There was something wrong with the light.
It dripped.
Thin strands of silver bled down from the sky as if reality itself was unraveling by thread. The Mire of Unspokenness did not abide by Varellen's usual rules, and now that Mimus had passed the Gate, he could feel it more clearly. It wasn't just that Echo grew louder here. It was that it listened back.
The air tasted like old parchment and unwept tears. Each step stirred up whispers—not voices, but emotions without mouths. Guilt clung to his boots. Longing coiled around his throat. The land itself was remembering too much.
"Don't speak unless it's true," Ilyan warned. They moved slowly now, hood up, eyes flicking between the ground and the sky. "The Mire punishes contradiction."
Caldrin followed behind, her movements crisp but muted. Even her usual rhythm had dulled, swallowed by the oppressive quiet. She hadn't spoken since the Gate opened. Not even to Mimus.
They were deeper than ever before.
And yet, the others felt distant.
The Gate had done something to him. Something subtle, invisible. He could feel their Echoes pulling away—not out of rejection, but uncertainty. He was still Mimus. But he wasn't just that anymore.
He had become a tether.
A lighthouse to ghosts.
---
The Mire narrowed into a path of skeletal trees. Each one pulsed faintly with phrases long lost. Mimus passed a trunk and caught a sliver:
I should have held your hand.
Another whispered:
They never knew I was afraid.
A thousand truths buried in bark.
Neren, who rarely showed discomfort, walked with his flame shrouded beneath a black cloth. "This place is wrong," he muttered. "Every time I light the fire, it flickers with my father's voice. He died before I was born."
Olyra brushed a knotted branch with her fingers, only to recoil as it hissed: you lied to save her.
"This place knows too much," she said.
"It's not knowledge," said Caldrin finally. "It's reflection. The Mire doesn't create. It remembers."
They stopped to rest in a hollow shaped like a broken amphitheater. Echo pooled across the stones like shallow water, warping light. Mimus sat at the edge, trying to breathe evenly, but every breath brought fragments of sensation—touches of lives not his.
Rhesk approached and dropped a heavy stone beside him. "You're shaking."
"I'm not."
"You are."
Mimus looked at his hands. They trembled faintly. His Echo was pulsing, out of sync with his heart.
"Why did the Gate mark you?" Rhesk asked. "Why you?"
Mimus had no answer.
"I saw Vesyr," he said instead. "And I remembered her. That's all."
"No," Rhesk said. "That's not all. You didn't just remember. You refused to forget. That's different."
---
That night, the Mire shifted.
The trees moved.
Not like wind. Like thought.
Mimus jolted awake, blade half-formed. But the others were already up—Caldrin with both swords out, Olyra high on a ledge, Ilyan holding Echo in a tight ring.
A figure stood beyond the trees.
Not a Harrower.
Not a Curator.
A Resonant.
Tall. Dressed in cracked white armor veined with grief. Their Echo was tightly coiled, nearly invisible, like they'd strangled it into submission.
"I came to see him," the figure said.
Their voice was soft. Wrong. Like something that had been written, then erased, then re-written in a stranger's script.
Caldrin stepped forward. "Name yourself."
The figure tilted its head. "I have none left."
Mimus rose slowly. "Why me?"
"Because you carry a glyph not yours. And you didn't collapse."
They walked forward.
The others shifted, ready.
But the stranger raised a hand.
"I'm not here to fight," they said. "I'm here to warn you."
"About what?" Ilyan asked.
"About the Echowound."
The Mire went still.
"What is that?" Mimus asked.
The figure pointed south. "Beyond this place lies a scar. A place where two realities tried to merge and failed. The Curators sealed it. But it's unraveling."
"Why?"
"Because you made the story too loud."
The stranger turned to go.
"Wait," Caldrin said. "Who were you?"
They paused.
"A brother," the voice said.
"To who?" Mimus asked.
The figure vanished.
---
The next morning, the Mire opened into a valley of silent bells—metal towers that never rang, each one carved with names too faint to read. In the center: a chasm.
The Echowound.
It was not a place.
It was an undoing.
Reality frayed along its edges. Echo split into prisms. Color bled sideways. Even the sky bent inward, unable to hold itself together.
Mimus stepped toward it.
His Echo didn't pulse in warning.
It leaned forward.
Because for the first time, it wasn't being pulled by the past.
It was being drawn toward what came next.