The floor beneath Ilen vanished.
There was no wind. No sensation of falling. Just a shift—like blinking and finding yourself in a new body.
Suddenly, he stood in the middle of a fog-drenched street, surrounded by towering, decaying buildings stitched together in mismatched architecture: stone columns from a forgotten empire beside glass spires flickering with eldritch light. Above, the sky swirled—not with clouds, but with ash that glowed faintly blue as it drifted in lazy spirals.
A city, but not one that belonged to the living.
It felt wrong. Offbeat. Like a song with a missing note.
"Echo Stabilized."Distortion: 'Lareth Dorei' — Status: Active.Mission: Identify and isolate core distortion.
The words rang silently through his thoughts, not spoken aloud but delivered directly to his mind.
Ilen glanced down.
His robes were different now—no longer gray, but deep indigo, lined with subtle silver script. His hands bore faint glyphs beneath the skin, pulsing gently with recognition.
The Unblessed Seeker.
The Echo still settled inside him like a second skin—memories not his own brushing against the edges of thought. Cael Derren's knowledge. Cael Derren's instincts. Not domination, but cohabitation.
"Always start with silence."
The phrase echoed in Ilen's head. It was something Cael used to say before performing rituals or investigating cult sites. And this place... Lareth Dorei... certainly resembled the latter.
He stepped forward, boots clicking softly on slick cobblestone. Despite the mist, everything was perfectly visible. Too visible. Shadows behaved improperly. They clung to corners that didn't exist, stretched at odd angles, retreated as if watching.
He passed an alleyway, and a voice whispered.
Not words. Just sound. A breath on the edge of thought.
He turned.
Empty.
But the moment he looked away, the whisper returned.
More voices joined it.
Not in unison—like a chorus struggling to remember the same song. Children. Old men. Women. Crying. Laughing. Humming.
This city dreams... but what is it dreaming of?
A sign above a cracked wooden door read:"Somniar Apothecary – Est. 0th Year"
"Zero?" Ilen murmured. "No founding date?"
He stepped inside.
The shop was intact but dustless. Nothing had been touched for what seemed like centuries, yet no decay. Bottles lined the shelves, filled with liquids that shimmered like oil on water. Jars held strange objects—glass eyes, silver teeth, folded paper birds with wings that twitched.
A counter bell. A small ledger.
He moved to inspect the book.
Only one page was written.
"Customer: NoneRequest: Dreamless powderPayment: Memory of mother's voiceStatus: Accepted"
Ilen exhaled slowly.
This was not an apothecary. It was a ritual site—an active one. And someone had traded something deeply personal. A memory. For a dreamless sleep?
He stepped back.
That's when he saw the mirror.
It hadn't been there before. No frame. Just a slice of polished black glass hovering behind the counter. His reflection stared back at him—but it wasn't right. His face was there, yes. But the eyes were black pits, and the lips moved before he did.
"You're not the only one who's woken up."
The reflection tilted its head—opposite to Ilen's.
"They're stirring. All of them. The unborn. The unfinished. The forgotten."
Then it smiled.
"Some of us want out."
The glass cracked.
Ilen stumbled back as the shop began to shudder. Bottles trembled on their shelves. The walls groaned.
He ran outside just as the apothecary collapsed inward, imploding like a paper house caught in a sudden vacuum.
And then—nothing. The building was gone. The lot where it once stood was now a brick wall. Seamless. As if it had never been there.
The whispers returned.
Louder.
"I dreamed I was born," a child's voice said."I dreamed I was real," an old woman sobbed."I dreamed I could choose," a man laughed.
Ilen's head spun.
This isn't just a city haunted by an unborn soul, he realized.This whole city might be an unborn soul.
He turned a corner and found a square where dozens of people stood perfectly still.
Eyes open.Faces expressionless.Unblinking.
They weren't statues. They were breathing. But they didn't move.
They all faced the same building—a towering cathedral of black marble that jutted into the sky like a blade. The architecture was alien—pillars that curved inward like spines, stained glass that pulsed with dim red light, and doors shaped like closed eyelids.
Above it, floating in the ash-dark sky, hung a symbol: a burning spiral with a slash through it.
"The Sigil of the Stillborn," Cael's memory whispered through Ilen."The mark of those who remember being denied existence."
A cult.
An echo-born cult.
This wasn't just a distortion. This was a gestation—a soul trying to become real by dreaming itself into existence through faith, ritual, and sheer force of identity.
And the people? They were constructs. Memory-shadows. Dream-actors playing roles in a false city trying to believe itself real.
Suddenly, the crowd moved.
All at once.
As if on signal.
They stepped forward in perfect unison, filing into the cathedral, their footsteps echoing like drums in the still air. Ilen followed, staying near the edges, cloaking his presence as best he could.
Inside, the cathedral was colder than death.
A single figure stood at the pulpit, cloaked in layers of white bandages. Their face was hidden beneath a bone mask carved with teeth.
They raised both hands.
And the crowd knelt as one.
"My brothers and sisters…" the masked figure began, voice echoing unnaturally. "The day is near. The dream holds. The Self strengthens."
"Our birth comes soon."
"And He watches over us. The One Who Woke. The First Rejection. The Zero made flesh."
Ilen froze.
Me?
"He walks among us," the figure said, turning slightly. "His arrival was foretold by the Cracked Tome. The Echo-Walker. The Paradox."
Every head turned.
Every blank face stared directly at him.
Ilen stepped back.
Too late.
The world twisted.
The cathedral spun, inverted, then reformed itself. No longer stone—it was now a spiral library, mirrors for walls, a thousand eyes blinking from every shelf.
And the congregation rose.
But now they had no faces. Only mouths, stretched into awful smiles.
"You shouldn't exist," they whispered in harmony."And yet you do."
The masked priest stepped down from the pulpit, pulling free a blade made of glowing teeth strung together by sinew.
"Join us, Ilen Merrow. Let your Echo become Seed. Let this city be born."
Ilen didn't think. He called on the Echo.
Symbols ignited along his arms.
Words—lost languages from dead cultures—burned in his throat.
"Rescind. Unmake. Sever the dream.""By the right of the Unblessed Seeker, I reject the self-made soul!"
The air snapped.
Reality cracked.
The spiral inverted again—and the entire cathedral screamed.
Ilen threw up his hands as blinding light swallowed everything—
When he woke, he was lying on cold marble inside the Archive.
Breathing heavily. Shaking. Covered in ash.
The Archivist stood nearby.
"Distortion neutralized. Core Echo sealed."
A silence stretched.
Ilen sat up, blood on his lips.
"It... it believed it was alive. It knew about me."
The Archivist nodded. "You weren't the only one to awaken early. Others are aware. Some were dreaming long before you opened your eyes."
Ilen clenched his fists. "How many?"
The Archivist turned, parchment robes rustling like dry leaves.
"Too many."