The child would burn.
Lira knew it the moment the harmonic lines shivered across the glyph-skin of her notes, humming with a dissonance no core should produce. The threads didn't lie. Not to those who truly listened.
And she had listened, night after night in the dark beneath Isenhold. Beneath the wardstones. Beneath even the Guild's notice.
Beneath everything.
She'd found the pattern in the bone-dust of the Withered Pass. In the shattered remnants of the Silent Core left behind after the Surge Wars. Most dismissed those shards as inert—echoless. Dead. But Lira heard what others didn't. Remnants sing.
And one fragment—small, jagged, stained black with soot and something stranger—sang in the same key as her unborn child's heartbeat.
A perfect harmonic.
At first, she wept. Such bonds were impossible. Dangerous. Any true Corebearer knew that harmonizing without protection—not to mention through bloodlines—meant madness. Collapse. Becoming Echoed.
But the dreams wouldn't stop.
The woman cloaked in silver light. The songs no one else could hear. The fire in her veins when she touched the glyph-skin.
And the child's pulse—always stronger than it should have been. Not violent. Just… inevitable.
She began to wonder if her daughter was chosen.
Or cursed.
By her sixth month, Lira could no longer stand near the village's Warden post without hearing a hum in the air. It sang like her daughter did, in the quiet between beats.
Her husband, Dannen, noticed the change. He watched her fingers shake when she wrote. He touched her belly with worry, not awe.
"She'll be healthy," he said. "Strong like her mother."
She smiled, and told him yes.
But inside, she wondered: What if strength meant ruin?
The scrolls she smuggled from the Guild's back libraries spoke of the First Echoes—women and men who could bond before birth to core-essence itself. Not artifacts. Not Warden-forged cores. Raw essence. Pre-Binding. Pre-Surge.
They were called Ashborne.
None survived into legend. The records ended with phrases like "consumed by inner flame" or "unraveled during Awakening." Even the Guild stamped the topic forbidden.
But what if Evelyn was Ashborne?
What if she wasn't meant to survive?
What if she was meant to change everything?
One night, Lira woke with her palms bleeding—scratched from inscribing glyphs in her sleep, inked in ash and fever. Evelyn hadn't even been born, but she was already singing in Lira's mind.
The baby turned once, then stilled.
And Lira, trembling in the dark, whispered the lullaby she would teach Evelyn years later, not knowing it had no origin. Only echo.
"Hush, the Hollow sings for you…
Through ash, through flame, through fire true…"
The glyphs pulsed on the walls. The fragment in her drawer grew warm.
And somewhere, something listened.
Back in the present, Evelyn stirred in her half-sleep beneath the ruined waystation. Her mother's words threaded through her dreams like light beneath skin.
She heard her name—not shouted, not spoken, but sung.
And deep within her chest, her core pulsed in response.
Once.
Twice.
A third time—off-rhythm.
Then silence.