A silence that wasn't silence pressed in around him—thick, damp, and loaded with a whispering malice that scraped against the skin of the mind. Atahsaia Vire stood at the lip of the Maw of Ikharen, a fissure in the bones of Nehkara that split the earth like a jagged mouth attempting to devour the sky. The air carried a scent like rusted chains and spoiled incense, dense with decay and power long left to ferment in the dark.
He tightened his cloak around himself, though the fabric offered no real warmth. The descent below would not challenge his flesh—it would unmake his sanity.
The Maw exhaled. A low, shuddering sigh of old breath long forgotten. Cold swept up from its depths, not like winter but like absence—absence of heat, of light, of presence. It whispered along the edges of memory. He felt the phantom warmth of a hand that once held his—his sister's—flicker through his mind and vanish like smoke.
He let it go. He had to. Echoes fed on sentiment.
Behind him, the wastes of Lower Nehkara stretched, a cracked desert of iron sand and skeletal monoliths. Once a city had stood here. Now, only the husks of monuments and broken columns remained, half-swallowed by the shifting, ash-colored dunes. The stars above this region never moved. Time itself warped here—anchored to the pulse of deeper realities, bleeding through the Maw.
He stepped forward.
The descent began.
The Maw did not welcome him—it consumed him.
Each step into the void stripped away the sounds of the surface: the subtle wind, the distant grind of rock, even the hum of his own blood. All gone. Only the wet click of his boots on the stairs carved from obsidian and fossilized bone remained. Even that was wrong. Each step echoed twice—as if someone, somewhere, matched his stride from another branch of existence.
He did not look back.
"The Hollow Echoes will smell you," Kaelen had warned him. "They remember what you tried to forget."
Kaelen, who had fallen two chapters ago. Kaelen, who had screamed not in pain, but in clarity.
The walls of the Maw were lined with carvings that flickered as he passed—glyphs etched by no tool. They pulsed with faint light and dimmed in his wake. They weren't words. They were memories. Fragmented records of all who had fallen here. He glanced at one, and for a heartbeat saw a woman sobbing as she cradled her own skull. Another glyph—a child smiling as his throat was torn open by a father weeping apologies. These were not visions. They were truths trapped in stone.
He pressed on.
Hours passed, or perhaps days. The Maw twisted perception. Time was elastic here.
Atahsaia reached the Depth Threshold—a narrow platform etched into the gut of the chasm. Below it, no stairs descended. Only a singular chasm fell into the unknown.
He knelt and placed his palm on the center of the platform. The bone beneath it responded, thrumming like a plucked chord. A resonance answered.
He had come seeking an Echoform. Not just any—he needed one born from restraint. From a life where he hadn't fought. A version of him that had walked away.
The irony made his lips twitch.
A gust of air surged upward, nearly knocking him backward. The darkness below churned. He knew what came next.
They rose.
First, the air thickened—grains of memory clustering like spores in a stagnant cave. Then came the voices. Whispered in overlapping tongues. Muttered regrets. Laughter without context. Screams without pain.
Then the Hollow Echoes emerged.
Wraithlike and partial, their bodies were not consistent. Limbs shimmered in and out of sync with reality. Faces bloomed and withered across their heads like tumors of possibility. One wore a face he remembered. Himself at age eight, when he first learned betrayal. Another wore the face of a version that had gouged out his own eyes to stop seeing futures.
They swarmed.
Atahsaia did not draw a weapon. Instead, he opened his Core.
A cold ache spread across his chest as his Resonant Core expanded, drawing on latent strands of possibility. He offered no resistance, allowed the Hollow Echoes to close in—fifteen, perhaps twenty of them.
They screeched.
Then he synchronized.
Not with one Echoform—but with many.
They came like shards of glass pressed into his consciousness. A scholar who never picked up a blade. A healer who died in his second year. A man who ran from love and died alone.
They collided inside him. Screamed. Merged.
And then, silence.
One stepped forward from the meld. A version of himself who had chosen not to hate. Who had let the betrayal go. Who had died for someone unworthy—but with peace in his heart.
The Overlay began.
Atahsaia's eyes glowed with pale violet light. Not power—but clarity. His body shimmered, momentarily becoming something else—taller, thinner, with eyes not shaped for war but for insight.
The Hollow Echoes paused.
And they bowed.
This was not dominance. It was resonance. Harmony.
He saw them—not as monsters—but as warnings.
He walked forward. They parted.
Every breath he took inside the Maw now throbbed with potential. The Overlay held firm, this Echoform's sync rate higher than any prior.
He named it: The Peaceless Monk.
And behind the clarity came pain.
For a moment, Atahsaia remembered the warmth of another's hand. The smell of Earth rain. A laugh that hadn't been forged in cruelty.
Then it was gone.
And he was alone.
He began the climb back to the surface.
But something followed.
Not one of the Hollow Echoes.
Something deeper.
Atahsaia turned once—just before the first rays of grey Nehkaran dawn filtered into the top of the Maw.
A presence stared back. Not a form, not a creature—but a possibility that should never exist. A silhouette that shifted faster than thought.
It whispered one word, in a voice that cracked the surrounding walls:
"Final."
He said nothing. But he remembered.
The Echoverse did not only offer power.
It offered hunger.
And now something knew his name.
To be continued…