---
---
There are voices beneath silence.
Not whispers. Not words.
Imprints.
The kind that linger after a god dies, after a star collapses, after a prayer is swallowed whole and forgotten by the very heavens it once tried to reach.
Yun Che heard them now.
---
It began slowly, like breath returning to a body long buried.
A hum in the back of his mind.
Then rhythm.
Then tone.
Then... sorrow.
He stood still in the ruins of the erased creature. Dust clung to the air like it had nowhere else to go. His hand—still outstretched from the act of erasure—trembled, though not from strain.
"You hear them, don't you?" Aestra asked behind him.
He didn't respond.
He didn't need to.
---
The voices weren't speaking to him.
They were speaking through him.
They didn't beg.
They didn't scream.
They remembered.
"We were never meant to be remembered..."
"...and yet he sees us..."
"...he hears..."
It wasn't madness. It wasn't some twisted hallucination born of power.
It was something ancient.
The echoes of uncreation.
Aestra stepped closer, her shadow stretching too far, curling like ink around his feet.
"This is the price of your bond," she said softly.
"You don't just walk between existence and absence… you become a vessel for everything the world cast away."
"I don't want them inside me," he muttered.
"You don't have a choice."
"Then make them stop."
"I can't. Not yet."
---
He turned sharply. "Why not?"
She tilted her head, eyes bright with a softness that didn't belong in a place like this.
"Because if you silence them now, you silence yourself."
"They're part of you."
"You were erased, Yun Che… But they were erased long before you."
---
The air grew heavier. Not darker—thicker, as if grief had substance. The voices swirled, pulling his steps toward a jagged slope of bone and stone beyond the ruined village.
He followed, wordlessly, like a man chasing the echo of a life that never happened.
And then he saw it.
A blackened monolith, half-buried in dust, with no inscription, no symbol. Just a mirror carved into its face.
Aestra stood beside it.
"The Mirror of Dusk," she whispered.
"It reflects not your past… but the pieces of you that survived erasure."
---
Yun Che approached. The air around it shimmered.
The reflection was not his face. Not anymore.
He saw flames.
He saw blood.
He saw names trying to form—and fail.
Then the mirror split in two. Not cracked—divided.
One half showed a future where he forgave.
Healed.
Became the kind of man who returned, not to destroy, but to rebuild.
The other half—
Showed fire swallowing constellations.
His name carved into the sky in red.
Aestra behind him, smiling, her hands outstretched as he unmade reality.
---
He stepped back.
"You're trying to shape me," he said, not accusing—just realizing.
Aestra didn't deny it.
"The world will do it if I don't," she said. "I would rather you become yourself through choice… not chains."
He looked at her.
Really looked.
And for the first time, he didn't see a goddess.
He saw a lonely truth—something once powerful, now tired. Ancient. Frightened to hope again.
"I choose neither," he said, turning from the mirror.
"I won't forgive them."
"But I won't become them either."
"I'll walk the middle path—between flame and silence."
"A fragment is still a piece of something. I'll find out what."
---
The voices in his mind stilled.
Not gone—just... watching.
Waiting.
And far above, in a sky that had never truly seen him, the crimson moon blinked.
Not in joy.
Not in fear.
But in recognition.
---
End of Chapter 4 — Crimson Echoes