Asher faces the first of many echoes stirred awake by the Fifth Throne's call. But this one is personal. And it remembers the night it died—wearing Asher's name on its tongue.
The Vault still pulsed with residual dread.
Asher stood motionless. Not from shock—but preparation.
He could feel it.
Something had responded. Something old. Not just from Velvora, not just from the throne… but from beyond the city's withered skyline. A memory with teeth.
Lucien paced beside him, unease tracing every step. "You're not alone anymore," he murmured, "Whatever you saw—whatever saw you back—it's not done."
Asher didn't answer. He couldn't. A noise scraped across his senses, silent to the others, but loud in his mind: a bell with no source, tolling from somewhere outside space, or perhaps inside him. Not a warning.
A summons.
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The Watchtower.Far from Velvora's twisted streets, atop a mountain shrouded in forgotten prayers and unmade maps, it stood: a tower with no doors, no windows, and no shadow. It had not stirred in centuries.
Until now.
Its stone cracked. Not outward, but inward—as if something inside was trying to remember how to be alive.
Then came the whisper.
A name, repeated not by voice, but by soul:
"Asher Blackwood."
Inside the tower, something opened its eyes.
They were not human.
And they were furious.
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Back in Velvora—
Night had returned to the city with a different color.
The streets still bled from the succubi purge. Corpses still hung from the Clockspire. But the air itself had changed. Everyone—mortal, beast, and thing in between—felt it.
The throne's death cry hadn't been a closing.
It had been an invitation.
Rosa walked beside Asher in silence as they exited the Vault. Danya lingered behind, flipping through her Book of Knots, eyes wide with shifting glyphs.
Rosa finally broke the silence. "It felt like... something knocked back."
"Not something," Asher said. "Someone."
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Later, atop Velvora's cathedral spires—
Asher stood alone under moonlight, his body still heavy from the vision. He wasn't meditating. He wasn't strategizing. He was waiting.
It came like a tremor.
The spire's glass cracked in a perfect circle.
Not from impact.
From presence.
A ripple tore open in the sky above the city—thin as a thread, curved like an eye. A figure stepped out, descending slowly, as if gravity had agreed to this intrusion.
It wore white.
A robe of bone-thread. Face obscured by a porcelain mask. Its chest bore an ancient sigil: the Watchtower's sigil. One that had been erased from every surviving history text.
Asher narrowed his eyes.
"…You're dead," he whispered.
The figure floated down until its feet hovered inches above the roof.
"I was," the thing replied. Its voice was layered—one voice calm, another angry, a third one broken. "And when I died… I wore your name on my lips."
The sky behind it closed with a silent snap.
"I am The First Watch," it said. "You lit the beacon. You accepted the scroll. You took on the debt."
Asher took a step forward, shadows curling around his wrists.
"You came here to collect?"
"No," the Watch said.
"I came here to remind you what happens… when you forget what your name cost me."
And then it attacked.
Asher was thrown back through a stone bell tower—the air cracking with layered echoes as the Watch's finger barely grazed his shoulder.Inside that single touch, Asher saw a battlefield made of names, a memory of his own past that hadn't happened yet.
And in it, he was dying.
[End of Chapter 122]
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Next Chapter: Chapter 123 – "The Debt of Names"Asher faces the Watch in a battle that twists memory and identity. Every move he makes risks unraveling the self he thinks he is.