The image burned behind Dren’s eyes long after the mimic’s ash dispersed. Myra’s face soft, terrified, too real to dismiss. He told himself it was a trick. A borrowed mask dredged from memory. But memory had weight. And what he saw had been heavier than illusion.Veyna sheathed her blade with a sharp motion. “It knew your name.”Dren’s fingers tightened around his sword hilt, knuckles bone-white. He hadn’t realized until she said it the mimic hadn’t only worn Myra’s face. It had spoken with a knowledge no echo should have. Not you again.“That wasn’t random,” Veyna pressed. Her voice stayed measured, but her eyes searched him, demanding an answer. “What did it mean ‘again’?”Dren’s throat worked, but no words came. The truth tangled too deeply. His lives blurred; the Archive made sure of it. He had seen Veyna die in other timelines, had buried her, betrayed her, saved her. Myra, too. Names and faces replayed in his mind like broken glass. But this mimic had spoken as if it remembered

The silence stretched until even the ashfall seemed to hang in the air, suspended like the pause before a blade strike. Dren’s throat felt raw, as if every word he wanted to speak scraped on its way up, jagged and unshaped.Veyna’s stare didn’t waver. She was trembling just faintly, just enough for him to see it in the tension around her jaw, the way her fingers flexed like she wanted to keep a sword in them. But her voice didn’t break.“Tell me what this thing is doing to you. Tell me what it wants. No more fragments. No more silence.”Dren forced himself to look away, toward the embers collapsing in their pit. The glow reflected in the black veins carved into the ridge stone, veins left behind by the Archive’s earlier breach. They pulsed faintly like they weren’t just scars, but arteries.“It wants out,” he said at last, his voice low. “Every whisper, every ghost, every face I cut down it’s all leading to that. The Archive isn’t just memory, Veyna. It’s every failure. Every life tha

The air itself seemed to rot as the nest revealed its core.Shadows peeled back like flesh from bone, revealing a cavernous hollow beneath the ruins. The stone walls pulsed faintly, threaded with veins of living black. The ceiling was a cage of twisted beams and roots, dripping with the residue of mimic-births. Every inch of it whispered, thousands of overlapping voices, each a fragment stolen from the Archive’s prey. Some were incoherent. Others clear.And too many of them were Dren’s.He froze on the threshold. The whispers crawled under his skin like parasites, finding old wounds and prying them open. He could hear himself begging for mercy. Laughing like a butcher. Screaming as steel tore through him. Whispering to Myra in the dark, words he should not still remember.Veyna’s hand tightened on his shoulder. “It’s feeding on us,” she said low. Her eyes scanned the chamber, hard as flint, but her jaw clenched. She heard it too. Her own voice tangled in the swarm. “We end it here.”D

The ridge wind carried ash like snow, drifting over their cloaks and armor until they seemed carved from the same gray stone as the cliffs themselves. Morning had come without light. The storm-choked sky dulled every edge of the horizon, and the valley below still writhed faintly, as if last night’s battle had stirred something too deep to settle.Dren adjusted the strap across his chest, the weight of his sword biting into his shoulder. He hadn’t slept. Neither had Veyna, not truly, though she pretended better. She moved ahead of him, steady, eyes scanning the barren expanse, but he caught the stiffness in her shoulders, the way her hand kept brushing her hilt as if to remind herself it was still there.The silence between them wasn’t hostile, not anymore. But it was brittle. Every word they hadn’t said last night hung between them like smoke.They followed the ridge north. The ground sloped in long waves of black stone and frost-bitten ash, the kind of landscape where nothing should

The Ashborn’s fire was meager barely more than glowing coals smothered beneath ash to keep the light from carrying. They sat in a ring around it, their faces half-hidden, shadows deepening the ruin of their scars. No one spoke unless it was in the low murmur of warning or direction.Veyna sat near Dren, knees drawn, sword across her lap. She hadn’t unclenched her grip since the march. Her eyes kept flicking to the burned man across the circle, the way his gaze lingered too long on Dren.The Archive’s whisper hadn’t stopped since they left the hollow. It prowled at the edge of his thoughts, never loud enough for the Ashborn to notice, never quiet enough for him to forget.They watch you because they see what you are becoming. Not man. Not soldier. You are us. You are already theirs.Dren pressed his thumb hard against the scar on his palm until he felt bone. He needed pain real pain, something to cut through the voice.“You bleed shadows even in silence,” the burned man said suddenly.