Cassian Vey woke to the taste of copper and the sensation that he'd forgotten something vital.
Not the ordinary forgetfulness of misplaced keys or an unattended errand—this was the bone-deep certainty that a piece of himself had been carved away in the night, leaving only the phantom ache of its absence.
He lay motionless in his narrow bed, listening to the familiar sounds of Ashenmark's morning: the distant clatter of the 5 o'clock airship engines warming in their docking towers, the grinding of the Aetheric pumps that fed the city's lifeblood through copper veins beneath the streets, and somewhere closer, the muffled sobbing of Mrs. Calloway in the adjacent apartment, who had been weeping every morning for three weeks now. Cassian had stopped asking if she was well.
In Ashenmark, grief was as common as the perpetual ash-fall.
The ceiling of his single-room flat was a map of water stains, each one a previous tenant's legacy. He'd learned their patterns over the two years since he'd taken this room in the Outer Districts—the one that looked vaguely like a reaching hand, the cluster near the window that resembled a spider, the long streak that, if you squinted, might have been a woman's profile. Familiarity was anchor in a world that shifted in the periphery of vision.
But this morning, something was different.
The stain above his bed had changed.
Cassian's breath caught. He blinked, convinced his sleep-fogged mind was playing tricks. But no—where yesterday there had been a formless brown blotch, there now sprawled an intricate symbol. It resembled no alphabet he knew, yet something in its curves and angles tugged at recognition. The pattern seemed to writhe when he wasn't looking directly at it, like words trying to form meaning just beyond comprehension.
This is wrong, whispered the rational corner of his mind that had kept him alive through two years of archival work in the Forbidden Stacks. Stains don't change. Not without cause.
He sat up slowly, every movement deliberate. The room spun briefly—a wave of vertigo that brought with it fractured images. A corridor of obsidian mirrors. A voice speaking in a language that felt like cold water down his spine. Hands—his hands?—reaching for something that pulsed with sickly luminescence.
Dream fragments. Nothing more.
Except Cassian had learned, during his tenure in the Archives beneath Ashenmark's Inner Circle, that dreams sometimes remembered what waking minds refused.
He swung his legs over the bed's edge, bare feet meeting the warped floorboards. The room was exactly as he'd left it: the small writing desk stacked with borrowed books he'd smuggled from the Archives (a hanging offense, but knowledge was the only currency he valued), the wash basin with its cracked mirror, the single chair with three and a half legs. His coat hung on its hook, his worn boots stood at attention by the door.
Everything in its place. Everything except—
Cassian froze.
There was something on his desk that hadn't been there when he'd extinguished the lamp and collapsed into bed at midnight.
A crystal.
It sat atop his most recent project—a comparative analysis of First Age architectural symbolism that his superior, Archivist Morlane, had dismissed as "academic masturbation with no practical application." The crystal was roughly the size of a child's fist, translucent with veins of deep violet running through its core. It seemed to absorb the grey morning light filtering through his window rather than reflect it, creating a pocket of shadow around itself.
Cassian didn't move. Didn't breathe.
He knew what this was. Every archivist, every scholar, every street urchin in Ashenmark knew the stories.
An Echo.
But that was impossible. Echoes didn't simply appear in locked rooms. They were found in the Ruined Lands, excavated from the corpses of nightmares, extracted from the dreams of dying Echo-bearers. They were rare, valuable, and illegal to possess without Assembly authorization.
And they certainly didn't arrange themselves on the desks of impoverished archival assistants.
Don't touch it, his survival instincts screamed. Report it. Call the Constables. Get it out.
But Cassian's hands were already moving. Not from courage—he'd never possessed much of that—but from the same terrible curiosity that had led him to the Archives in the first place. The need to know, to understand, even when understanding came at a price.
His fingers closed around the crystal.
The world unmade itself.
Not violently, not with the dramatic flourish he'd read about in censored texts. Reality simply... unfolded. The walls of his room became translucent, revealing the lattice of memories embedded in their structure: arguments between previous tenants, a child's laughter from decades past, the slow despair of lonely deaths. He could see them all simultaneously, layered like transparencies, each moment existing in perpetual present.
Mrs. Calloway's sobbing resolved into clarity. She wasn't mourning a loss—she was remembering when she last felt joy, playing the memory on loop because it was all she had left.
The grinding of the Aetheric pumps became a scream. The engines were crying. They'd been crying since the day they were built, fueled by crystallized nightmares of the workers who'd died in their construction.
And beneath it all, deeper than the city's foundations, something vast stirred in imprisoned sleep. Cassian felt its attention brush against him like a blind man's fingers reading braille—curious, ancient, hungry for the sensation of being perceived.
