The Echo War

Six

The Fractured Path

The sky beyond Korr Vale bled into dusk, streaked with amber clouds and the remnants of static storms. Dren stood at the edge of the ruined causeway, his breath still ragged from the run, the Pulse Emitter cold and humming in his gloved hand.

Behind him, the city burned a distant scream of collapsing steel and memory-sick echoes unraveling in the wake of their confrontation. The emitter had not yet been used, but just carrying it made Dren feel like he was holding the end of himself.

Veyna stood beside him, face half-shadowed beneath her hood. Her eyes were locked not on the city, but on the wasteland ahead.

“No turning back now,” she said quietly.

Dren didn’t answer right away. His thoughts were fractured bleeding over with pieces that didn’t belong to him. He saw flashes of other versions of himself: a warlord with a crown of bone, a healer holding a child’s corpse, a version of himself bleeding out beneath twin moons.

“How do I know I’m still the original?” he muttered.

Veyna glanced at him. “What makes you think that matters?”

A gust of wind swept ash into the air, and with it, a sound distant, rhythmic. Marching. Too far to see. But growing closer.

“We need to move,” she said. “Your Echo has agents still active. If they get to the breach before we do, that emitter won’t matter.”

They descended the fractured path toward the Bleeding Wilds, a stretch of corrupted land left behind when the Echo Storm first tore through the realm a decade ago. No map marked it. No survivor dared live near it.

The land ahead pulsed like it remembered pain.

As they walked, Dren looked down at the Pulse Emitter. The device was deceptively small sleek and curved, etched with obsidian veins. It was designed to erase echo anomalies on contact… but Zel had warned it could erase him too. That was the catch. The Echo and Dren weren’t truly separate anymore.

“You’ve been quiet,” he said after a while.

Veyna didn’t respond immediately. When she did, her voice was distant. “The last time I came through this place, I wasn’t alone either.”

“Your old partner?” he asked.

She nodded. “Taren. He was one of the first to volunteer for the Mindlink Project. Said he could still feel pieces of people he merged with. One day, he stopped sleeping. Said the dreams weren’t his anymore.”

“What happened to him?”

“I killed him. Or… I thought I did.” She looked ahead. “Sometimes I think part of him made it out. Maybe inside me. Maybe walking the Wilds.”

Dren felt the silence stretch between them, heavy and aching.

“You think I’ll become like him?” he asked.

“I think you already are,” she said, too softly for comfort. “But you’re still fighting. That counts for something.”

They crossed into the Wilds just as the second moon rose Driath, the crimson shard of a broken world hanging above them. The terrain changed almost instantly. Cracked ground steamed with violet mist. Trees if they could still be called that twisted like bone and glass, grown from memory-ruined soil. Some of them whispered when the wind passed through.

Veyna stopped near a black ridge. “We camp here. Light will scatter in this zone. They won’t track us easily.”

Dren helped set a minimal perimeter, placing distortion beacons and masking fields. By the time they finished, the stars had shifted twice.

He sat beside a crumbling stone wall, watching Veyna prep rations from her field kit.

“Why help me?” he asked. “Really.”

She paused. “You were the last one who remembered my name.”

He stared. “What?”

“I’ve worked for the Sovereign Court, the Mindlink Guild, even Echo hunters. Every time I stepped into the field, I left pieces of myself behind. And every time, they buried what was left under more masks, more titles, more missions. But when we first met in the refugee zone before your memory fragmented… you said my name like it mattered. No hesitation.”

Dren’s mouth felt dry. “You remember that?”

“I wrote it down. On my real skin.” She pulled back her sleeve. Beneath the synthetic plating, a scar lined her forearm faint, but visible. Veyna. Cut into flesh like a prayer against forgetting.

They sat in silence. Only the wind whispered, carrying voices that weren’t quite real.

Later that night, Dren dreamed.

But it wasn’t his dream.

He was standing in a grand hall made of mirrorglass and bloodstone, watching masked figures kneel before a shadow-throned version of himself. This Echo wore black armor laced with living runes.

