The forest outside Grythvault was unnaturally quiet.
Kael leaned against a moss-covered tree, panting, the scroll clutched in his hand. Ashhorn lay nearby, licking its wounds but alert. The stars above blinked through a canopy of twisted branches.
Kael had been walking for hours.
Running from a place most never escaped.
Running from himself.
He opened the scroll again. The symbols had changed.
Where once the ink shimmered faintly, now it pulsed — like a heartbeat. A new mark had appeared in the center: a black sun, half-obscured by a crescent moon. Beneath it, a word etched itself slowly into the parchment:
"Devourer."
Kael swallowed hard.
He didn't remember writing it.
He didn't even remember learning it.
But it felt… familiar.
"Is this what I'm becoming?" he muttered. "Or what I already am?"
The scroll responded with nothing but silence.
Kael folded it carefully and tucked it back into his satchel. Then he sat down, letting the tension fade from his body for the first time in days.
Fifteen.
That was his age.
It hit him suddenly — not as a memory, but as something certain, grounded deep in his bones. Before this life… before the fragments… he had been Kael, age fifteen, a wanderer's son from a minor border village. He'd lost his mother in a raid. His father… maybe to time. Or magic. He couldn't remember clearly.
But now?
Now he was fifteen and something else.
An Echo with something ancient inside him. A power he didn't ask for. A destiny he didn't understand.
He needed time.
And for once, the world seemed to grant it.
Because far away, across the spires of kingdoms and salt-crusted coasts, the sky cracked.
A tear in the veil.
Another Echo awakened — but this one was unstable, uncontrolled, rampaging across the Aethercliffs. The organization—the same that sent the Seeker—was forced to respond. Their eyes turned east.
Not south.
Not toward Kael.
For now… he was forgotten.
A flame in hiding.
Kael stood.
The stars above whispered softly. The wind tugged at his clothes, urging him forward. Ashhorn rose, limping but loyal, and followed at his side.
Kael didn't know where he was going next.
But he knew what he needed.
Power.
Control.
And answers.
"I'll master this," he said aloud, gripping the scroll tighter. "Before it masters me."
And with that, he stepped deeper into the dark.