The sky above the ashen plain sagged like a wounded canvas. A bruise-colored sun tried to pry a weak light through the clouds, but the world beneath it remained a study in gray and rust. Reiji and Kaede walked in silence; their footsteps swallowed by the soft ash that carpeted the road. Behind them, the ruins of Halveris still hummed—the echo of something not entirely dead.
"We follow the Pact's trail south," Kaede said at last, voice low. "They moved through the old trade routes—left traces in places no one visits anymore."
Reiji nodded. He felt the sigil at his palm, pulsing faintly under the skin, as if anxious to lead him somewhere it had never wanted to be. The mark tugged like a lodestone toward the abyss—the hollow where the city's refuse and secrets had been thrust and forgotten.
They reached the cliffs at dusk. Below yawned the Abyss: a chasm black as a wound, its walls slick with glass veins that caught what little light remained and refracted it into blood-red glimmers. From that depth rose a sound like a faraway chorus—too low to be human, too rhythmic to be random. Crimson echoes, Kaede had called them once in a whisper; the city called them by no name.
A rope bridge dipped across the mouth of the chasm—old, frayed, threaded with metal bindings that shivered under the wind. Whoever had come this way intended to keep the path usable. Whoever had come this way wanted something below.
"Why here?" Reiji asked, staring over the lip. The wind carried up a faint, metallic tang.
"Because the Pact loves places that remember," Kaede replied. "The Abyss keeps the things the Court couldn't catalogue. It swallows stray memories, then breeds them into weapons."
She checked a small device clipped to her belt, a makeshift scanner that flickered with pale light. The readout pulsed: faint signatures, resonance patterns akin to the fragment in Reiji's wrist. "They've been active. Recently."
They moved across the bridge. Each step was a negotiation with gravity; the ropes groaned, sending a skin-tingling vibration up into their bones. Beneath them, the abyss breathed—an inhalation that rolled up in invisible waves, carrying smells of old iron and distant fires. The red reflections danced on the underside of the bridge like restless eyes.
Halfway across, a sound struck—thin, harmonic, not unlike a bell struck under water. The bridge shuddered. From the darkness below, shapes rose: braided tendrils of glass and shadow, twisting upward as if climbing for the first time. They were not alive in the ordinary sense. They moved with purpose, with memory, with the kind of cruel sentience that had once been given a name: Echoes.
Reiji drew his blade before the tendrils touched the wood. The shard at his wrist thrummed, and his arm felt warmer than the night air. He slashed, meeting mirrored glass with black steel. Sparks that looked like red embers showered into the chasm and vanished. The tendrils recoiled, then reformed, quicker, sharper. Each impact against a strand sent a ring of sound down, a crimson chime that made the rope bridge sing.
A blade of reflected light sliced near Kaede's head; she rolled, bringing her dagger up in an arc that neatly severed an Echo strand. The cut bled red light. For every Echo that fell, two more rose in its place. They were fed by the Abyss; they were hunger shaped to memory.
"Move!" Reiji barked, voice raw with the effort of keeping the bridge from becoming their tomb. They ran, blades catching the flecks of reflected blood as they flew, cutting a path toward a stone stair set into the far wall of the chasm.
At the base, the stair spiraled into a sculpted mouth—old work, obsidian and glass, an entrance carved to feel like swallowing. The Echoes hammered at the stone, eager to reclaim what their masters had set free. Reiji and Kaede threw themselves through the maw as the tendrils lashed, the bridge shrieking behind them.
Inside the Abyss the air changed. It was cooler, but the cold had teeth. The walls were alive with veins of crimson glass; their surfaces rippled with faces—memories trapped and stretched thin. Each face spoke nothing, yet the echoes of syllables moved through the room like eddies, colliding and reforming into faint phrases. The chamber smelled of old prayers and machine oil.
"Listen," Kaede breathed, hand on the wall. When she flattened her palm to the glass vein, a chorus swelled—overlapping voices in three or four languages, some shifted beyond recognition. Buried beneath the noise was a distinct pattern. Reiji could feel it in his bones: the cadence matched the fragment's pulse inside him.
They followed the sound deeper, down corridors that sloped inward like veins guiding blood to a heart. The farther they went, the clearer the voices became—until they resolved into a single, repeating line. It sounded like a litany read backward, a confession re-encoded into music:
> "…bind, seal, remember—remember, seal, bind…"
A door loomed at last, framed by black glass and circlets of rusted iron. The sigil on its face was small but unmistakable: the ouroboros crowned by hollow eyes. Whoever opened it had not hidden their stamp.
