Ashes Of The Past
Author: Beo
last update2025-08-04 21:31:44

The moment Sparrow stepped into the abandoned cathedral on the outskirts of Boston, she felt the ghosts clawing at her throat.

It wasn’t haunted in the traditional sense—no flickering candles or whispering spirits—but in her memory, it bled. The old stone walls echoed screams she hadn’t let out in years. Her footsteps faltered, and Jason—ever attuned to the slightest tremor in her—placed a hand lightly on her lower back.

“You sure about this?” he asked.

Sparrow didn’t answer. She just kept walking, the heels of her boots clicking across the cracked marble floor. In the far end of the nave stood a figure cloaked in the shadows, waiting.

Sparrow’s breath came short.

He hadn’t aged.

Not where it counted.

Father Lucien.

The man who’d raised her in the guise of salvation. Who taught her to fight, to kneel, to pray—and to bleed on command.

Jason stepped closer, ready to intervene, but Sparrow lifted one hand.

“I need to do this,” she murmured.

Lucien’s smirk grew as she approached.

“My litt
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  • The War Of Echoes

    They thought the splice in the plaza was singular. A wound. A mistake.By dawn, they knew better.Jason stood at the overlook, and across the districts below, a dozen new fractures burned. Each one shimmered like heat over stone, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that wasn’t theirs. Whole streets warped in and out of shape—sometimes rubble, sometimes restored. Survivors screamed as houses folded into copies of themselves, only to split apart again.Callen’s voice rasped over comms, ragged and thin. “It’s not localized anymore. Whatever fed that first splice—it spread. Like infection.”Yara’s blade hissed as it left its sheath. “Then we cut it out.”Jason didn’t answer right away. He watched as one of the new splices tore through a district square. On one side of it, fighters scavenged the ruins. On the other, echoes of their younger selves laughed in markets that hadn’t existed in years. One scavenger tried to step through—only for his body to flicker, and two versions of him fell at o

  • The Blood Of Memory

    The splice hadn’t dimmed overnight. If anything, it pulsed stronger—as if the plaza’s grief had given it fuel.Jason hadn’t left its edge. He stood watch like a sentinel carved from ash, unable to drag his eyes away from the man he’d pulled back.The survivor’s body still breathed. But his mind was trapped. His eyes blinked in an endless rhythm, lips repeating the same sob in silence. The plaza had started calling him the Looped One.Jason only saw him as proof. Proof the city wasn’t done breaking them.Callen crouched nearby, rig crackling weakly, exhaustion etched into his face. “His soul’s tethered,” he muttered. “Not gone. Not whole either. The splice caught a fragment—maybe more than one. Like a hook in water, dragging him back into echoes.”Yara paced with her blade bare, fury in every step. “Then cut the hook.”Callen’s hands trembled as he shook his head. “Not that simple. If I sever wrong, he won’t come back at all. His body will breathe, but he’ll be a husk. Gone.”Jason’s v

  • The Shattered Clock

    The plaza didn’t sleep that night. Not because of hunger, or cold, or the fear of Ravens regrouping. It was the air. It carried that rhythm still—the faint rise and fall, as though somewhere deep in the bones of the city, the breath of another world hadn’t fully exhaled.Jason stayed awake with it. He stood at the perimeter wall, watching the broken skyline. Each flicker of fractured light made him feel as though he were being watched back.By dawn, he didn’t need Callen’s warning to know something new had stirred.The hum was different. Not the ocean breath they’d faced before. This was thinner, sharper. Almost like the ticking of glass teeth.And it was close.***They found the anomaly at the edge of the plaza itself. No need to scour half the district this time. It had already come to them.Where a collapsed clocktower once sprawled in rubble, the stones had shifted. Not by hands. Not by time. They had simply… rearranged themselves. As though something remembered their shape diffe

  • The Gate That Breathes

    The plaza had gone still after the Raven lieutenant’s fall, but Jason knew stillness was only the skin of the wound. Beneath it, something pulsed.At first he thought it was the memory of battle—his heart still pounding, his muscles still tense with the echo of choices. But then he heard it. Not the crack of guns, not the clatter of blades.A sound like breath.It drifted across the ruins in a faint exhale, rising and falling with uncanny rhythm. The kind of sound no ruin should make.Yara noticed too. Her hand dropped to her blade, eyes narrowing. “Tell me you hear that.”Jason nodded grimly. “I hear it.”Callen’s shoulders hunched as though against a weight. His rig hissed softly, half-repaired but sparking with occasional jolts. “That’s resonance. A gate isn’t closed—it’s thinning. And not like before. This one’s… moving.”The plaza survivors shifted uneasily, eyes darting to Jason as though waiting for him to name the fear creeping through their bones.Jason didn’t give them fear.

  • The Banner Of Cinders

    The plaza was a wound cut open by silence.Hundreds of eyes darted between Jason’s team and the Raven lieutenant, the air heavy with the weight of a city’s future condensed into one standoff. Smoke curled from broken stone, from shattered spire, from the wreck of what once held the city together. The lieutenant’s scorched armor gleamed faintly in the firelight as he raised a broken blade, pointing it at Jason like a curse.“There!” his voice cracked raw with fury, “These traitors ended the Ravens’ reign. They killed your brothers and sisters. They destroyed the engine that could have lifted us above the chains of ruin!”A surge of voices followed him—rage, grief, the desperate clinging of those who needed an enemy more than truth.Jason’s pulse pounded, but his stance held steady. He kept his rifle level but unfired. “The engine wasn’t salvation. It was the end of everything. You felt it—every collapse, every tear in the sky. Do you think the mastermind cared for you? He used you, all

  • Ashes And Echoes

    The city no longer screamed.It whispered.Smoke drifted between the skeletal towers, thin and gray, carrying the acrid tang of melted steel. Fires burned here and there but without fury, as though exhausted by the war. The ground itself was quiet—no more shuddering pulses, no more impossible seams splitting across the horizon.Jason limped through the ruins, every step a reminder that survival wasn’t mercy—it was a sentence. His body felt carved from pain, but he kept moving. He had to.Behind him, Yara walked stiffly, one arm strapped against her ribs with torn cloth, her eyes scanning every shadow. Callen followed in silence, his rig hanging from one shoulder like a broken relic.The Severed Wing had lived. Somehow.But Jason wasn’t sure the same could be said of the city.***They reached what had once been an avenue, now a scar. Entire blocks had collapsed into a yawning trench, choked with rubble and twisted girders. Here and there, survivors picked through the wreckage—civilian

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