The calm after battle never felt like peace — it felt like a warning. A breath held too long. A silence too sharp. Blackridge wasn't celebrating. It was watching. Listening. Waiting.
Crispin stood alone on the edge of the plaza, where broken stone met blackened blood. The city still smoked. The bodies hadn't all been cleared. Some hunters had vanished into the fog before the sun rose. The way they left — organized, deliberate — it wasn't retreat. It was strategy.
And he knew it.
"They'll be back," he whispered to himself, not as fear, but as fact.
Behind him, the rebels worked in quiet teams. Moving rubble. Healing wounds. Mourning. Preparing.
Yara passed him a piece of stale bread, her eyes puffy, her hands trembling. "Mom would've hated this place," she muttered. "But she'd fight for it."
Crispin took a bite, didn't taste it, nodded. "She still is."
Above, crows circled, black against the golden sky.
Whatever was coming… wasn't done with them yet.
The city's wounds weren't just in the walls and streets. They were in the people. In the quiet glances. In the way no one spoke above a whisper anymore, like raising your voice might bring the System crashing back down on your head.
Crispin sat beside a fire that barely kept warm, watching a young rebel try to stitch a man's shoulder closed with shaking hands. No magic. Just needle and thread.
"You're using the wrong side," Crispin said softly.
The boy blinked, embarrassed. "I—I don't know how to do this. I was a baker. I wasn't supposed to be here."
Crispin reached over, guiding the boy's hands with his own. "No one was supposed to be here."
That was the truth of Blackridge now. Nobody was trained. Nobody was ready. They weren't warriors. They were broken pieces trying to hold each other together long enough to matter.
Revenna approached quietly, blood on her armor, dirt on her cheek.
"They're setting traps in the lower quarter. Something big's moving underground."
Crispin looked toward the city's bones — the old tunnel routes where whispers said the System once tested its first subjects. "They're coming from beneath now?"
She nodded. "They're not just hunting us. They're digging us out."
Crispin stood slowly. "Then we don't wait. We go first."
The lower quarter of Blackridge was a graveyard of forgotten things. Rusted pipes jutted from crumbling brick like bones from a wound. The tunnels beneath were older than any map — once used to transport weapons, prisoners, and silence. Now, they were breathing again. And not in a good way.
Crispin dropped down first, boots landing in thick mud that sucked at his ankles. The stench was foul — rot, mold, and something else. Something that wasn't dead, but should've been.
Yara followed, lighting a weak glow in her palm, pushing back just enough darkness to see the shape of the walls. "Why does this place feel like it remembers us?"
"Because it does," Revenna said behind her. "This was the place they tested the first Hunters. When they didn't survive, they didn't bury them. They left them here."
The silence that followed wasn't quiet. It pulsed. Deep and slow. Like a heartbeat in stone.
They moved carefully, weapons drawn, steps measured. Every corner could mean death. Every echo could be something worse.
Then they found it — a wide chamber hollowed beneath the city, filled with strange machinery and black cables crawling like vines over the walls. At the center was a pod. Open. Empty. Still warm.
Crispin approached it slowly. "This wasn't a trap…"
"It was a release," Yara said, swallowing hard. "Something got out."
The air turned colder. A scream tore through the tunnel behind them — not human. Not close to it.
The hunters weren't just returning.
Something worse had woken
The scream echoed through the tunnels like a blade scraping metal, rattling bone and soul alike. It wasn't just sound—it was pressure. It crawled into your ears and stayed there, whispering things you didn't want to hear.
Crispin raised his hand, motioning for silence, though none of them dared to speak anyway. Even the Echoes that floated behind him flickered, uncertain.
Yara's voice was small. "That wasn't a hunter."
"No," Revenna replied, hand tight on her blade. "That was older."
Something moved beyond the chamber, slow and heavy. Footsteps, but wrong. The kind of wrong that didn't belong in any world built by reason.
Then they saw it.
A figure stepped into view, ducking under the stone archway like it had done it before. Its body was stitched from parts of things—human maybe, once—but warped by something deeper. Long limbs. Too many joints. A face that didn't know what it wanted to be, so it tried to be everything at once.
Its eyes fixed on Crispin, not with hunger… but with recognition.
It spoke with a voice full of static and regret.
"Bearer…"
Revenna lunged first, sword slicing the air in a clean arc. But the creature moved like smoke, bending without breaking, vanishing and reappearing just behind her.
Crispin shouted her name and charged, his Echoes bursting forward, crashing into the thing with a fury that shook the walls.
It screamed again, not in pain—in joy.
Yara pulled Crispin back just as the creature's hand nearly took his head. "It's feeding off your Echoes," she snapped. "It knows them."
