The Echo War

Two

The Ghost Tower

The city was screaming.

Sirens blared through the Bastion’s lower wards, echoing off steel corridors and synthstone arches. Dren moved fast, boots pounding against reinforced walkways as red warning lights pulsed overhead like a dying heart.

Echo breach. Sector Nine.

A hiss of static buzzed through his comms. “Commander Keel to all units containment protocol Theta-Black is in effect. Do not engage without scan confirmation. I repeat, do not engage unless you’re certain it’s not one of ours.”

Too late for that.

Dren vaulted a shattered bulkhead, his side burning from old wounds and half-healed bone. Ahead, a patrol of Bastion guards was already down some unconscious, others… broken in ways that didn’t seem possible. Twisted backward. Shimmering.

He knelt beside one of them.

The soldier’s face was still contorted in panic, his skin flickering faintly as if some version of himself in another timeline was trying to phase through. Dren had seen that before.

Echo-hijack.

A worse fate than death. The echo doesn’t just kill you it overwrites you. Replaces your reality with its own. A new “you” wearing the same bones, erasing the version that once lived here.

He rose slowly. The hallway smelled of ozone and scorched dreams.

Something moved in the shadows ahead.

Dren drew his blade not his old war-sword, which was lost when he died but a Bastion-issue short saber he’d pulled from the armory minutes ago. It felt unfamiliar in his grip. Too light. Too clean.

The thing stepped out of the smoke.

It looked like him.

Same height. Same build. Same jagged scar above the right brow.

But its eyes were all wrong too calm, too cold, like it didn’t need to breathe to live.

Dren froze. “Which version are you?”

The echo tilted its head, then whispered in a voice almost like his, only flatter. “The one that survived.”

It lunged.

—

They collided like collapsing timelines.

Dren parried the first strike and twisted under the second. The echo moved with perfect precision—every step a memory, every feint a stolen moment from one of Dren’s forgotten lives.

They’d trained the same way. Fought the same wars. But something about the echo was tighter. Cleaner. It didn’t hesitate.

It didn’t care.

Dren ducked beneath a swipe aimed at his throat and slashed low, catching the echo across the thigh. Sparks. No blood. The thing shimmered again momentarily see-through, as if reality hadn’t fully accepted it yet.

“You don’t belong here,” Dren hissed.

The echo smiled. “Neither do you.”

Then it disappeared literally.

One blink, and the corridor was empty.

Veyna met him two levels up, out of breath, eyes wide.

“They breached from inside,” she said without preamble. “That means the veil’s thinning faster than they predicted. They’re not slipping through anymore they’re being summoned.”

Dren stared at her. “Summoned by who?”

Veyna hesitated. Then, “Not who. What.”

He didn’t like that answer.

She held out a tablet. “While you were playing swords with yourself, I dug up something. Coordinates. An energy pulse that spiked just before you woke up in the crater. It matches the kind found in Ghost Towers.”

Dren blinked. “Those still exist?”

“Barely. Most of them collapsed after the Fracture Wars. But this one? Tower Seventeen? Still standing. Barely monitored.”

“And?”

She tapped the screen. “It was where you were reborn.”

His pulse jumped.

“I thought I woke up in the wastelands.”

“You did. But whatever happened to you… started there.”

Dren tightened his grip on the tablet. “Then that’s where I go next.”

“Not alone,” Veyna said.

“You’ll just slow me down.”

She stepped in front of him. “If that were true, I wouldn’t have found the tower in the first place.”

He sighed. “You always this annoying?”

“You always this stubborn?”

He almost smiled.

—

The journey to Tower Seventeen took hours.

They crossed the lower subway line now overtaken by ash roots and flickering echo signatures and rode a scavenger skiff down the collapsed tram rails until they reached the dead zone.

It rose ahead of them like a black tooth in the mouth of a dying god.

Tower Seventeen wasn’t a building anymore. It was a scar jagged, hollowed, and humming with energy that didn’t belong to this world. Black stone fused with old alloy, wrapped in sigil-wires that blinked intermittently like eyes trying to wake up.

Veyna adjusted her goggles. “This place has been dormant for years. No energy, no readings. But the second you came back…”

“It lit up.”

“Like a flare in the void.”

Dren approached the door. Symbols carved into the stone began to shift as he neared ancient language overlaid with flickering code.

They pulsed in sync with the crown fused to his skull.

He reached out.

The door hissed and split.

—

Inside, it was colder than death.

The air was thick with memory. Not dust—memory. Dren could feel it in his skin, in his teeth, crawling down his spine like fingers trying to pull him back.

The main chamber was circular, surrounded by walls of dormant data cores and fossilized machinery. In the center, a raised platform more altar than console hummed softly.

He stepped onto it.

The crown on his head responded.

Pain lanced through his vision bright and searing. A rush of sound and color and other. A memory not his own slammed into him.

He saw himself no, a version of himself standing on this same platform, surrounded by people with no faces, speaking words that burned through time.

Then: a scream. A tear. A promise whispered through broken space.

“We can win the war. But we must first destroy ourselves.”

He fell to his knees.

“Dren!” Veyna’s voice echoed in the distance, sharp with fear.

He gasped, trembling, and looked up.

The altar was lit. Glowing with a symbol he didn’t recognize but felt in his bones.

“What did you see?” she asked, kneeling beside him.

“I was here before,” he said. “Not in this life. But… I came here. And I agreed to something.”

Veyna stiffened. “What?”

“I think I was the first.”

She shook her head. “No. That can’t be. The First Self is a myth…”

“He made a deal,” Dren interrupted. “He let the timeline fracture… on purpose.”

Veyna stood slowly, her voice barely above a whisper. “Why would you do that?”

Dren looked up at the swirling echoes trapped in the tower’s walls.

“To win a war we were already losing.”

—

They stayed in the tower until night fell.

Then, as the stars blinked over the dead horizon, a message pulsed through Dren’s crown faint, like a heartbeat struggling to start again.

He turned to Veyna. “I know where the next breach will be.”

“Where?”

He looked toward the northern range, where the ruins of the original Bastion Fortress long abandoned rose in silhouette.

“Home.”