The wind howled through the fractured cliffs of Arhyn Vale, cold and sharp, like it carried the whispers of the gods themselves. Kael stood atop a jagged precipice, the world sprawling beneath him in pale mist and shadow. His cloak fluttered violently behind him, the fate-seal now etched into the length of his arm glowing in tandem with the glyphs carved deep into the mountainside. The Echo Protocol had changed something fundamental inside him. Where before there was tension, now there was resonance. The weave no longer felt distant. It sang to him.
Syra knelt nearby, her fingers trailing over the stone circle they had uncovered—an ancient gate, locked by runes older than the Collapse. Her expression was unreadable, but her aura was still wrapped in quiet calculation. Since they emerged from the Mirrorgate, something in her had shifted too. The silence between them wasn't uncomfortable. It was the silence of shared burdens, unspoken but deeply understood.
"It's reacting to your seal again," she said finally, standing. "The Divergence Code—it needs your mark to unlock."
Kael approached the gate, resting his palm on its center. The glyphs surged to life. Lines of energy webbed outward, like lightning caught in slow motion. The wind ceased abruptly, as if the world itself was holding its breath.
A sound followed. Not a roar. Not a whisper. A note. Deep and echoing, as though the mountain had struck a chord on an unseen instrument. The air shimmered. The gate... split.
A portal unveiled itself—a corridor of swirling starlight and shivering shadow. Kael staggered slightly.
"Where does it go?" he asked.
Syra stared at the vortex, her eyes flaring with mirrored light. "To where the threads unravel. To the origin of fate's corruption."
---
They stepped through together.
The shift was immediate. Kael felt as though he had stepped out of the world's breath and into its memory. The corridor was infinite, lined with transparent tapestries of moments past. He saw scenes he recognized—his mother's smile, the orphanage where he grew up, the sealed chamber where he'd first met Syra. But there were others—moments he didn't remember, lives he hadn't lived.
"Fragments from broken timelines," Syra murmured. "When fate diverges, not every path fades. Some echo."
Kael halted before a tapestry showing himself leading an army of crimson-cloaked figures. Behind him, cities burned. On his brow, the same fate-seal—warped and spiraling outward like a corrupted star.
"I become him in one future," he said.
"You could become him," Syra corrected. "That's why we're here. To find the divergence point—the root split—and seal it."
---
They reached a chamber at the end of the corridor. Floating within was a core of twisted crystal, pulsing with shifting runes. It was tethered to hundreds of fraying threads, each representing a timeline, a life, a choice.
Kael reached toward it instinctively.
The moment his hand touched it, he fell inward—into memory, into echo.
---
He stood in a ruined cathedral, moonlight filtering through shattered glass. Before him was a boy—himself, barely thirteen—arguing with a masked figure cloaked in void.
"This was the first pull," Syra's voice whispered, disembodied. "The first time the Weave reached out to guide you—and the first time something else tried to pull you off course."
Kael watched as his younger self accepted a strange relic from the masked figure—a shard of mirrored bone.
"I remember... I kept that with me for years. Until my powers manifested."
"Because it wasn't just a relic," Syra said. "It was a divergence lock. A trigger. It tied you to an echo path."
Kael turned and faced the memory. With his current fate-seal ablaze, he raised his hand—and the echo burned away, the tether cut.
---
He snapped back into the real chamber.
The core pulsed once more—then stilled.
A third of the threads faded.
"One anchor down," Syra said, stepping forward. "Two remain."
Kael was breathing hard. "And when they're all gone?"
Syra looked at him with eyes that mirrored the stars.
"Then we rewrite fate. For good."