"No," Crispin whispered. "It is them."
The realization hit like a hammer. This thing wasn't just created from the System — it was built from the dead who had already fallen under his power. Their shadows. Their pieces. Their pain.
It was the result of everything the Crown had forgotten.
And now it wanted to be remembered.
"You think death stops me?" the creature asked in a dozen voices, some still crying. "You gave me purpose. I am your legacy."
Crispin's grip tightened on his sword. "Then let my legacy burn."
The ceiling cracked.
Revenna grabbed Yara and pulled her back. Crispin stayed one moment longer, watching the thing as it reached toward him — not to strike, but to touch.
He stepped back as the stone gave way.
The chamber collapsed, burying the creature in rock and screams and dust.
Silence followed.
But it wasn't peace.
It was a pause.
And Crispin knew it.
The dust hadn't even settled when Crispin dropped to his knees. His ears rang from the collapse, his lungs burned from the ash, but it wasn't the physical pain that had him shaking. It was the voices. Still echoing. Still clinging to the edge of his mind like shadows that refused to be forgotten.
Revenna knelt beside him, gripping his arm. "You okay?"
He didn't answer right away.
Because he wasn't.
He looked at his Echoes, the ones that hadn't shattered. They hovered in silence. Dim. Hesitant.
"Something's wrong with them," Yara whispered, voice shaking. "They're... scared of him. Scared of you."
Crispin turned to her, eyes hollow. "What did I do?"
"You kept going," Revenna said, not unkindly. "You survived. That's what the Crown does. It turns loss into power."
"But at what cost?"
No one answered.
They climbed out of the ruins slowly, emerging back into the cold breath of Blackridge's broken alleys. Morning had faded into dull gray light. The city wasn't quiet anymore — it was restless. The people could feel it too. Something dark had been disturbed below the streets.
Something not done with them yet.
"Should we tell them?" Yara asked as they walked.
"No," Crispin said quickly. "Not yet. Not until I understand what that thing was. Not until I know it can't come back."
Revenna's silence said she wasn't convinced it was gone at all.
And neither was he.
Because as he stepped onto the stone walkway above the collapsed chamber, he felt it again — not movement, not sound — just presence.
Not a monster.
A consequence.
And consequences don't
Later that night, when the city fell into that eerie stillness between exhaustion and sleep, Crispin stood alone on the edge of the broken plaza, staring down at the Crown etched into his palm.
Its light was dimmer now. Not weaker, just… quieter. Like it had seen something it didn't want to remember.
He tried summoning an Echo.
Nothing.
He tried again.
Still nothing.
Finally, with a breath that felt like it might break him, he whispered the word: "Arise."
The air shimmered. A single Echo formed — not the full army, not the dozens he usually commanded. Just one. A boy, maybe sixteen. Face bloodied. Eyes wide.
"Name?" Crispin asked softly.
The boy didn't respond.
Because he didn't have one. Or he'd lost it. Or he'd been called back so many times he'd forgotten it mattered.
The Echo trembled, looked at Crispin like a frightened animal, and vanished.
No explosion. No dramatic fade.
Just… gone.
Crispin stood still for a long time. The wind picked up. The city moaned around him.
Whatever that creature was — whatever it had done — it had left something inside the Crown.
Or maybe inside him.
A flaw.
A crack.
He turned as Revenna approached, her voice low. "We're getting reports from the north wall. Strange shapes watching from the old gate. Not hunters. Not ours. Something else."
"Then it's starting," Crispin said, eyes empty. "The war we thought we'd already fought."
She nodded, but her hand found his wrist.
"You're not alone in this," she said.
He wanted to believe her.
But deep inside, he knew…
The Crown was changing.
And he was changing with it.
The night sky above Blackridge rolled with clouds, not storming, but thick with pressure — like something huge was watching from behind the dark. The streets, still wounded and half-lit with salvaged lamps, stretched in every direction like veins in a dying beast.
Crispin stood on the balcony of the old spire overlooking the plaza. His coat fluttered in the wind, torn at the edges. The city below looked quiet. But it wasn't. He could feel it humming.
Something had changed under their feet.
And in him.
Revenna sat nearby, sharpening her blade for the third time in an hour. The sound of metal on stone echoed like a heartbeat. Yara was inside the tower, passed out on a makeshift bed of cloth and old books, her fingers twitching in restless dreams. She'd been pushing her magic too hard. Too far. But none of them had a choice anymore.
Down below, the people of Blackridge moved like ghosts. Fixing what they could. Mourning what they couldn't. And always glancing over their shoulders.
