They descended in spirals—into the belly of the citadel, where gravity wavered and time thickened like honey. Static clung to their skin. Light filtered in without a source, colored like thoughts too old to name.
Then came the voices.
Not over speakers. Not from any device. They rose from within their own skulls—fragments.
A lullaby in a dead dialect. A child's cry. The thunder of a war long lost.
Echo dropped to one knee, clutching his head. "They're all mine."
Kira knelt beside him. "They stored your mind here. Each suppressed memory—partitioned and scattered across thousands of echo-banks."
"Why?" he gasped.
"So you'd never hold the whole truth at once. It would've broken you."
The wall ahead pulsed, and a panel split open. Suspended within was a sphere of liquid light, spinning between magnetic coils. Images swam within it—his own face at different ages, fire raining from the sky, hands trembling over a signature drawn in blood.
He touched it. The sphere shrieked—not in pain, but in recognition.
These weren't memories reclaimed.
They were lives—iterations of himself, rewritten, repurposed, and doomed to fail. Again and again.
"They didn't build you to succeed," Kira whispered.
"No," Echo said, eyes locked on the light. "They built me to keep trying—until I stopped asking why."