Chapter Four: Stones That Remember
Omkar woke to birdsong that echoed like flute notes and leaves that shimmered with dew-shaped light. It felt like hours—maybe days—had passed since the battle with the Echo, but time in Velmyra was unreliable. The moons still hung in the sky, unchanged, like watchful sentinels.
He sat up slowly, body aching in places he didn't know existed.
The clearing—the grove of stones—was peaceful now. Whatever force he had summoned the night before had receded, but a lingering resonance remained in the air. As though the stones were still watching him. Still waiting.
He crawled to the center of the grove and placed a hand on one of the larger stones. Warm. Humming. As if it remembered what had happened.
He heard a whisper in his mind:
"This is the Place of Bound Echoes. A shrine to memory... and fracture."
He pulled his hand away, startled. The voice had not come from outside. It had come from within the stone. Not speech—impression. Knowledge conveyed like emotion.
The Echo he had fought—it hadn't been a wild beast. It had been a fragment. A piece of a soul torn from its reality and trapped between dimensions, twisted by chaos. And it had come for him because he was fractured too.
Before he could process the thought further, he heard movement—soft footsteps on grass.
He turned sharply, energy building in his palms instinctively, though it was weaker now.
Out of the tree line stepped two figures.
One was tall and wrapped in bark-skin armor, a woman with hair like woven vines and eyes the color of dying embers. The other was smaller, younger—barefoot, with pale-blue skin and softly glowing pupils that pulsed like a heartbeat.
The woman raised her hands.
"We are not here to fight, outsider," she said. Her voice was deep, textured like thunder inside a cave. "We felt the Echo burst. We followed its scream to you."
The smaller one peered curiously at Omkar and said, in a voice like chimes, "You speak the Weave. But you are not Dreamborn."
Omkar nodded slowly. "I don't know what I am anymore."
The woman stepped forward, inspecting the stone he had touched.
"You awakened the shrine," she said with a trace of reverence. "Few in this realm can do that. Fewer still survive it."
She knelt, pressing her palm to the stone, and began to whisper a chant. A projection bloomed above the rock—hazy, flickering images of the Echo, once a man in ceremonial robes, conducting some kind of ritual… before being consumed by a spiraling crack of dark light.
"He was a Watcher," the woman murmured, eyes narrowed. "One of ours. Before the Rift took him."
Omkar stared. "That was… a person?"
"Once," said the blue-skinned one. "Now, only pain. And hunger. Echoes are not monsters. They are lost."
---
They made a small fire near the shrine that evening.
The woman introduced herself as Saenril, a Guardian of the Silent Grove. The younger one was Niv, a Seerling—born from Velmyra's living dreams, able to feel the threads of fate as they shifted.
"You've entered Velmyra not as an invader, but as a tear in the world's pattern," Saenril explained, tossing herbs into the fire. "Something dragged you through—a force older than the Loom, older than the Dreaming Realms."
"You said I spoke the Weave," Omkar asked. "How is that possible? I didn't even know what I was saying."
"The Weave remembers," Niv said, placing her hand over Omkar's chest. "You carry an imprint. A forgotten inheritance. Buried deep. Something… ancient. Something fractured."
Omkar closed his eyes.
The visions returned—the glimpse of the man in the pool, the Echo's distorted voice, the symbol etched into the stone.
Kailash.
"Is that a name?" he asked aloud. "Kailash?"
Both Saenril and Niv froze.
Saenril's expression darkened. "Where did you hear that?"
"I saw it. In the sigils. In the water."
Niv's voice turned quiet. "The Weave does not whisper names without reason. If it gave you that name… then perhaps you are more than a traveler."
Omkar stood slowly, eyes locked on the twin moons above.
He had come to Velmyra as a nobody. A fractured soul tossed between worlds. But the threads of fate had begun to tighten around him—and the name Kailash, once foreign, now felt like a memory waiting to be claimed.
He was no longer just Omkar.
He was becoming something else.