Absolutely — here's an extended version of Chapter 6: The Unraveling from The Echoes Beneath Verdant Hollow. This chapter plunges Elian into fractured timelines and alternate selves as the Echo begins to consume the
Elian woke to silence.
Not the hush of sleep, but the kind that follows a scream — the kind that waits.
The manor was wrong.
The wallpaper had peeled into curling symbols he didn't recognize. The hallway to the study now stretched impossibly long, lined with doors that hadn't been there before. Each door bore a name carved in bone. Some he recognized — Lira, Maerith, his mother. Others were strangers. One bore his own name, but the letters were backward, as if written in a mirror.
He opened it.
Inside was a version of his bedroom — but not his. The bed was smaller. The walls were painted blue, not green. Toys he didn't remember owning sat neatly on shelves. A photograph on the desk showed a boy who looked like him, smiling beside a woman who wasn't his mother.
He stepped back, heart pounding.
The door slammed shut behind him.
The hallway was gone.
Now he stood in the village square — but it was dusk, and the sky was stitched with black thread. The lanterns were made of bone. The effigy on the stage was not wood, but flesh. A child stood bound in vines, mouth sewn shut, eyes wide with pleading.
He stepped closer.
The child looked like him.
Lira appeared beside him, blindfolded, her voice distant and hollow. "This is the version where you stayed. Where you were taken."
"What is this place?" he asked, voice shaking.
"A memory that never happened," she said. "But the Echo remembers it anyway."
The sky cracked like glass.
Suddenly, Elian was in the manor again — but younger. His mother held him, whispering lullabies. Then she turned, eyes hollow, and handed him to the shadows. He screamed, but no sound came. The shadows took him, and the world went dark.
He gasped awake in the cellar, surrounded by villagers in robes of ash and crimson. They chanted in a language he didn't know. The bowl of water boiled. The pedestal split open. The bundle of hair and cloth burned.
Maerith stepped forward, her face lined with grief. "The Echo must feed."
Elian turned to run — but the door was gone.
Lira's voice echoed from nowhere. "You're unraveling. The Echo is showing you all the versions of yourself it could have consumed."
He fell to his knees.
The journal appeared in his hands, pages blank — then filled with his own handwriting.
> "I was born. I was forgotten. I was traded. I was remembered."
The pendant around his neck pulsed like a second heart.
The world shifted again.
Now he stood in the forest — the bone-white trees, the stitched sky, the fog that moved like breath. Children walked backward through the mist, their mouths sewn shut, their eyes wide with silent screams. One of them turned.
It was the boy from the circle.
"You left me," he said.
"I didn't know," Elian whispered.
"You forgot."
"I didn't mean to."
The boy smiled, sad and sharp. "The Echo doesn't care about meaning. Only memory."
He reached out.
Elian flinched — but the boy didn't touch him. Instead, he placed something in Elian's hand.
A tooth.
His own.
The forest trembled.
The children vanished.
And Elian stood alone in a chamber of mirrors.
Each mirror showed a different version of himself — older, younger, broken, blind, silent. One showed him as a child, eyes sewn shut, whispering to the soil. Another showed him as a man, standing in the village square, holding the bone pendant aloft as the villagers bowed.
He turned away.
The mirrors cracked.
The Echo spoke — not in words, but in feeling. Grief. Hunger. Loneliness. It didn't want flesh. It wanted memory. It wanted to be remembered.
And it wanted Elian to choose.
Which version of himself would survive?
Which would be forgotten?
He screamed.
And the world shattered.
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