Everyone begins as a name. He began as nothing.
There was no face.
No voice.
No memory.
No name.
Only the ache.
A hollow thrum that pulsed in rhythm with a dying world.
He opened eyes he didn't know he had.
Above him, the sky bled ink. Clouds unravelled into half-written verses that faded before they could end.
Below him, the earth curled like burnt parchment, each layer brittle with forgotten meaning.
He stood.
The ground did not remember him. No footprints. No weight. Not even a whisper of acknowledgment.
There was no wind. No birdsong. No sun.
The silence was not absence. It was indifference.
Even the world blinked around him, as if confused by his presence and unsure whether to render him or let him fade.
He wandered.
Not toward anything. Just away from nothing.
Each step was a question. Each breath, a negotiation with existence.
After a time that could not be measured, he found a stream.
It murmured, threading between stones carved with fractured glyphs.
Trees arched overhead, their leaves veined with ancient runes, but they cast no shadow upon him.
He leaned closer.
The water reflected the sky, the stones, the trees.
But not him.
He touched the surface.
It rippled outward... and inward.
A whisper bloomed in the stillness behind his ribs:
"You are not in the story."
He jerked back.
The water stilled. The reflection remained unchanged, still missing.
He tried to speak. Nothing came.
No sound, no syllable, not even the idea of language.
His thoughts were echoes that led nowhere.
He looked at his hands.
Pale. Smudged. Faintly trembling.
Each blink brought subtle shifts in their shape, as if the world hadn't finalized the draft.
Am I real?
A rustle.
From the woods beyond, something emerged.
It walked upright, emaciated, its body etched with calligraphy.
Ink-dripping antlers curled upward from its skull.
Its eyes were blank parchment, veined with bleeding quill-strokes.
It sniffed the air.
Paused.
Looked in his direction.
Then walked past.
Not with caution. Not with a threat.
With indifference.
It hadn't seen him. It couldn't.
Because he wasn't written.
The creature vanished into the mist like a sentence removed from a draft that never was.
He stood still, longer than reason should allow.
I am not part of this world.
The thought didn't frighten him.
It hollowed him out.
He didn't want to scream.
He wanted to exist.
In the distance, atop a crumbling hill, something stirred behind the haze.
A shrine.
Its stone structure bent with age, wrapped in ivy like veins strangling a corpse.
No name marked its gate. Only deep grooves where meaning had once been.
It called to him.
Not like memory.
Like punctuation. The promise of a beginning or the mercy of an ending.
He walked.
Not because he chose to.
Because to stop would be to vanish.
The path to the shrine was carved from neglect.
Moss-eaten stones, crumbling steps, and echoes of reverence too old to linger.
The shrine door creaked open without touch.
Dust blanketed everything.
Scrolls lay rotted in their cases.
Wax pooled where candles had once burned themselves hollow.
At the center stood an altar.
On it: a scroll. Blank.
Beside it: a quill.
Its nib dripped slow beads of black-gold ink.
He stepped forward.
Something deep in his bones, older than memory, trembled.
He reached out.
The scroll unravelled, edges glowing with silent anticipation.
Then, from the walls of the shrine, a voice filled the space. Not spoken but understood.
"Write your myth, nameless one."
His fingers closed around the quill.
The air thickened. Reality narrowed to ink and page.
He hesitated.
He had no memories. No identity. No name.
But he understood something.
He did not need to recall.
He needed to begin.
The nib touched parchment.
The ink resisted at first, then yielded.
A line appeared, dark and smooth, drawn from the marrow of nothing:
"The Echo walked into the world and was not seen, but the world changed in his passing."
The scroll shivered. The words vanished.
But not into silence. Into reality.
A low pulse radiated from the altar. The shrine exhaled a breath it had held for centuries.
He stepped back.
The quill stilled. The ink no longer dripped.
Outside, the wind stirred for the first time.
He crossed the threshold.
And the world acknowledged him.
Leaves rustled with intention.
The trees angled slightly toward him.
The stream, once blind, now reflected a faint outline. A shadow of a figure, shifting and vague, but present.
He looked behind him.
There were footprints on the path.
His.
He looked up at the sky.
The clouds still bled verse. But one of them paused. Its letters flickered in confusion.
He had written a line into existence.
And the world was reading it.
Far away, across the realms of breath and ink, a ripple passed through the Loom.
A bell tolled in a place no longer worshipped.
Something old opened a forgotten page.
And paused.
The Echo had entered the story.
And so, the first lie was written.