The Echo War

One

Ash and Memory

The wind carried ash like snow.

It drifted in slow spirals across the ruined borderlands, soft as silk and thick with the scent of scorched iron. Once, this had been farmland. Green fields, scattered homesteads, the gentle hum of machines harvesting wheat and sunvines. Now only black earth remained, cracked and poisoned. Whatever grew here now was not meant to be touched.

Dren Asher rose from the ash.

He didn’t remember falling. One moment, there was silence true silence, the kind that pressed into your bones and the next, he was pulling himself out of a crater with blood in his mouth and static ringing in his ears.

His armor was half-burned, scorched through the left shoulder. The plating along his ribs was warped. Every breath hurt. But the worst part the truly wrong part was the crown fused to the side of his skull.

He felt its weight before he saw it. Not just a metal band. No, this thing had roots dark, glimmering veins like fossilized blood, burrowing just beneath his skin, disappearing under his temple and jaw.

And it pulsed.

Not like a heartbeat. Faster. Flickering. Syncing with something in the distance.

Dren staggered upright, hand hovering near the hilt at his hip, only to realize the scabbard was empty. No blade. No backup. Just the broken breath in his lungs and the taste of fire behind his teeth.

He looked up.

The sky was cracked.

A fracture arced across the horizon like a wound in glass, glowing with dim, violet light. The breach shimmered, distorting everything around it clouds, birds, light itself. Echoes leaked from wounds like that. Creatures from other timelines. Other versions of this world. Of people.

Of him.

Dren touched the side of his head. The metal was cool. The pain was deeper than the flesh.

“You’re back,” a voice whispered not out loud, but from somewhere inside the metal.

His breath caught.

“Who said that?” he rasped.

No reply. Just the wind sifting through bone-white trees and the sound of distant, broken engines clicking under their own rust.

He started walking.

—

The Bastion walls rose like jagged teeth against the sky. Towering constructs of alloy and runestone, built generations ago to keep what lived out there from reaching in here.

Dren approached the checkpoint just before dusk, weaving through the rusted bones of what had once been war machines. No patrols. No guards. Only a red sensor drone, cracked and barely functional, buzzed overhead and scanned him with a pulse of light.

The warning flare lit seconds later.

A whirring sound filled the air. Guns rotated from the upper walls automated turrets long out of practice but still hungry for movement.

Dren raised his hands. “Don’t shoot. I’m not an echo.”

The drone hesitated.

A hiss of static crackled from above. Then: “Identify yourself.”

“Dren Asher,” he said. “Captain of the Ninth Bastion Guard, Echofront Unit. Serial ID… I don’t know. But I’m real. I was born here. Veyrah Core. Twenty-nine years ago.”

Silence.

Then the voice returned. Clipped. Cold.

“Captain Asher has been listed as KIA for twelve years.”

Dren exhaled sharply. “I know.”

“That makes you an echo.”

“Then scan me again.” He stepped forward. “I remember everything. I remember the siege at Skelwall. I remember the breach at Tower Five. I remember dying.”

That quieted the line. Even the turrets paused.

Dren lowered his hands. “Let me in.”

The gates opened not fully, just enough to admit a single man.

Dren walked through and into Veyrah for the first time in over a decade.

—

The Bastion was not the same city he remembered.

The spires had aged. The streets were quieter. Lights flickered like dying embers, and the neon veins that once pulsed down the walls had faded to flickers.

People watched him from behind reinforced glass and narrow alley slits civilians dressed in scavenged coats and stitched boots, their eyes sharp with suspicion.

Echo incursions had worsened.

He could feel it in the way the ground hummed beneath his feet, like the heartbeat of a city preparing for war and losing.

A woman met him in the lower corridor of the Citadel’s core.

She wore grey combat leathers and a burn-scar up her neck, ending just below her jawline. Her eyes narrowed the moment she saw him.

“Dren Asher,” she said. Not a question.

He nodded. “You know me?”

“No,” she replied, walking in slow circles around him. “But I knew the last one.”

Dren stiffened. “Last one?”

“There’ve been five. Versions of you. Since your original death.”

He didn’t speak.

She stopped in front of him, arms folded. “I’m Commander Nyra Keel. Intelligence Division. You’re either a miracle or a walking time bomb, and I haven’t decided which.”

“Let me help,” he said.

“You don’t even know who you are.”

“I remember everything.”

“Do you?” she asked, stepping closer. “Do you remember me?”

Dren looked at her again.

There was something in her voice something he should’ve remembered. A thread. A name. A moment.

But there was only static.

“No,” he admitted.

“Then maybe you’re not him after all.”

She handed him a clearance tag. “Until we figure out which version you are, you’re confined to District Four. You’ll be watched. Monitored. If you so much as twitch wrong, the killshot is automatic.”

“Understood.”

“Oh, and one more thing,” she added, pausing as she turned away.

“What?”

“There’s a girl in the Archives. Veyra calls her ‘Echo Whisperer.’ She’s been drawing pictures of you for years. Versions of you she’s never met.”

Dren’s heart skipped.

“Why?”

Commander Keel gave a shrug. “That’s what you’re going to find out.”

—

The Archives were buried deep beneath the city. A vault of data and old tech, hidden from the public and guarded by a pair of drones with laser-scorched plating.

Inside, the air smelled of rust and ozone. Machines whispered to themselves in dark corners. Screens flickered with half-dead code.

She sat at the far end of the chamber—kneeling, head bowed, sketching something across the floor with black chalk.

Dren watched her for a long moment.

She looked young. Maybe twenty. Pale. Dressed in a patched jumpsuit layered with worn cloth and belts of tools. Her hair was cropped short, dyed silver-blue and spiked on one side.

“You’re him,” she said without turning.

“You don’t know that,” Dren replied.

She smiled. “I know a version of you. You’re the first one who made it back with eyes like that.”

“Like what?”

“Haunted,” she said, finally turning.

Her gaze met his sharp, intelligent, far older than her face suggested.

She held up her chalk sketch.

It was him. His face, twisted in battle. A fracture running down his skull, echoing the real-world wound where the crown fused to his head. Behind him, a storm. A breach. A tower of light breaking the sky.

“I drew this last month,” she said softly. “Before you returned.”

Dren felt the hairs on his neck rise.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Veyna.”

“You’re the Whisperer.”

“They call me that,” she said, rising. “But I don’t talk to echoes. I listen to them.”

Dren’s voice dropped. “What do you mean?”

“They leave fragments,” Veyna explained. “Memories. Static. I can feel them when I touch the timelines. And every one of you every Dren says the same thing before they fade.”

He braced himself.

She stepped closer, gaze locked with his. “They say: He’s coming.”

“Who?”

Veyna pointed to the crown fused to his temple.

“The First Self. The one who started the war. The first Dren. The only one who never died.”

—

The lights above flickered once. Twice. Then died.

An alarm screamed through the Archives.

Dren’s instincts kicked in before thought grabbing Veyna by the wrist and pulling her down as a pulse of energy blasted through the corridor, searing past where they’d just stood.

Screams echoed from above. More alarms. Gunfire.

Echo breach.

“Stay here,” he told her.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Veyna”

“I know this city better than anyone,” she snapped. “And I’ve seen this before. They’re not after civilians.”

“Then what?”

“They’re after you.”