The shrine was older than the kingdoms — Serida told him that on the first morning of training, just before making him scrub bloodroot off the stone steps while upside down, blindfolded, and under the influence of a mild paralysis spell.
She called it "building focus."
Kael called it "torture."
"Again," Serida ordered, watching him try to summon energy through a meditation stance she called the Spiral Flame. "No Devourer energy. You touch it, you start over."
Kael sat cross-legged on the stone floor, drenched in sweat. The early mountain winds bit at his skin, but the pain grounded him. He focused on the scroll beside him. The symbols still shimmered, still changed when he wasn't looking. And the word Devourer still pulsed like a curse.
"I can feel it watching me," Kael muttered.
Serida knelt beside him. "Then don't blink."
He exhaled sharply.
It wasn't just about learning magic — Serida was teaching him how to feel magic, how to distinguish its voice from his own thoughts. Magic in this world wasn't a tool. It was a current. A living tide.
"The Devourer inside you isn't evil," Serida said on the third day. "But it is wild. And wild power doesn't obey. It consumes."
Kael nodded.
That night, the mirror in his dreams whispered his name backwards.
---
Far across the continent, stormclouds bloomed above the Aethercliffs.
The newly awakened Echo tore through the cliffs, unstable and glowing with fractured energy. It screamed with the voice of a thousand memories — loud enough to split stone.
The cloaked figures circling the cliffs worked in cold precision.
This was the Cradle of Balance — the secret order dedicated to hunting and controlling Echoes. They believed Echoes, unchecked, would unravel the world again like they nearly did in the Fracture Era.
Their leader, a gaunt woman known only as Matron Vohr, watched through a glass disc, brow furrowed.
"Kael was at Grythvault," a voice said. "He killed Seeker Nine."
Vohr's expression didn't change. "Then he's already too dangerous."
"What of the rogue Echo here?"
"Contain it. Kill it if you must. But Kael…" Her eyes narrowed. "He's something else. Something old. Something waking."
She turned toward the west, toward the shrine hidden in mist and runes.
"We'll come for him soon."
---
Back at the shrine, Kael stood alone in the dark, sparks flickering at his fingertips.
"I'm not just an Echo," he whispered. "But I'm not the Devourer either."
The scroll at his feet glowed softly, a new line forming in its center:
"The flame remembers."
Kael stared at it.
A chill crawled up his spine.
And for the first time, he wondered… what exactly had remembered him back?