ECHOBURN

"Finally," Kael muttered as he strapped his blade across his back. "If I had to go one more week without drawing this thing, I might've cut my own damn shadow."

Lyra didn't glance at him. "You'd miss."

Veyra snorted. "He'd trip trying."

Their voices echoed faintly, carried through the skeleton of a crumbling warehouse. Wind whispered through shattered panes above. Water dripped from broken pipework, steady as breath.

The team moved in practiced formation — five shadows stitched together by familiarity and silence.

Anya traced silent glyphs against a wall. Lyra tapped glowing circles on her gloves, muttering. Kael took point with a sword across his back. Veyra prowled beside him, loose and ready.

Ren walked last. Distant. Watchful.

He didn't speak. He didn't need to.

"No threat classification," Kael said, flipping the mission brief. "No support. Unsupervised."

"They're hiding something," Lyra muttered.

"So what else is new?" Veyra replied.

Ren walked on.

None of them saw the boy. None of them could.

He stood frozen, watching them disappear deeper into the broken facility — a ghost watching ghosts.

Rain filtered through the roof above. The smell of ozone and wet rust thickened.

It was all so vivid.

Too vivid.

The tension in Ren's shoulders. The silent nod Anya gave as she passed. The flicker in Lyra's eyes, like she'd sensed something wrong but hadn't said it yet.

They kept moving.

And then—

white.

Like a canvas wiped clean in a single stroke.

Sound cracked and fell away.Color collapsed like ash.

Shapes folded inward. Walls buckled into fog.

And the team?

Gone.

The boy fell back hard, gasping.

Stone met his spine.

His hand jerked away from the object in front of him — a heavy, leather-bound book, resting alone atop a cracked stone throne.

It hadn't moved.

The ruin around him was silent.

Moss-covered pillars stood like forgotten teeth. Wind stirred dry leaves through the open ceiling. Birds cried faintly in the distance, unaware of anything that had just happened.

He sat up slowly, heart thudding.

What the hell was that?

He looked at the book again.

The surface was weathered, lined with faint spiral markings burned into the leather. No title. No clasp. It pulsed gently under the sunlight, just once — as if breathing.

He reached out again, hesitated, then pulled the book into his lap.

He opened the cover.

Unreadable script curled across the first page. Circles nested in circles. Language shaped more by memory than design.

He couldn't read a word of it.

But it felt important.

Expensive, even.

He smiled faintly.

"Alright. Rent's sorted."

He slipped the book into his bag, stood, and gave the throne one last glance.

It meant nothing to him. Not yet.

Just old stone and silence.

He turned and left, boots crunching across vine-cracked marble.

The throne room remained quiet.

Sunlight drifted lazily through the hole in the ceiling.

And behind the boy — just for a breath — one of the spiral symbols inside the book glowed softly through the pack's cloth.

Then faded.

Like it had never been there.