"To search for meaning in a world fractured by war is to hold a mirror to the void and ask it to explain itself."
—From the writings of Lirael, Last Archmage of Thale
The dawn was colder in the Dead Valleys.
It was a place untouched by wind, where the silence pressed against the skin like a weight. Beneath Amine's boots, the ground crunched with the brittle bones of long-dead trees—ghosts of a forest that once sang with life. But now, it was nothing more than a frozen graveyard stretched beneath a wounded sky.
Thanor padded silently beside him, his fiery presence reduced to glowing embers, as though even the dragonling's soul dimmed in reverence to this haunted place.
Mira, walking ahead, didn't speak. She hadn't since they crossed the boundary into what the old maps called Verith's Rest. It was a name given by survivors of a battle none remembered—only that dragons and mages alike had perished here in numbers too vast to count.
Amine pulled his cloak tighter, not against the cold, but against something deeper.
It wasn't fear.
It was the weight of knowing.
They were seeking the first civilization—the Echoed, as the Grimoire named them. A people born before the rift. Before dragons. Before magic.
Before the wound in the sky.
According to the texts, the Echoed had not wielded power the way mages did. They had understood it. Lived in harmony with it. And when the corruption came, they had not fought it with weapons, but with silence.
They vanished.
Not in war.
In withdrawal.
In refusal.
Amine sometimes wondered if he should have done the same.
Since the Council, word of the dragons' message had spread like wildfire. Some called it a trick. Others believed the dragons were still beasts, now made clever. But a few… a rare few… began to wonder what else the world had misunderstood.
And Amine, bearer of that truth, became something he had never asked to be.
A symbol.
The boy who died and came back. The mage who spoke with dragons. The one with the monster made of flame and teeth walking beside him like a loyal dog.
But deep down, he knew—
He was still the same boy who once stood on a rooftop in Tokyo, wondering if the world would miss him when he was gone.
And now, somehow, the world depended on him.
They stopped at a ridge overlooking the remnants of an ancient city.
No walls. No towers. Only stones, arranged in concentric circles, perfectly cut, untouched by weather or time. In the center, a monolith of dark glass reflected the sky—not the real sky, but a distorted version, as though it showed another world.
Mira broke the silence. Her voice was small in the great void of the valley.
"This is where they vanished."
Amine nodded. "What were they running from?"
She shook her head. "I think… it wasn't fear. It was acceptance. They realized something we haven't."
"Which is?"
She turned to him. "That the war isn't ours. That magic, dragons, even the Wound… these things weren't made for humans. We're just caught in its gravity."
Amine studied the monolith. His reflection didn't show Thanor. It showed himself alone. Older. Empty-eyed.
And behind that reflection, faint and flickering like an old dream—stars.
They camped under the monolith's shadow that night.
Mira fell asleep quickly, her breathing soft. Thanor curled up beside her, one eye glowing faintly as it kept watch.
Amine sat awake, staring at the sky.
The stars seemed closer here.
Brighter.
More like questions than lights.
He thought about the figure from the Gate of Echoes—the dragon that spoke like a man. The memory that told him he was "half-echo." And the way the monoliths responded to his touch.
What did it mean to be an echo?
A copy? A remnant?
Or… something born again from a sound long lost?
In Tokyo, the stars had been hidden by light and smog. He'd never once seen the Milky Way. Never wondered what lay beyond the dark. Only now, in this shattered world of magic and myth, did he understand the terrifying scale of existence.
And in that understanding… a kind of calm.
Philosophers of the old age said that to confront the infinite was to lose the self. But Amine disagreed.
To confront the infinite was to remember the self.
Because in the vastness, in the silence, what echoed back was truth.
His truth.
He had died.
He had been forgotten.
And yet, here he was—echoing.
Not for glory. Not for destiny.
But because someone had to answer the silence.
The next morning, the monolith spoke.
Not in words. In images.
When Amine touched its surface, a ripple spread outward—and suddenly, he stood in a memory not his own.
A city, floating above a sea of clouds. People made of light and thought. No weapons. No kings. Only purpose.
And then—a rupture.
A soundless scream from beyond the stars. A black tendril piercing the sky. The people tried to understand it. Welcome it.
And in doing so… they were undone.
The city fell.
Not in fire.
But in silence.
One by one, they laid down their memories inside monoliths.
A record.
A warning.
And then they walked into the sea of clouds.
Never to return.
Amine gasped as the vision faded.
He staggered back. Mira caught him.
"What did you see?"
He couldn't speak for a moment.
Then: "It wasn't a war. It was a collapse of meaning. They tried to hold on to themselves—and they couldn't."
Mira's eyes widened. "The corruption?"
He nodded. "It doesn't kill. It rewrites. It turns knowledge into instinct. Language into hunger. Thought into echo."
She whispered, "That's what the dragons are."
"They were the first to fall," Amine said. "And we're next."
But it wasn't all despair.
In the final moment of the vision, Amine had seen something else.
One figure—hooded, faceless—had resisted. Had refused to give their memory to the monolith. They had walked the other direction. Toward the source of the rupture.
And before they vanished into the sky, they left behind a single word:
"Remember."
Later, as they left the Dead Valleys, Amine turned to look one last time.
The monolith still glowed faintly.
Not a warning.
A beacon.
A reminder that even in the face of cosmic silence, memory mattered.
That to remember was to resist.
And to echo was to survive.