Kael stopped pulling at his chains.
There was no point. Not yet.
He wasn't ready to escape — not until he knew what this place was, and what they were doing to the others.
In the dark hours between sleep and madness, he listened.
To the quiet moans through the walls. To the footsteps that always stopped at the same three cells. To the murmurs of the technicians and the low, vibrating hum from below the floor.
The Cradle didn't just imprison Echoes.
They harvested them.
---
It began with the screaming.
Kael flinched as the doors opened and the girl in cell D-7 was dragged out — the one who muttered in old tongues and sang lullabies to ghosts. He never saw her again.
Later, two masked figures entered with a silver cart.
On it were vials.
Glowing.
Still warm.
"Residual soulprint," one whispered. "Just enough for seeding."
They didn't explain.
But Kael understood.
They were extracting Echo essence.
And not just to destroy.
To replicate.
---
He was moved the next day.
Not released — just shifted to a new cell: a cold chamber lined with mirrors and embedded with runes Kael didn't recognize. The light was wrong here, pulsing faintly in time with his heartbeat.
There was someone in the chamber with him.
An old man, bound by chains too heavy for his thin frame. His skin was grey-veined, his eyes blind — but when Kael entered, he smiled.
"Another broken one," he rasped.
Kael hesitated. "Who are you?"
The man grinned, teeth missing. "I'm what happens when you live too long in pieces."
Kael frowned. "You're an Echo?"
"We all are. But I'm on my seventh return. Most go mad by the third."
Kael's blood ran cold.
"Why are they doing this?"
The man leaned in. "Echoes are not reborn by accident. We were made. Carried through the dying pulse of magic itself. The Cradle fears what we remember."
Kael swallowed. "What is it we're supposed to remember?"
The man went still.
Then whispered:
"The world wasn't broken. It was erased."
---
That night, Kael saw the hidden floor.
He was marched down a stairwell carved from ancient obsidian. What he saw below would haunt him.
Rows of suspended bodies — not dead, not living. Echoes, frozen in time, connected by glowing strands to a massive sphere of white fire and black veins.
A heart.
A living core made of Echoes.
Feeding something sealed beneath the lab.
Something Kael's scroll had once shown him in a dream.
A shape without form.
A god made of memory.
---
And then Kael knew.
The Cradle didn't want to stop the Devourer.
They wanted to wake it.
And use him to do it.