They came for me at dusk.
Black-robed riders on bone-white horses, moving with the eerie silence of assassins. No banners, no emblems—only iron masks and blades that shimmered with anti-magic runes. The Church's dogs. Sanctifiers. They weren't here to ask questions.
They were here to erase me.
I ran.
Through marsh and fog, barefoot and half-awake in a body that still felt like a costume two sizes too small. My stolen cloak snagged on roots and thorns. I didn't stop. I couldn't.
The runes on my arms began to glow again—hotter now, flickering with old memory. Not mine. Not fully. A sword stance I didn't remember learning. A prayer in a language I couldn't name. A woman's scream echoing from a life I never lived.
That was what made Echoes dangerous.
We don't just remember. We carry.
Spells from dead worlds. Techniques lost to time. Languages no scholar has spoken in centuries. The soul becomes a library—fragmented, cursed, brilliant. And if you live long enough as an Echo… you stop knowing where the old lives end and you begin.
But I wasn't strong yet.
The memories were shards. Glimpses. And I had no control over when they came—or what they showed.
Ahead, a cliff rose through the mist. No path. No time. The hoofbeats were too close.
I whispered the first thing that came to mind—no plan, just instinct.
"Avel mor'kai."
The world shuddered.
The ground split beneath my feet, swallowing the edge of the cliff. A wave of force erupted outward, throwing me into the trees as the Sanctifiers' horses reared and screamed. Dust and debris rained down. Silence followed.
Then pain.
I groaned, crawling to my feet. My hands were burned where the sigils had flared. My vision swam. But I was alive.
Barely.
That phrase—"Avel mor'kai"—wasn't from this world. I knew that much. It came from a life I hadn't touched yet. A spell, maybe. Or a curse. Whatever it was, it had saved me.
But it had also marked me.
Any seer or mage worth their salt would now feel the ripple of that spell across the ley-lines. An Echo had Awakened. And in Serelith, that was a death sentence.
I'd need to run farther. Smarter.
Or start fighting back.