2025-08-30 15:26:43
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Sixteen
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
Fifteen
The Watcher’s corpse sagged in on itself, collapsing into a ruin of smoking sinew and withered limbs. Its last cry lingered in the air like a poisoned hymn, too long, too loud, until the sound warped and folded back into silence.The silence was worse.Dren stood in the ruin’s courtyard, sword still locked in both hands, the blade dripping black fire. His chest heaved. Every nerve screamed, not only from the gash across his ribs but from what he’d pulled through himself to end it. The Archive wasn’t gone. It curled there, in his marrow, purring.More, it whispered, smooth and eager. More blood. More ruin. We are stronger together. You know it.Dren tightened his grip on the sword until his knuckles whitened. His body wanted to obey. His veins burned with that sick, honeyed power.A hand gripped his arm.“Dren.”Veyna. Her voice cut the whisper clean for a heartbeat. She was at his side, sharp-eyed and steady despite the smear of ash across her cheek. Her blade was sheathed now, her ot
Fourteen
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
Thirteen
The fire had long since collapsed to embers, but Dren’s eyes stayed open, tracing the orange veins through ash and coal. Sleep never lasted not when the Archive pressed at the edges of his skull like an infection. He had drifted once, briefly, only to jolt awake choking on a scream that hadn’t belonged to him. Myra’s voice. Or Veyna’s. Or both.Across the camp, Veyna slept with her back against stone, sword propped within reach. Her breathing was steady, but even in rest she looked unyielding jaw tight, one hand curled near her hilt as if she expected him to turn against her.Dren pressed the heel of his palm against his eyes. She trusts me enough to follow, but not enough to sleep easy beside me. The thought twisted sharper than the Archive’s whisper.A rustle cut through the ridge’s silence. Not Veyna. Something beyond.Dren’s hand went instantly to his sword. The ash-drenched valley below churned faintly, rivers of soot shifting as though stirred from beneath. He rose without a sou
Twelve
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
Eleven
Ash and Whispers The night dragged like a blade across the skin. Sleep never fully came only fragments, flashes of shadow pressing at the edge of Dren’s mind. He saw himself standing over Veyna with the Codex in his hands. Saw her blood dripping from his blade. Saw his reflection smile when he himself did not.Every time he jolted awake, the fire had burned lower, the stars felt farther, and the voice lingered. Not words, now. Just a steady hum, like breath against his ear.By dawn, he hadn’t slept at all.Veyna stirred, rolling her stiff shoulders, wincing at the dried blood along her ribs. She studied him with sharp, unblinking eyes.“You look like hell.”“I feel worse.” His voice came rough.She didn’t press. Instead, she tightened the straps on her armor, methodical, disciplined, as though order in her hands might fight the chaos gnawing inside them both. Only when she finished did she say, “We can’t linger here. If the Codex woke echoes, then something else might’ve felt it too.
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