The southern wastes of Vesvara were a graveyard of unspoken wars. Sand crusted over forgotten weapons and monuments half-devoured by time. Now, the horizon split like torn parchment as the Dominion Anchor struck ground—an obsidian spire laced with memory-scarring runes, pulsing with severance energy.
From the cliffs above, Yuuji stood with Kael and Sera, watching the Anchor bloom like a wound.
"That's not just a declaration," Kael murmured. "It's a rewriting point. They mean to reshape the echoes of this entire region—remove you from the world's memory, root and all."
Sera narrowed her eyes. "And if we step into that zone?"
"We cease to exist," Kael said. "Or worse—exist in fragments, scattered through half-remembered histories."
Yuuji's eyes remained locked on the Anchor. "Then we go in before they finish the rewrite."
Kael turned, startled. "That's suicide."
"No," Yuuji said, voice low. "It's reclamation. They're trying to erase a version of me that hasn't happened yet. I need to find what they're afraid of… and why."
---
They entered the Severance Field at dusk.
Reality inside bent like heat shimmer, echo-threads floating freely, dislodged from their sources. The world felt thinner—less true. Names whispered and unraveled in Yuuji's mind, memories he hadn't lived flickering just behind his thoughts.
The Dominion's forces were already deployed.
Figures in echo-null armor stood guard, each marked with glyphs that devoured resonance. But Yuuji wasn't looking at the soldiers—he was watching the one standing in the Anchor's shadow.
A woman.
Clad in fractured mirror-mail, her helm bore no insignia—only a pale crown formed of reflective shards that shifted shape each time Yuuji blinked.
Sera gasped. "That's not possible."
Yuuji knew her before Kael spoke the name.
"Severer Avelis," he said. "Dominion executioner. But she was lost to a memory fracture cycle years ago. Declared echo-dead."
"She remembered her way back," Kael whispered grimly.
Avelis raised her hand. The air between them warped—and suddenly, they were somewhere else.
Not transported. Remembered.
A battlefield. The Enclave burning. Dominion banners waving. A monstrous figure descending from the sky—Yuuji, but not. Not human. Not whole.
Avelis stood across from him on that field too. She screamed something. A challenge? A plea? The memory frayed before he could hear it.
Back in the present, Avelis lowered her hand.
"You're early," she said. "That version of you took longer to break."
Yuuji's heart thundered. "I'm not him."
"You will be," she replied. "Unless you sever the thread before it completes."
Sera stepped forward. "Why now? Why bring a Severer into a still-stable echo field?"
Avelis smiled coldly. "Because the future Yuuji buried tried to overwrite this one. That future's collapse infected the timeline. The only way to contain the contamination—was to find the source. Him."
Kael's voice was sharp. "You're not here to sever him. You're here to bind him. To make him the very thing he's running from."
Avelis said nothing.
Instead, she drew a blade of memory-glass—a Severance Fang, honed to cleave not flesh, but selves.
"Yuuji Ishikawa," she said. "By Dominion order, you are to be unthreaded. Not killed. Not erased. Unmade."
Yuuji felt something ignite inside him. Not fear. Not rage.
Recognition.
He stepped forward.
And whispered in a voice not entirely his own:
"Then I'll show you why I chose to forget."
The Severance Fang in Avelis's hand shimmered like it was made of frozen screams—every inch of its glassy edge humming with unspoken endings. Around her, Dominion soldiers backed away, forming a wide circle. This wasn't a battle. It was a ritual.
Yuuji stepped into the ring, and the air cracked.
Not thunder—echo distortion. The kind that only happened when two memories tried to overwrite the same moment.
Sera drew her daggers but Kael stopped her with a look.
"He has to face this," the old mage whispered. "This isn't just combat—it's resonance. It's memory claiming memory."
Avelis lunged.
But Yuuji didn't dodge.
He raised his hand—and caught the blade.
Not with flesh. With a thought.
The echo-glass sparked, meeting resistance not from skin, but from a lattice of coalescing memories—fragments of potential futures he didn't yet understand, forming a gauntlet of possibility around his arm.
Avelis's eyes widened. "You've already started to fracture."
Yuuji pushed back, throwing her off balance.
"No," he said. "I've started to remember."
---
They clashed again.
Every strike from Avelis was a severing. Every parry from Yuuji, a memory reclaimed.
When her blade slashed across his chest, he staggered—not from pain, but from a vision:
—Himself, kneeling before Erisen. "I'll do it. I'll carry the void if no one else will."
—Sera, dead-eyed, whispering, "You left me behind in every timeline."
—Kael, weeping as he etched a name into a wall of vanished souls: Yuuji Ishikawa.
Each moment pressed against his mind like a scream. But he stood.
"This is why you're afraid," he said to Avelis. "Because I chose the void. I wasn't corrupted. I volunteered."
She hesitated. The first crack in her composure.
"That's not true," she said. "No one chooses to become what you did."
He smiled, not with pride—but defiance. "Then why do I remember loving the world enough to break it for a chance to save it?"
The ground fractured.
Not physically—but historically. Reality itself buckled as the Severance Field collapsed inward.
