The sky above Ikenar bled orange.
Mimus stood on the edge of the ravine, the wind pulling at his dark cloak like a restless ghost. Below him, the remains of Uzelith—once the heart of his people—smoldered in quiet surrender. What hadn't been burned had crumbled. What hadn't crumbled had been buried. And what had been buried… still screamed, if only in memory.
The boy beside him said nothing, but his small hands clenched around the haft of a broken spear. Barely twelve, face smudged with soot and eyes wide with disbelief, he mirrored a grief far too ancient for his age.
Mimus did not know his name. He had saved him from the rubble on instinct, not intention. Something in the child's eyes had reminded him of Rynor—fierce, defiant, not yet broken.
"You shouldn't be here," Mimus said, voice low. The Echo was still in the wind, faint but pulsing, like a drumbeat heard through stone.
The boy didn't move.
Mimus turned, his boots grinding ash and bone into the cracked soil. The scent of scorched iron clung to everything. Even now, with the sun hanging low and trembling, he felt something approaching—a call, a shift in the pattern of the world itself.
He hadn't planned to leave.
But Uzelith was gone. Whatever had taken it—whatever had turned fire against memory—left him hollow enough to follow the pull when it came.
He found the mark that night, etched into the sandstone wall of an ancient well. An hour's walk from the ruins, beneath a fractured pillar that once held stories of the First Sun, the symbol pulsed faintly in the moonlight—twin spirals bound by a circle, the ancient glyph of a forgotten path.
Mimus knelt and touched it. His fingers tingled.
The air shifted.
Behind him, the boy stepped back instinctively.
From the mark, light unraveled—quietly, beautifully. It reached out like memory, forming a ring of white fire on the ground. The temperature dropped. The wind stopped. The stars above seemed to hold their breath.
And then the Gate opened.
A thin ripple, no wider than a doorway, shimmered in the still air. Through it, the outline of a vast chamber flickered into view: obsidian pillars, floating glyphs, and a throne that pulsed faintly.
Mimus turned to the boy. "Stay," he said. "Live."
"But—"
"Not this path. Not yet."
The boy's eyes were already red. "Will you come back?"
Mimus hesitated.
"No."
Then, without another word, he stepped through the Gate and was gone.
---
On the other side, silence reigned.
The chamber was impossibly vast, circular, carved into some forgotten planet's hollow core. The air tasted of ozone and ancient stone. Echoes of forgotten wars hummed in the walls.
A single figure waited.
A woman with silver eyes and copper skin watched him without expression. Her armor was smooth and iridescent, a constellation of scars woven into the metal. Her gaze swept over Mimus like judgment. She tilted her head slightly.
"You're early," she said.
Mimus didn't speak. The air pressed too hard against his chest, not with pressure, but with memory.
The throne behind him flared as he approached. Not with fire—but with echo. Scenes from his past danced briefly across the air above it—Rynor's laugh, the fall of Uzelith, the boy in the rubble. Then it dimmed, and the stone accepted him.
He didn't sit. Not yet.
The woman did not smile, but something in her gaze softened. "I am Vesyr," she said. "Once of Solkar. Resonant. Curator's mistake."
Mimus nodded. "Mimus."
"No title?"
"They all burned."
A shadow passed over Vesyr's face, but she did not press.
He looked around the chamber. So many thrones—some pulsing faintly, others cold. No one else had arrived. No signs of the Tournament. Just silence.
"Where am I?" he asked.
"Varellen," Vesyr said. "A realm stitched from echoes. It is not a place—it is pressure. Invitation. Trial. You were brought because something in you resonated loud enough to be heard."
He frowned. "I'm not... like you."
"Not yet."
"What is this?"
"An ending. A beginning." Vesyr rose slowly, her shadow long against the glyph-lit floor. "You carry Echo, even if you do not yet know how. The Eidara will awaken when you bleed where no one can see. That moment will come."
He looked down at his hands. They did not tremble. Not anymore.
"What happens now?"
She smiled, just barely. "Now… Varellen decides."
The chamber shifted. Light bent inward. The floor cracked, not breaking but remembering pain. Mimus stumbled as the ground gave way, and he fell—not through space, but through memory.
Colors roared. Voices spiraled. His name unraveled like a song he had never learned.
And then—
Ash. Wind. A skyless world.
Mimus woke in Varellen proper.
Alone.
The Tournament had begun.