Zara's breath lingered in the cold air, curling like lost whispers beneath the crumbling sky.
Aeroth's ruins stretched ahead of her, each fractured building a reminder of the war she had just begun. The Hollowed had vanished, the void-being had retreated, but the echoes in her bones refused to quiet.
Noel stood beside her, tense and alert, watching the horizon as if expecting another ripple in reality to bleed through.
"You've changed," he muttered.
Zara didn't answer.
She had felt it—the shift in her blood, the way the Echo coiled through her veins differently now. It was no longer just a force inside her. It was her.
"How long do you think we have?" she asked, voice steady despite the storm brewing in her chest.
Noel scanned the ruins. "Not long."
They moved swiftly through the broken streets, stepping over remnants of forgotten battles and shadows that did not belong to the living. Zara could feel the weight of every erased name pressing against the city's walls, waiting for her to do something with the truths she had unearthed.
She had undone the Circle's silence.
Now, Aeroth was watching her.
As they approached the remnants of the old Arcanum, the sigils carved into the stone pulsed—subtle, but unmistakable.
Noel swore under his breath. "They're already here."
Zara tightened her grip on the dagger.
She had expected this.
The Silent Conclave had shattered beneath her voice, but the Circle still had weapons—ones that didn't rely on rewritten histories or buried truths.
The assassins were coming.
And the first would wear her father's face.
The shadows in the archway shifted.
Something moved.
Not the Hollowed.
Something worse.
Noel stepped forward, blades ready, but Zara didn't move.
She recognized the presence before she saw it.
The Skin-Painter had arrived.
And this time, it wasn't wearing a stranger's mask.
It was wearing hers.
***
Zara lunged.
Her blade struck true, piercing the twisted flesh of the Skin-Painter—but there was no blood. No scream. Only a ripple, like ink splitting beneath her dagger, the creature's body stretching unnaturally before snapping back into place.
She had expected resistance. But not this.
The Skin-Painter exhaled, its many faces shifting, collapsing inward before reforming anew. Its voice no longer carried through its mouth but through its entire body.
"You are learning," it whispered, the stolen voices layered over one another, eerie and distorted. "But you are still afraid."
Zara's heart pounded.
Noel darted forward, his twin blades slashing through the thing's shifting mass. But the wounds refused to remain. Each cut only bled shadow, folding back together like an unfinished sketch correcting itself.
"You cannot kill what has already been rewritten," the Skin-Painter said, its stolen mouths forming half-smiles. "You are fighting against history. And history always wins."
Zara tightened her grip on the dagger. The words weren't just taunts. They were a warning.
This creature wasn't just another assassin.
It was proof that the Circle had rewritten lives so thoroughly that some had lost the ability to die.
No.
She wouldn't allow it.
She had already reclaimed fragments of lost voices. She had walked through the fractures of erased history. She had touched the past Aeroth tried to bury.
And now, she was done letting them dictate the terms.
The dagger burned in her grip, heat curling through the metal, bright enough that the Skin-Painter finally hesitated.
Zara inhaled sharply—then threw herself forward, embedding the blade deep into the Skin-Painter's center.
It screamed—
Not in pain.
In recognition.
The mark on Zara's arm seared through her skin, coiling, twisting, changing.
The Echo had heard her decision.
And it answered.
The Vault trembled.
The symbols along the walls shifted, rearranging themselves. The chains along the altar groaned as if waking from centuries of slumber. The very air thickened with something unseen—an unraveling of reality itself.
Noel's voice was sharp behind her. "Zara—"
She didn't hear him.
Not through the storm in her veins.
Not through the resonance bleeding into the dagger's edge.
The Skin-Painter convulsed.
It wasn't healing this time.
It was losing shape.
The faces within its body collapsed, distorting, unraveling into blurred impressions of people Zara had never met—no, of people who had been erased.
The dagger hummed.
"You are not just an Echo," the Skin-Painter rasped, its stolen mouths trembling. "You are a fracture."
Zara stepped closer, twisting the blade deeper.
"And you are fading."
The moment she said it, the Skin-Painter collapsed inward.
Its body melted—literally—disintegrating into ribbons of lost memory.
The Vault swallowed its remains.
The echoes it carried did not scream.
They sighed.
And then—
Silence.
Zara exhaled sharply, pulling the dagger free. The mark on her arm flickered, stabilizing.
Noel stood beside her, watching cautiously.
"You didn't just kill it," he muttered. "You unmade it."
Zara wiped sweat from her brow. "Then let them fear me for it."
Above them, the Vault pulsed once more.
A new symbol burned into the altar.
Not the Circle's mark.
Not the cult's.
Something older.
Something Zara had seen before.
In a dream.
In a memory.
On the door to the Gate of Echoes.
She clenched her fists.
This war wasn't about the Hollowed.
It wasn't about the Circle's rewriting.
It was about what lay beyond that Gate.
And now—
She was ready to open it.