The footprints were gone by morning.
No wind, no rain. Nothing to erase them. But as the light rose, the perfect ring of steps around their fire had simply vanished—swallowed into the dirt as if they'd never been there.
Kael stared at the spot, jaw clenched. The Echoheart was cold against his chest. Still. Watching.
Tovan was already packing. "We should move. I don't like being watched by things that leave no trace."
"I don't like that we slept through it," Elira said. Her blade was already strapped to her side, her eyes scanning the horizon.
Kael remained quiet. The relic hadn't whispered in hours—but it didn't feel silent. It felt coiled, like breath being held just out of earshot.
The trail narrowed. Rocky ledges gave way to a descending path of worn stone, leading toward the outskirts of Vareth's perimeter. They could see it now—jagged spires rising in the far distance, some crumbled, some impossibly tall, their silhouettes broken like the teeth of gods.
But the air changed as they descended.
Kael first noticed it when he blinked and saw the same tree twice—once upright, and again, in the process of falling.
Tovan cursed as he walked into a spot he swore they'd already passed. Elira pulled a fragment of wardstone from her satchel, and the edges of it glowed faint blue.
"The veil here is thinning," she said.
"Thinning?" Kael echoed.
Elira's voice was steady, but low. "Time, space. Memory. Whatever holds reality together—it frays in places like this."
The descent ended in a basin filled with shattered stone. At the center, an ancient gate stood—more sculpture than structure, cracked and partially sunken into the earth. It pulsed with dull light every few seconds, like a dying heartbeat.
Tovan frowned. "You two see that, right?"
Kael stepped forward slowly. "It's calling."
"The Echoheart?" Elira asked.
Kael nodded. "Or whatever's underneath it."
As Kael neared the gate, a pressure built in his head. Not pain—resonance. Like something remembering his shape from long ago. The moment his hand brushed the edge of the stone, the world split.
A Vision.
Not past. Not future. Something between.
Kael stood at the center of a city not yet ruined. People screamed as relics tore the sky apart. He saw a woman—cloaked in starlight, reaching for him.
"You cannot outrun the echo."
He blinked—his arms were bound in chains. The relic burned through them. The crowd around him wasn't running—they were kneeling.
And then darkness.
Kael collapsed to the ground, gasping.
He didn't breathe for a full ten seconds. Not because he forgot—because part of him hadn't come back yet.
Elira knelt beside him. "What did you see?"
Kael shook his head. "I don't know. I was someone else. Or… maybe myself, in another time."
Tovan's voice was low. "This place is wrong."
Elira's hand tightened around her blade. She didn't raise it, but she didn't let go either.
"We're not just passing through something old anymore," she murmured. "We're waking it."
Kael stood slowly. The Echoheart stirred again, dimly. But something had changed. The vision hadn't just shown him something.
It had marked him.
He could feel it in the soil, in the sky. Something beneath the ruins had recognized him.
And it was no longer sleeping.