Echo felt it the moment Nu'Ravin decided to stop whispering.
The city had spent years folding itself in silence, shifting memories like pages in a forgotten book, burying truths beneath its endless corridors of shadow and glass. But now—now the weight of the past had become too heavy to ignore. The cracks were spreading. The foundation was splitting.
And it was hungry.
Lani stood in the center of it all, the rain refusing to touch her, her presence warping the space around her like she had become part of the city itself. She had always been a part of it. Echo just hadn't realized it until now.
"You don't know what you've done," Thalia murmured, voice steady despite the chaos unraveling around them.
Echo tore his gaze away from Lani and turned to Thalia. The spirals in her irises pulsed violently now, shifting like tides pulled by unseen forces.
"I opened the door," Echo said, his voice hoarse.
Thalia's grip tightened around her blade. "And in doing so, you set Nu'Ravin free."
The city gro, deep and guttural, like the breathing of something colossal waking from centuries of slumber. The ground trembled, the skyline rippled—rooftops bending, windows shattering without sound.
The first thing to break was the sky.
The fractured stars twisted, warping into symbols Echo couldn't understand, their light pulsing with unspoken rage. The air thickened, pressing against his skin, turning sharp as if the city was trying to claw its way inside him.
Lani watched it all unfold without fear.
"You erased me," she said softly.
Echo flinched.
"You rewrote me," she continued, stepping forward, slow, deliberate. "You turned me into a fragment. A whisper. A name buried in ink."
Echo swallowed hard, forcing himself to stay still as she closed the distance between them.
"But you can't erase something that refuses to die," Lani whispered.
The city responded.
Nu'Ravin screamed.
A storm erupted—not of wind, not of water, but of thought.
Memory-ink poured from the buildings, twisting through the air in thick tendrils, wrapping around the streets, consuming the world in shifting symbols and fragmented whispers.
Echo felt the weight of them press against his mind. The voices of those he had rewritten, those he had buried inside the Red Court, those he had stolen—all clawing their way back, demanding recognition.
Thalia cursed, stepping between him and Lani, blade raised.
"It's happening," she hissed. "Echo, if you don't stop this—"
"Stop it?" Lani interrupted, tilting her head.
She smiled then.
It wasn't warm.
It wasn't kind.
It was the smile of someone who had spent years trapped inside an illusion, only to finally shatter the walls holding her in place.
"It's too late," she said.
The city roared.
And the game changed again.
***
The streets howled.
Nu'Ravin was changing—not in the quiet way it had always shifted beneath Echo's feet, not the subtle bending of walls to conceal secrets. This was violent. This was the city tearing itself apart.
Echo stumbled backward, his breath ragged, the weight of memory pressing against his skull. The silver key around his neck pulsed wildly, reacting to something deep in the city's core.
Lani stood motionless amidst the chaos, the storm of unraveling ink twisting around her frame. She didn't flinch when buildings collapsed behind her, didn't blink when fragments of rewritten minds clawed their way into the air, whispering half-formed curses.
She was part of this now.
Echo knew it.
Thalia moved before he could, lunging forward with her blade, her expression unreadable beneath the stormlight. The air around her burned violet with summoned glyphs, ancient magic pulsing with every step.
"She's beyond saving," Thalia hissed.
Echo wasn't sure if she meant Lani or the city itself.
Lani lifted a single hand.
The moment she did, the ground beneath them cracked open.
Not stone.
Not earth.
Ink.
Echo barely had time to react before the darkness surged upward, liquid memory swallowing the space between him and Thalia. The structures around them twisted violently, the roads splitting apart as Nu'Ravin screamed.
The city was alive.
And it was hungry.
Echo moved without thinking. His fingers curled around the silver key, the metal burning against his palm. He didn't know what he was doing—only that something inside him recognized the pattern, the shifting symbols, the ancient pulse of the city's unraveling laws.
He whispered something under his breath—words older than any memory he had kept.
The ink shuddered.
A heartbeat passed.
Then—
Nu'Ravin reacted.
The storm of broken memories twisted. The streets groaned. And for a single breath, the city hesitated.
Lani's eyes narrowed.
Thalia didn't stop.
She moved faster than Echo could process, her blade arcing through the mist, the violet glyphs burning brighter, sharper—this time aimed not at Lani, but at the ink itself.
The city roared.
A pulse of violet magic slammed into the twisting abyss of memory-ink, sending shockwaves through the streets. The liquid entity shrieked, fragments of lost thoughts scattering into the wind, dissolving into nothingness.
The city felt it.
It recognized the attack.
And it retaliated.
The air thickened. The roads shifted. The skyline cracked open.
Something stepped through.
Not human.
Not Reaper.
Something worse.
Echo felt it before he saw it—the presence curling through the space between realities, pressing into Nu'Ravin's broken form.
A whisper—soft, deliberate—crawled through the air.
"You never learn."
Echo's pulse slammed against his ribs.
The silver key burned hotter.
Lani smiled.
And then—
The war for Nu'Ravin truly began.