The two Solans stood in the clearing, ash whispering across their boots like the breath of forgotten oaths. For a moment, neither moved.
Then the echo broke first.
With a twitch of the hand, it opened the grimoire—Solan's grimoire, but aged, warped. The pages turned of their own accord, bleeding black glyphs into the air, and from them erupted a soundless scream.
Reality buckled.
[Abyssal Manifestation Detected]
Name: Vareth's Echo
Type: Abyssal Memory Construct
Tier: VII+
Nature: Anti-Continuum Predator
Behavior: Seeks and consumes unresolved identities
Weakness: Conceptual Anchoring / Counter-Naming
Solan staggered back as the copy's body cracked open down the sternum. From within, tendrils of flickering memory burst forth—silver, jagged, thrumming with lost time. Its face warped, collapsing into a prism of Solan's forgotten expressions: fear, rage, surrender.
It screamed with his own voice.
"Who are you now that your name has been spoken backward?"
The mask under Solan's cloak pulsed—The Forsaken Tongue—urging him to answer with silence. But this was Tier VII. Here, memory fought back.
The creature lunged.
Solan reacted by instinct. Wyrm flared along his forearm, soulsteel threading through his veins. He twisted, barely dodging a spiraling chain of mnemonic thorns hurled from the creature's chest. They slammed into a petrified root, which immediately began to decay—turning into wax, then smoke, then a weeping child's face.
"Strike clean. Don't remember."
His thought wasn't his own—it was the girl's voice, echoing through the tether.
Solan exhaled. Veilcraft bloomed from his right palm—a sigil of clarity inscribed with a drop of his own forgotten blood. He slammed it to the ground.
The clearing shuddered.
The construct recoiled—but not from pain. It laughed.
"I know what you chose to forget," it hissed, and from its skin spilled visions:
A boy screaming as a cathedral collapsed.
A hand reaching through the Veil, letting go.
A promise unspoken, swallowed by water.
Solan gritted his teeth.
System Alert:
[Cognitive Integrity Threshold Breached – 78% Stability]
Warning: Memories are unraveling. Establish anchor.
Optional Countermeasure: Invoke Wyrm: Reweave Pattern
He activated it.
Wyrm howled. Runes peeled across his ribs, lighting his veins with silver fire. A binding spiral formed underfoot—Conceptual Reinforcement—and his fragmented self stabilized.
"You're not me," he said.
The creature paused.
Solan's eyes glowed with the unspoken syllables of his True Name, pulsing behind wards.
"You're a grave I refuse to climb into."
He charged.
They collided in a storm of ruined memory.
Solan ducked beneath the echo's swing—chains slicing air—then countered with a strike from the Wyrm-forged dagger. It buried in the creature's chest, and for a moment, both of them convulsed.
Visions spilled into Solan's mind like rot through a broken seal—alternate timelines, dead friends, worlds where he died in Tier I.
He almost let go.
Almost.
But the girl's voice steadied him again.
"Anchor with what you chose. Not what you lost."
He remembered her smile—not her name, not her nature—but the warmth of it.
It was enough.
Solan roared, activating the Echo Severance Rite from the Mask. A pulse of anti-memory erupted outward, stripping names and futures alike. The creature froze, stuttering through incomplete forms, glitching between versions.
Solan stabbed again—through the forehead—and whispered:
"Be unmade."
The creature shattered.
Ash fell like glass, slow, silent, as the clearing returned to stillness.
System Update:
Threat Expunged
Mindscape Stabilized: 91%
Tier VII Progression: 12%
Trait Gained: [Mnemonic Resilience]
Fragment Acquired: [Ashborne Thread of the Echoed Self]
Solan collapsed to one knee, breathing hard. The forest reassembled itself in silence.
And somewhere, in the place where the girl waited—
A mirror cracked.