Kaede paused. "This is it. Whoever signed the Pact uses this as a well. It draws in the city's discarded truths, bones of memory, and crafts them into reinforcement. The more we let it feed—" Her voice broke. "—the harder it is to reclaim them."
Reiji's fingers tightened on the hilt of Kagetsu. He had been hunting oath-makers and their twisted bargains for years, but he had never seen a place where the echoes made the air red. "We end it," he said. "Now."
They pushed the door.
Inside was a cavern larger than the mouth of any cathedral—ceilings lost to shadow, walls studded with fragments of mirror and bone. In its center floated a column of light like a frozen wound; it pulsed crimson with each echoing phrase the Abyss sang. Around the column knelt figures in dark robes—faces hidden, hands stained with ink and ash. They chanted in a language old as forgetting, their voices binding the column to the world.
Reiji moved before Kaede could whisper a plan. He had no time for ritual when the city itself fed the enemy. Steel met cloth, and the kneeling figures rose with synchrony that betrayed long practice. They wore sigils on their throats—small discs like the one Kaede had thrown him in the plains. Reiji recognized one at once: his own mark, twisted and burned into the metal.
"Your signature," he said to no one in particular. "You wear it like a brand."
A leader stood, taller than the rest, crownless but certain. Beneath his hood, light pooled like a memory. He raised his hands, and the column surged. The Echoes outside answered with a chorus that bent the air.
"You cannot stop what remembers itself," the leader intoned. His voice carried through the hall like wind through bone. "To unmake the Pact is to unmake power. Power will not be unmade."
Reiji stepped into the light. "It will be undone anyway." His blade flashed. He struck like a confession delivered in violence—cutting at the ropes that bound the column. The robed figures moved as one to stop him; Kaede moved like a shadow at his side, precise and terrible.
The leader screamed, the sound raw with the collapse of certainty. He lunged, pulling a token from beneath his robe: a sigiled shard, glowing faint and cruel. He stabbed the shard into the column; the light flared crimson as the Pact's thread rewove itself, new echoes pouring into the system like blood.
Reiji lunged, catching the leader by the throat and twisting. The shard tore free and clattered to the floor. The leader's eyes widened—the moment of a man who has seen the truth he cannot absorb. From the column's sudden instability came a noise like a thousand chimes breaking—then a howl that shredded the air.
The Echoes screamed. The chamber convulsed, and the glass veins along the walls began to fracture, releasing faces that fell like snow and dissolved into dust. The robing figures were thrown back, their chant broken into ragged breaths.
Kaede moved to the column and plunged her dagger into the core where the shard had been embedded. Light lanced outward, a clean white for an instant, then black. The rhythm of the Abyss stuttered and slowed, then began to wobble, as if remembering incorrectly.
Reiji ripped another shard from the floor and ground it beneath his boot, his eyes fixed on the leader, who now trembled with the sudden smallness of his belief. "This ends," Reiji said, and the sound of his words carried like a verdict.
Outside, the bridge that had long howled under wind snapped. The echoes fell silent, not dead but scattered, like something that had been pried from the earth and set adrift. The column collapsed, a slow implosion that sucked light inward until the cavern was a hollowed bone.
When the dust cleared, the robed figures lay where they had fallen, their sigils dull. The red glimmers in the walls had dulled to grey. The Abyss began to exhale—an exhausted, exhaling sound. Reiji and Kaede stood amid the ruin, breathing, coated in ash and the residue of memory.
Kaede wiped a smear of red from her cheek and looked at Reiji. "We stopped it," she said, but the sentence did not sound like triumph. It sounded like a report.
Reiji glanced at the leader—the man on the ground, the shard smashed beneath his foot. The sigil burned faintly on the leader's palm, as if the brand resisted death itself. Reiji's jaw tightened.
"We delayed it," he said, voice low. "The Pact is a machine. Snuff one ember and another may flare. But we took their heart tonight."
A distant tremor ran through the cavern. From somewhere below, a faint, hollow note answered, like a promise or a threat. Crimson echoes, quieter now, rolled back into the depths—waiting, remembering.
Reiji slid Kagetsu into its sheath and stepped toward the exit. He had no illusions that the Abyss was pacified; the world below always kept secrets to regrow.
"Where next?" Kaede asked, the scanner at her belt flickering weakly.
He looked at the bruise of the horizon. "We follow the signatures. We find who wears my mark and pull them out by their throat."
She gave a small, humorless smile. "Then let's walk. The city still has sins lined up like trophies."
They climbed the stair back into the night, the Abyss falling silent behind them, its crimson echoes folding inward like the closing of a wound. Above, the sky hung heavy and indifferent—watching them leave, keeping one careful eye on the map of scars they had yet to travel.