The corridor was quiet again. The broken mirror gone, the shadow vanished. But the sphere remained—softly glowing, thrumming with silent weight.
Ren reached for it before Serei could stop him. His fingers brushed the surface. No sound. No shock. Just… contact.
And suddenly, the world blinked.
His vision dimmed. Not darkness—just less reality. Like waking from a dream into another one, subtler and older. The floor beneath him turned to fractal ash. The walls rippled like heat haze. And above him loomed an impossible construct—a vast lattice of rings and spheres, turning without noise, humming with ancient purpose.
The sphere pulsed in his hand, and then:
> "Identity confirmed. Ren Calder. Soul Thread: Fractured. Protocol: Waking."
A voice. Not mechanical. Not human. Something… in between.
> "You have touched the Core. You have seen the Spirals. You have heard the Echo."
The light collapsed inward, piercing his chest. His breath caught.
> "You are now bound. Welcome to the Threshold."
Ren screamed silently as a thousand memories not his own flickered behind his eyes.
He saw a man—bald, scarred, standing on a dead cliff under twin moons, cradling a dying woman in his arms. He saw a child pulling free of iron chains, eyes glowing like suns. He saw a dragon made of glass. A war in the clouds. And a spire rising from the ruins of a world that looked eerily like his own.
Then it all vanished.
Ren gasped and fell backward, the light fading. He was back. Real again. Serei knelt beside him, jaw clenched, one hand on her dagger. But the sphere was gone.
"It marked you," she said. "Didn't it?"
He nodded slowly. "It… chose me. It spoke."
"What did it say?"
He repeated the phrase: "You are now bound."
Serei cursed softly in a language he didn't recognize.
"What?"
"That means it's begun. The real Protocol."
----
They left the tunnel in silence, returning to the Archive proper.
But it wasn't the same.
Where once the lights had flickered faintly and the consoles had sputtered to life under Serei's touch, now everything responded to Ren. Panels opened without a sound. Doors slid aside before he reached them. Screens whispered fragments of information when he passed.
He had become a key.
Serei watched him carefully as they navigated deeper into the lower levels, toward a chamber she called the Central Cortex. It was where the facility's true systems were meant to reside—the ones tied to Echoborn, the ones even she couldn't access until now.
"It's changing you," she said as they walked.
Ren nodded. "I can feel it. Not just in my body. In how I think. I remember things I never learned. Languages. Maps. Equations."
"You're absorbing legacy data," she said. "The Archive's imprinting on you. That's how the Echoborn Protocol was designed to work. It fuses memory, identity, and function."
"What was it for? Originally?"
Serei hesitated. Then: "To save a dying world."
They stopped before a vast doorway etched in glowing lines. The air shimmered with energy. The shard on Ren's belt began to vibrate faster, responding.
Ren placed his hand on the door.
It opened like a blooming flower of light.
Inside was a room unlike any other.
Rows of memory cores floated midair, each spinning gently in streams of silver light. In the center, an obelisk hung suspended, its surface alive with shifting patterns. Above it, a projection of a planet—fractured and crumbling—hovered like a ghost.
The planet looked like Earth, but broken. A large chunk missing. Orbiting debris clouds. Faint rings of energy circling it like a cage.
"That's the end," Serei said softly.
Ren stepped closer. "What happened?"
"This is what the Echoborn Project was made to prevent. Collapse. Soul decay. Mass desynchronization. The corruption was too deep. So they made this system to store fragments of possible salvation. People. Powers. Memories. Candidates."
Ren turned to her. "Me?"
"One of them," she said. "Maybe the last one."
---
A nearby terminal lit up. A voice—calm and artificial—spoke from the chamber walls.
> "Echoborn Protocol Phase One: Active. Awakening Subject Calibration. Initiating Echo Sync in T-minus 48 hours."
Ren turned to Serei. "What's Echo Sync?"
She looked grim. "It's the second gate. When your soul aligns fully with the Archive's code. After that, you won't just remember what they were—you'll start becoming one of them."
"One of who?"
Serei stepped closer and placed her hand over his chest.
"The lost ones. The Bound. The ghosts of this place. The ones who failed. You'll inherit their memory, their pain, their purpose."
Ren stared at the projection of the dying world. He didn't know if he was ready. But it didn't matter. The spiral had begun.
And it was pulling him in.