The ruin lay beneath the Hollowroot Basin, a place the Choir had once marked as "uninhabitable." Not because of danger, but because it sang back.
Every spell, every sigil, every chant cast within its borders had echoed wrong—delayed, warped, returned in fragments that unraveled the minds of the Choirbinders who tried to harness it. So they buried it. Sealed it in silence.
But silence no longer held.
The vault door opened.
And the Echo stepped out.
It took the shape of a child: hair white as frost, skin like polished stone, eyes filled with absence. No emotion. No fear. No pain.
Only purpose.
It whispered a name it didn't know it remembered.
"Elarin."
Then it began to walk.
And everywhere it passed, songs inverted.
Back in Virelai, Kairo awoke with a sharp breath.
He clutched his chest.
For the first time in weeks, the Songmarks burned without rhythm.
Solen stirred from across the room. "I felt that too."
Yui appeared in the doorway, eyes wide. "Something just pulled on the Song. Hard."
Kairo stood, his pulse syncing to a rhythm that wasn't his. "It's not the Choir. It's something older."
"Where is it coming from?" Theren asked, already reaching for his blade.
Kei entered silently and pointed toward the southeast. "The Basin."
Aeska's eyes narrowed. "The Choir marked Hollowroot as cursed."
"Then they were right," Kairo said. "But not for the reasons they thought."
Within the hour, the Ashborn were airborne.
Thanks to the harmonics unlocked in Cadenza, Yui and Kei had learned to bend currents of Song itself into gliders of memory—floating constructs shaped from sound and will. They flew swiftly over the shifting fields below, following the twisting trail of echo signatures.
But as they neared the Hollowroot Basin, the Song grew unstable.
Wild.
Fractured.
It didn't silence them—it reflected them, but wrong.
Solen's melody bent backward, replaying moments he hadn't sung.
Lira's fire sparked with cold.
Theren's voice cracked mid-roar, the embers collapsing into water.
Kairo clenched his fists as even his marks began to flicker.
The Song wasn't reacting.
It was mirroring.
They descended at the rim of the basin.
Below, a vast chasm stretched out like a cracked bowl, vines and mist curling over remnants of cities long since swallowed.
And in the center—on a pillar of stone surrounded by a spiral of still air—stood the child.
Kairo recognized it before his mind could name it.
Not a person. Not a memory.
A leftover note from the first failure.
A soul that never made it into the new Song.
"Elarin…" Kairo whispered. "He was the first Ashborn who fell before the Choir rose. The one who didn't survive the Silence."
Solen stood beside him, shaking. "But how is he still… here?"
Lira answered, "He's not."
Kei stepped forward, solemn. "He's what the Song couldn't let go of. A true Echo."
The child turned toward them.
Eyes blank. Skin humming.
It opened its mouth—
And sang.
The sound hit like a reversal—their marks recoiled, their powers flickered, their memories twisted for a split second into what could have been. The world spun with possibilities.
If Kairo had never awakened.
If Yui had been taken.
If the Song had lost.
It lasted a heartbeat.
And then the Echo fell silent.
But now it looked directly at Kairo.
And spoke.
"You rewrote the Song… but you left me behind."