Words materialized in his mind, not heard but simply known:
THE ARCHIVE OPENS FOR THOSE WHO REMEMBER TO FORGET
Then the moment shattered, and Cassian was on his knees beside his bed, retching though nothing came up. The crystal lay on the floor where he'd dropped it, inert and almost innocent in its simplicity.
But he could still feel it. Not in his hand—deeper. Somewhere behind his eyes, in the space where thoughts formed before becoming words, a presence had taken root. Not hostile, not benevolent. Simply there. Observing. Waiting.
What have I done?
The question arrived too late, as they always did.
From somewhere in the building, a clock struck six. Cassian had one hour before his shift at the Archives began. One hour to decide whether to report this impossible thing, to attempt removing it (though he suspected that option had closed the moment his fingers touched crystal), or to simply pretend nothing had changed.
He pulled himself to his feet, legs unsteady. In the cracked mirror above his wash basin, his reflection looked back with eyes that hadn't changed color but somehow saw differently. There were shadows in his irises that hadn't been there before—shadows that moved independently of the light.
The copper taste in his mouth intensified. He spat into the basin and watched the water run red, though he'd bitten nothing, broken nothing.
The price, he understood with sudden cold clarity, had already begun.
Outside his window, Ashenmark continued its morning ritual, oblivious. Airships drifted through smog like great metal whales. Factory whistles shrieked their discordant chorus. In the distance, the Inner Circle's towers pierced the perpetual overcast, their peaks lost in crimson clouds that had hung there since the Sundering four hundred years ago.
Somewhere in those towers, the Choir of Silence maintained their vigil, hunting those who carried fragments of the divine.
Cassian picked up the Echo and slipped it into his coat pocket, where it hummed against his ribs like a second heartbeat.
Knowledge is power, Archivist Morlane had told him on his first day in the Forbidden Stacks. And power, boy, is the only thing that keeps you from becoming a footnote in someone else's history.
He dressed mechanically, buttoning his threadbare shirt, pulling on the coat that had seen better years, lacing boots worn thin at the soles. Each action was automatic, performed by hands that remembered routine while his mind spiraled through implications.
An Echo. A Divine Fragment, if his instincts were correct. Bound to him now, or he to it—the relationship wasn't entirely clear. The stories spoke of power, of abilities that could reshape reality within conceptual boundaries. They also spoke of madness, of bearers who lost themselves to the Echoes they carried, becoming hollow vessels for alien consciousness.
Mnemosyne, the presence whispered, not in sound but in sudden understanding. I am what remains of She Who Kept What Should Not Be Lost.
The goddess of memory. One of the Seven Prime Deities, imprisoned in the Sundering. According to fragmented texts Cassian had read, Mnemosyne had been the first to fall, her consciousness shattered into thousands of fragments and scattered across the Dreamscape.
And now he carried a piece of a dead god in his pocket.
"Wonderful," Cassian muttered, his voice hoarse. "I've always wanted to be hunted by the Choir."
The presence in his mind offered no comfort, no guidance. It simply watched, as archives do—recording, preserving, waiting for someone to read what had been written.
He opened his door to find the hallway empty, lit by the sputtering gas lamps that provided the building's only illumination. The wallpaper was peeling in great strips, revealing older patterns underneath—layers of decoration from decades past, each one a testament to tenants who'd believed things might improve.
They never did. Not in the Outer Districts. Not in Ashenmark. Not in the Second Age.
Cassian descended the stairs, each step bringing him closer to a decision he didn't want to make. Report the Echo, and face interrogation about how he'd obtained it—an interrogation that would end in execution when he had no satisfactory answer. Keep it hidden, and risk the Choir discovering him through their arcane means, which would also end in execution.
Or—the third option, the one that terrified and thrilled him in equal measure—learn to use it. Master it before it mastered him. Unlock whatever abilities the Echo of Mnemosyne granted and use that power to find answers.
Why had it appeared in his room? Why him, a nobody archivist with no family, no connections, no importance? Was it random chance, or had something chosen him deliberately?
The questions multiplied like breeding rats.
Outside, the morning ash had begun to fall—the daily reminder of the world's slow death. Cassian joined the flow of workers heading toward the Transit platforms, disappearing into the mass of grey coats and empty expressions. In Ashenmark, anonymity was survival. Don't stand out. Don't draw attention. Keep your head down and your questions quiet.
But as the Transit carriage rattled toward the Inner Circle, carrying him closer to the Archives and its forbidden knowledge, Cassian felt the Echo pulse against his chest like a second heart.
Some questions, he realized, refused to stay quiet.
And some answers, once glimpsed, could never be forgotten—no matter how much you might wish otherwise.
To be continued...