was the beginning.