A low fog blanketed the village like breath on glass—clinging to rooftops, curling through alleys, swallowing sound.
Nerin stepped into it alone.
His boots cracked frost-needled earth. The blade at his side stayed sheathed, humming faintly, as if half-asleep. But the weight of the mask fragment in his satchel kept him anchored to the present.
He was not going to the shrine or the shed this time.
Tonight, he was heading toward the oldest place in Edenrock.
The Clay Archives.
---
It wasn't a true archive, not anymore.
Once a longhouse from the ruin days, the Clay Archives had been reduced to a half-sunken foundation of vine-choked stone, topped with a sloping slate roof and guarded by nothing more than rusted hinges and old curses.
No one went there now.
Except scavengers.
And scribes.
Inside, moss climbed the walls like a slow fire. Rows of cracked urns lined shelves, sealed with wax and stamped with crude symbols.
Memory jars.
Nerin stepped lightly, avoiding the loose boards and ritual circles burned into the floor. He placed the mask fragment on a pedestal and unfolded his journal beside it.
Then he opened the jar he'd smuggled from the shed: it held soil and blood from his battle with the masked creature.
Mixed Essence.
His fingers trembled as he poured it into the shallow groove encircling the pedestal.
The fragment glowed softly.
And spoke.
Not in sound—but in the back of his thoughts.
A name.
But not his.
Rithan.
He flinched.
The room darkened.
Then came another name.
Halon.
Then dozens. A litany of names, cycling, warping, overlapping until—
They stopped.
The pedestal dimmed.
Nerin exhaled and collapsed against the stone wall, his mind ringing.
The fragment hadn't just shown memories.
It had pulled them.
From somewhere else.
And that... was impossible.
Unless—
"Echo conduction," he whispered.
A long-abandoned theory.
One only mentioned in the burned sections of scribe texts—an experimental hypothesis suggesting that if a soul imprint was sufficiently charged with trauma, it could leap across medium barriers.
Not Essence conjuration.
Not possession.
Conduction.
Like current through metal.
You didn't summon a spirit.
You became a conduit for their echo.
Nerin stared at his fingers. His pulse.
He'd just experienced it.
But the echo hadn't clung.
Not yet.
Not this time.
---
Morning came like a fever breaking.
The fog still lingered, but the sun fought harder now—rays carving slices through the mist and illuminating every cobbled crack with sharp detail.
Edenrock looked ordinary.
But everything had changed.
Nerin felt it.
Inside.
In the air.
Even in the way the birds no longer sang over the north field.
He returned to the square, where an argument had broken out again between Larn and the baker's son over something mundane—bread, or boots, or boundaries.
But Nerin only half-listened.
Instead, he scanned faces.
Who else is starting to hear the names?
He saw the old boatman muttering a song under his breath that had no tune. A woman sketching marks into the dirt with her cane. A hunter staring too long into a well.
The echoes weren't isolated.
They were crawling.
---
That night, Nerin sat with the blade drawn beside him. Not in defense, but for companionship.
He took ink and began drafting a new page in his journal, giving it no title.
It was a theory.
Not yet stable.
But a possibility.
Theme: The Ink That Forgets
The page read:
> "If the creatures are bound to recursive death loops, and if the masks are their fossils, then the fragments are keys to the locks in the world itself. Not memories, but instructions—Essence scripts waiting for hosts to rewrite them.
And if I write too often in that ink... I may no longer be writing as myself.
But maybe—just maybe—that's the price to overwrite what was always broken."
He stared at the words.
Crossed them out.
Then rewrote them.
He could feel something shifting in him.
Not possession.
Not madness.
Rewriting.
Not erasure of self, but a deliberate choice.
He would not be what the echoes made of him.
But he would use their voice.
And bend it.
The blade pulsed beside him again, warm.
It recognized him.
Not just as wielder.
But as scribe.
Not one who records.
One who authors.
---
Far from the square, near the marshy edge of the riverbank, a stone statue cracked.
Only slightly.
But enough.
A single mask fragment inside it began to hum.
And one of the names Nerin had heard repeated softly on the wind again:
Halon.
This time, it was not a memory.
It was a summons.
And someone—somewhere—answered.