There was no waking.
The boy had not slept. But still, there was a sensation like waking, as if reality had shifted a layer upward while he remained unmoved beneath it.
His knees no longer touched the floor. They floated, slightly, like limbs in brine. His breath came slow and shallow. The silence hadn't gone. It had simply… refined. What was left no longer crushed him. It threaded him, pulled him taut like a string across an unseen instrument.
The chamber was darker now. Not from the absence of light, but from the presence of shadow. Things flickered across his peripheral vision, not figures, not quite. More like the shape of regrets with no mouths left to speak them.
He sat still.
The question still burned, silent and unanswered.
If you say it, who will you be?
But another question had begun to form now. One less profound, more personal. Was the thing he would become worse than the thing he already was?
The boy opened his mouth and closed it again.
He wasn't alone.
There was a sound.
Not loud. Not sharp. Barely audible.
A breath.
A whispering breath.
It did not belong to him.
He stood slowly, legs aching from the stillness, and turned.
At first, he saw nothing.
Then, just behind the fold of memory, he saw himself.
Not a mirror. Not a reflection. Not a dream.
A figure.
His own body, but taller. Leaner. Covered in a robe that shimmered with black thread and dust. The face was older. Not ancient. Just tired. Hair longer. Hands steadier. No light shone from him, but the space bent slightly around his edges, as if remembering him hurt.
The boy didn't speak.
He couldn't.
The echo did instead.
"Lying to yourself is the first silence," it said, calmly.
The voice was not identical to his own. It carried more weight. A slower cadence. The kind that came not from wisdom, but from weariness. The kind of tone that knew what came next.
The boy stepped forward.
The echo didn't move.
"You aren't real," the boy whispered.
The figure tilted its head.
"No. But I am you. One of you."
The space shivered at that. One of you. A phrase that opened too many doors.
"Why are you here?" the boy asked.
"To remind you what you already know."
He wanted to run.
But there was nowhere to run to. Only inward.
The echo reached up and placed something on its tongue.
A feather.
Black, glistening, wet.
The boy gasped, the motion was involuntary.
He remembered that taste.
Silence-brine and ash. And something older, something that felt like guilt made solid.
"What did you do?" he asked.
The echo didn't answer.
Instead, it opened its mouth, and the sound that came out was his own voice, not the echo's voice, but the boy's, recorded and reversed.
And in the reversal, he heard it.
The confession.
Not just words.
The moment.
The death.
The thing he had buried beneath years of forgetting, the memory eaten by the Hole and ignored by everything else.
"I let them die," the echo said.
Not accusatory. Not regretful.
Just flat.
The boy staggered backward.
"No."
"Yes."
"I wasn't—"
"You were. You were there. You were always there."
The chamber warped.
The not-walls flickered between shapes, doors he hadn't opened, faces that never looked back, versions of himself in robes, in chains, in silence.
The boy clutched at his temples.
"Stop."
The echo continued.
"You let them die because saving them would have meant saying it. And you couldn't."
"Saying what?"
"The truth."
He shook his head.
"I don't know it."
"You do."
The echo stepped forward now.
Closer.
It smelled of salt and dust and something burned long ago.
"I've already said it," the echo whispered. "And I'm what's left after."
"No," the boy said.
But the word was weak. Thin.
The echo reached out and touched his shoulder.
The boy collapsed inward.
Not physically. But mentally. Like a house remembering the first crack in its foundation. He felt his memory split open, not with force, but with recognition.
He was back there, just for a second.
The riverbank.
The hand he didn't hold.
The scream that didn't leave his throat.
The silence that followed, long and absolute.
He came back shaking.
The echo was gone.
But the sound wasn't.
It echoed still.
His own voice, saying words he hadn't said.
Yet.
I let them die.
The boy dropped to his knees.
His throat ached.
He wanted to scream. To confess. To spit it out and be clean.
But he couldn't.
Not yet.
The silence had a ritual.
And the Choir would make sure it was performed.
Somewhere above him, a bell began to ring.
Not sound. But absence.
A tolling made of vanished moments.
The boy looked up.
It was time.