Chapter Eighteen: The Echo Throne
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The ruins of Eastreach still smoldered.
Ash fell like snow, blanketing the shattered city in a lifeless frost. Pale corpses littered the streets, their masks cracked open like brittle shells, hollow eyes leaking silvery light that no longer belonged to this world. Time itself felt sluggish here, as if the destruction had bled into the veins of reality. The sky had returned to its grey-blue hue, but it carried no promise of peace. Just the quiet between calamities.
Kael stood at the broken edge of the Spire, staring toward the northern horizon where the Herald had vanished into the clouds. A line of dark stormlight lingered there, spiraling like a wound that refused to close. It pulsed with hunger.
Lyra approached, her steps heavy. Her armor was chipped, one shoulder exposed beneath the metal. Her starlight blade flickered dimly at her hip, drained from the battle. "They'll be back," she said quietly, her eyes tracing the shadowed sky.
Kael didn't look at her. "This was the test."
A soft crack of folded air announced Silas's arrival. He appeared beside them, brushing soot from his jacket as if he'd just walked out of a bar fight.
"They always send the polite ones first," he muttered, his usual grin absent. "Next time, we get the screaming kind."
Lyra exhaled a long breath. "What now?"
Kael's gaze didn't waver. "We go to the Echo Throne."
---
The Void Ark sliced through skies blackened with post-war silence.
Below them lay fractured landscapes. Forests turned to glass. Rivers frozen in loops. Statues of soldiers that hadn't been carved, but grown. The world was changing—folding inward in slow, deliberate pulses. The remnants of the Ash Crown's touch.
Nihrex stood at the bow, his cloak whipping around him. "The Echo Throne was never destroyed," he said to the others. "It was abandoned. Locked away in a fold between time and unmaking. Too loud. Too cursed."
"Loud?" Lyra frowned.
"It remembers," Nihrex replied, not turning. "Every choice ever made in its presence. Every death. Every betrayal. Every promise broken on a battlefield."
Silas leaned against the railing. "So it's a throne that holds grudges?"
"More like screams them into your soul," Kael said darkly. "I heard it once. During the Abyssal War. I thought it was the madness of dying gods. I was wrong."
Lyra crossed her arms. "And you want us to sit on that?"
Kael shook his head. "No. I want us to listen. To understand what the world has tried to forget. If we survive it, we'll know how to fight what's coming."
---
They reached the Rift at dusk.
A tear in the world, wide and bottomless, stretched before them—a canyon of inverted gravity and flickering stars, as if the ground itself had remembered how to dream. The Ark could fly no farther. They descended on foot, walking the path laid by floating stones. Each stone whispered a name as they stepped: kings, traitors, prophets.
At the canyon's heart stood a tower made of shattered mirrors, rising out of a field of bone dust. Embedded in its base was a door made of knotted ivory. No handle. No keyhole.
Kael stepped forward, flexing his fingers. "I remember the price."
He sliced his palm and let the blood drip onto the door.
The tower shuddered like it had just taken a breath. The door split down the middle, groaning like a god waking from old pain.
Inside was no light—only memory.
---
The throne room defied geometry.
The walls moved without motion. The floor flickered between obsidian, bone, and water. The ceiling didn't exist—only a sky filled with falling stars in reverse. At the center was the Echo Throne, pulsing with restrained awareness.
It was jagged, forged from fossils of dead stars, its arms etched in a script that bled black tears when read. Lightning flickered across its surface. It watched.
Silas let out a low whistle. "Well… I've stayed in worse places."
Kael ignored him and walked forward, each step echoing in places he hadn't yet been. He knelt.
The throne pulsed.
And then the voices came.
Ten thousand rulers. Ten million regrets. Screams. Warnings. Songs of conquest. Songs of failure. Betrayals whispered by long-dead lovers. Sobs from tyrants who'd outlived their empires. The room trembled.
Lyra staggered back, clutching her head. "It's too much—"
"Hold the memory," Kael snapped. "Just hold it."
He reached out and laid his hand on the throne.
---
The world exploded.
Kael found himself elsewhere—no longer flesh, but thought. He stood in the ruins of the First City, long before it had fallen. Gods held court on plinths of fire and ice. He saw himself: not as the Hollow King, but as the general, the idealist, the man who still believed in the empire.
He was kneeling before a golden king. He saw the betrayal. The false charges. The execution. He saw the lie that ended his life.
The vision shifted.
He saw the Ash Crown, not as a tyrant or entity, but as a seed. Planted by the divine as a failsafe—a parasite to consume civilizations once they reached too far.
It had waited patiently.
He saw Lyra, marked from infancy. Not chosen, but calculated. A pawn in the gods' great equation. He saw Silas, terrified before he was unshaken, standing in a burning field, screaming at a sky that didn't answer. Nihrex, cradling the first Pale Knight in horror.
Then Kael saw himself, again.
This time, he sat upon the Echo Throne.
The stars bowed. The dead wept. Time paused, then rewrote itself.
He saw a path forward.
---
Kael collapsed.
Lyra caught him before his skull cracked on the obsidian floor. Silas was already kneeling beside them.
"You saw it too?" Silas asked, voice tight.
Kael nodded. "We weren't fighting the Ash Crown. We were feeding it."
Lyra looked pale. "Feeding it… how?"
"Every crown, every rebellion, every desperate attempt to rule the world… that's what it wanted. It grew from that chaos."
Nihrex clenched his fists. "Then how do we kill it?"
Kael stood slowly, face hardened by new knowledge.
"We find the True Throne. The one that came before all others. The one they buried behind the Shroud Eternum."
Silas scoffed. "The Crown of Stillness? That's bedtime story garbage."
Kael gave a grim smile. "So was I. Once."
---
As they turned to leave, the Echo Throne gave one last pulse.
A whisper followed Kael like a shadow:
"You are not the end. You are the key."
---
Far to the west, in a shattered cathedral swallowed by time, the Ash Crown stirred on its altar of silence.
It had heard the throne.
It had remembered the key.
And it began to change.
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To be continued...