Crispin gripped the railing, knuckles white.
What haunted them now wasn't just the System.
It was him.
He could feel it in the way people looked at him — grateful, but guarded. Reverent, but afraid. And he didn't blame them. The Crown pulsed beneath his skin like a second heartbeat, but it wasn't steady anymore. Not like before.
It flickered.
It hesitated.
It questioned.
He hadn't told anyone about what the creature in the tunnels had said. Not yet. Not even Yara. Because part of him was still trying to figure out if it was true.
What if the Crown wasn't a gift?
What if it was a cage?
He closed his eyes, pressing two fingers against his temple. The screams of that stitched-together monster still lived behind his ears. Echoes of pain he'd never meant to cause. Lives he'd borrowed. Maybe stolen.
And now, whatever that thing was — it wasn't just a shadow.
It was a warning.
Footsteps approached behind him.
"I thought you'd still be up here," Revenna said, sliding her blade into its sheath and leaning on the railing beside him.
"Couldn't sleep," he muttered.
"You haven't been sleeping for a while," she said. "That Crown's taking pieces out of you, Crispin."
"It's not the Crown I'm worried about anymore."
She looked at him, quiet for a long beat. "You think that thing you buried… it's still alive."
"I know it is," he said. "And not just alive. It's growing. It feeds off forgotten Echoes. Broken ones. The ones I cast aside."
"And now it's made from them?"
"Yes," Crispin said, finally turning toward her. "It's the cost I didn't know I was paying."
Revenna didn't flinch. "And if it comes back?"
"Then I finish it. I finish me if I have to."
She shoved him. Not hard, but enough to jolt him. "Don't say that. Don't you dare start talking like you're alone in this."
"I am alone in this," Crispin snapped, louder than he meant. "You think this city follows me because they trust me? They're following what I can do, not who I am. And when that stops being useful—"
"They'll still follow," she cut in. "Because deep down, they know something you keep forgetting."
"What's that?"
"You're still trying to protect them. Even when it's eating you alive."
The wind rose.
The silence between them stretched.
"I saw something," Crispin said finally. "In the Crown. When the Echo shattered in front of me. For a second, I saw what it saw. What the other side of the Crown looks like. It's not power. It's memory. Pain. Every soul that ever died in my shadow… it remembers."
"That's heavy," she said softly.
"It's not just heavy," he said. "It's awake."
Just then, the tower shook — subtly, but enough to send dust raining from the ceiling. Crispin and Revenna both turned.
"What the hell was that?" she asked, hand already on her hilt.
Crispin's voice was low, certain.
"Not an earthquake."
Another tremor rolled through the ground.
He stepped away from the balcony and reached into the air with his mind, calling an Echo.
Nothing answered.
Again.
Still silence.
"Crispin?" Revenna's voice had changed. Tense now. Alarmed.
"I can't summon," he said. "Not even one."
She drew her blade. "Is it the Crown?"
"No…" he breathed, eyes widening. "It's not there. The Crown's still inside me, but the connection—something's interfering."
From below, a scream broke through the night.
Not human.
And not alone.
Crispin and Revenna bolted for the stairs, racing down the spire as more cries followed. Dozens. Then hundreds. All at once.
By the time they reached the plaza, the people of Blackridge were already out of their homes, wide-eyed and panicked.
Then came the lights.
From the east — the ruins of the old gate — flames flared like signals. Shapes emerged from the fog, tall, armored, walking in tight formation. But they weren't hunters.
They moved differently.
Marionette-like.
Joints jerking slightly wrong.
Eyes hollow.
Like puppets with memories.
Yara stumbled out behind them, breathless. "They just came out of the tunnels. The same place we collapsed. I felt the ground break. Something's risen—"
The sky boomed with sound — a deep, unnatural wail that made even the strongest fighters step back.
Crispin stared ahead.
Then he saw it.
One figure — taller than the rest — stepped forward.
Its arms split in three. Its face wasn't a face at all, just shifting skin stretched tight over something that wasn't human. And inside its chest, the Crown glowed.
But not his.
A mirror Crown.
Twisted.
Corrupted.
Built from the discarded pieces.
The creature raised its hand. Dozens of false Echoes behind it did the same.
Blackridge stood on the edge of a second war.
Not against hunters.
Not against the System.
Against what they'd created by surviving.
Crispin stepped forward, sword in hand, voice steady despite the chaos.
"Tell the people to fall back to the inner circle."
Revenna's eyes were hard. "And you?"
He raised his sword. "I'm going to remind it who it came from."
The creature tilted its head — and smiled.
The flame beneath the stone had found a voice.
And it was calling for war.