“You see it now,” the Echo said. His voice was Dren’s, but older. Deeper. Confident.

Dren stepped forward in the dream. “You’re just a glitch. A copy.”

“No. I’m the refinement.” The Echo stood. “You hesitate. I don’t. That’s what divides us.”

The dream twisted. Dren saw cities burning, children screaming, memories dissolving in light. Then Veyna, dying, her mask shattered, reaching for him.

“You can stop this,” the Echo whispered. “Join me. Seal us. Reclaim the whole.”

Dren screamed.

He woke with blood in his mouth.

The emitter beside him was glowing faintly.

Veyna rushed over, stabilizer in hand. “You phased again. Hard.”

“Dream,” he muttered. “He’s calling.”

She looked at the emitter. “Then we’re out of time.”

They packed quickly, moving through the shifting landscape. As dawn crept in, the Wilds changed again reality bending, gravity twitching, colors too sharp to be natural.

At one point, they passed a grove of memory blooms strange blue flowers that pulsed with stolen recollections. Dren brushed one accidentally.

He saw a child’s first step. A mother’s scream. The final breath of a stranger.

“Don’t touch them,” Veyna warned. “Too many can collapse your identity.”

He nodded, shaken.

As they crested a ridge, they saw it.

The Fracture Breach.

It wasn’t a structure it was a tear. A massive gash in the world itself, rimmed in spiraling light and echo-static. And floating at its center: a tower. Ancient. Black. Radiating wrongness.

“That’s where he is,” Veyna said.

Dren stepped forward. “Then that’s where we end this.”

They descended the slope under cover of distortion, passing through shards of shattered timelines. A creature stumbled by them once—its form flickering between a wolf, a man, and a child. Echo-born.

They reached the breach rim by midday. There was no clear bridge to the tower only unstable echo platforms shifting like puzzle pieces.

“He’s testing you,” Veyna said.

Dren exhaled. “Then let’s see what I’ve learned.”

He jumped to the first platform. It held.

Another. Then another. Behind him, Veyna followed without hesitation.

The platforms rippled under their feet, reacting to Dren’s presence. Echoes surged around them flashes of past failures, guilt-forms, lost choices.

One showed Dren killing his father.

Another showed him saving the Echo.

“Lies,” Dren whispered. “All of them.”

“No,” the Echo’s voice boomed from the tower. “Just futures.”

They reached the last span. The door opened, not with sound but with memory.

Dren stepped through, the Pulse Emitter pulsing in sync with his heartbeat.

Inside the tower was silence.

And then him.

The Echo stood in the center chamber, arms open, mask in hand. Behind him, an entire wall of preserved memories swirled like a living storm dozens of Dren’s lives, stolen and archived.

“You came,” the Echo said. “At last.”

Veyna raised her blade. “Step away from the breach core.”

He smiled at her. “You brought her. Good. She’ll need to witness this.”

Dren stepped forward. “This ends now.”

“Yes,” the Echo agreed. “But how?”

He moved faster than thought. The two clashed in a storm of memory blades and fractured time. Every strike echoed across timelines. Dren felt his mind tearing with each clash, his limbs fighting against their own hesitation.

Veyna threw the emitter.

Dren caught it mid-air.

The Echo froze.

“You wouldn’t,” he said. “You’d kill yourself too.”

Dren’s hand shook.

The Pulse Emitter warmed.

The room vibrated.

And then he smiled.

“No,” Dren said. “Not kill.”

He reprogrammed the emitter on instinct—flipping its polarity. Not to erase.

To bind.

He slammed it into the floor.

Light exploded.

When the storm cleared, the Echo was gone.

Dren lay on the floor, chest heaving, the emitter smoking beside him. Veyna knelt by his side.

“You’re still here,” she said.

“I’m… still me,” he whispered.

“For now.”

He looked up. “The breach?”

“Sealed,” she said. “For now.”

They stared at the swirling tower walls.

But deep within, something still stirred.

The war wasn’t over.

Not yet.

But Dren had won a battle.

And for the first time, the voices inside him were quiet.