Kael shouted a warding incantation, barely holding the present in place.
"We're slipping into an echo rift!" he warned. "Too many divergent futures are surfacing—your resonance is pulling them all in!"
Yuuji turned to Avelis, voice low. "You want to unmake me. But all you're doing is reminding me why I became. That's not power. That's conviction."
He stepped forward—no weapon, just memory flaring behind his eyes.
And with a whisper—not in words, but in the Godless Tongue—he unleashed a pulse.
Avelis screamed as her armor shattered—not broken, but reverted. Every shard of echo-glass turned to raw thread, writhing with half-dead timelines.
Sera ran to him as the Dominion soldiers scrambled, dragged away by retreat glyphs.
Kael limped to his side, eyes wide. "What did you just do?"
"I didn't fight her," Yuuji said softly. "I remembered her differently."
The Severance Fang lay on the ground, humming with new resonance.
Yuuji picked it up.
"It's time I stop running from what I am," he said. "Time to remember what I chose to become."
---
Far above, in the ruins of a Dominion sky-spire, a figure watched the scene unfold through mirrored shards.
He wore no face.
Only a reflection of Yuuji's own.
He spoke to no one. Or to himself.
"So… it begins again."
And the shards around him whispered, "The Whisperer remembers."
The Severance Field had not collapsed.
It had morphed.
Where the Dominion Anchor once stood, a crater now pulsed with inverted resonance—an echo rebound, where rejected futures refused to die quietly. Threads of broken time whipped through the air like spectral roots, anchoring to nothing. The land had no past here anymore—only possibility.
Yuuji stood at its edge, holding the Severance Fang. Its once-pure edge now flickered with colors that shouldn't coexist—echo hues corrupted by Voidbound will.
Kael stared at the blade with barely concealed dread. "You shouldn't be able to hold that. Severance Fangs are memory-purged. They reject Void-touched wielders."
Yuuji looked at him, voice strange and distant. "Then maybe I'm not Void-touched anymore."
Sera stepped closer. "Then what are you?"
He looked up. Wind tore through his hair, tugged at his cloak.
"A convergence," he said. "A thread that doesn't end—because it was never supposed to begin."
Kael's expression darkened. "Yuuji—what did the Severer remember when she looked at you?"
Yuuji hesitated.
"She remembered me… choosing to collapse the Dominion's Echo Vault. Not in battle. In penance. She said I erased the futures because I couldn't bear to see what I'd done in them."
Sera flinched. "You're saying you... erased your own possibilities?"
"No. He did." Yuuji pointed to the horizon, toward the storm-ridden sky where timelines once branched like lightning veins.
"I think there's a version of me still out there. A version that never let go of the Godless Tongue. One who became… the thing even the Dominion fears remembering."
Kael paled. "You think the reflection we saw above the spire—the one with your face…"
Yuuji nodded. "Not a future. Not a fragment. A witness. One that survived the purge. One that remembers everything."
The words hung like ash.
Sera's voice cut through the silence. "Then we hunt him."
Kael turned. "You would chase a version of Yuuji that might be untouchable—unmade—and confront what? A god in echoform?"
Yuuji's gaze was calm. "Not to kill him. Not yet."
Kael's eyes narrowed. "Then why?"
"To ask why he gave up."
---
Later, within the depths of the Hollow Enclave, the Elders gathered once more.
Kael stood before them, the Severance Fang now wrapped in seals and echo-bindings.
"The Dominion will not stop," he said. "They believe Yuuji is no longer a threat to be eliminated—but a variable to be preserved or replicated."
Elder Thren's voice was hushed. "Then the war has changed."
"No," Kael said. "The story has."
Outside, Yuuji walked the Shardwell's edge again, feeling the echoes of futures brushing past him like wind—futures he'd destroyed, ones he'd escaped, and one that waited ahead… with his own eyes and none of his mercy.
And for the first time since falling into Vesvara, Yuuji did not feel lost.
He felt remembered.
The Hollow Enclave slept uneasily that night.
But Yuuji did not sleep at all.
He stood alone beneath the whispering branches of the Shardwell Tree, where the sky above Vesvara flickered with the unstable shimmer of tangled echoes. Around him, reality bent—not with force, but with memory. The world remembered too much now. And it was beginning to resent it.
He looked down at his reflection in a pool of still water.
But it wasn't his face that looked back.
It was his, yes—but older. Hungrier. Eyes dimmed by knowledge that had long since stopped being useful. A man who had let the void speak for him too many times.
Yuuji whispered, "What did you lose that I still have?"
The reflection didn't answer.
It only smiled.
And then it spoke in the Godless Tongue—a voice not meant for living ears.
Yuuji staggered back. The words weren't meant to harm him. They were meant to be remembered.
Sera found him just before dawn, sitting beneath the Shardwell, eyes hollow.
"What did it say?" she asked softly.
Yuuji didn't look at her. He just whispered:
"You are not the first Yuuji to ask that question."
And as the first light touched Vesvara, the echoes trembled.
Because somewhere out there…
something had just remembered him back.