The assignment came without warning.
A summons—formal, cold, and sealed with the royal insignia of the Valemont Convergence Council.
Toji received it at sunrise.
"You are to report to Arcane Field Watchtower 3.
Coordinates: Riftpoint Vale, Northern Barrier.
Objective: Containment Support — Displaced Entities."
He didn't need to ask what it meant.
Something had breached.
And the Academy was sending students to plug the hole.
This was no test.
This was real.
⸻
Watchtower 3 was not a tower at all.
It was a jagged outpost built into the mountain's ribs—more fortress than lookout, suspended above the northern valleys like a spearhead aimed at the wilderness.
Toji arrived in full Class C uniform, his shadow-lengthened cloak trailing faint mist behind him. The jackal followed at his side, silent and alert.
A squad was already assembled. Three mages—one Class B, two C. Their expressions were stiff, controlled.
Toji was the youngest.
None of them questioned his presence. Not aloud.
Instructor Brannic was leading the mission.
He offered no greeting, only orders.
"Displacement signature registered at Riftpoint Cavern. Echo-bleed is surging. You four form entry group. I anchor the barrier. If it turns red, withdraw. If it turns black—run."
No ceremony.
Just reality.
Toji gripped the handle of the phantom vector beneath his cloak.
The blade wasn't summoned yet.
But it pulsed.
Like it knew.
⸻
The caverns opened like the mouth of a dead god—dark, damp, resonating with the tremble of barely-contained power.
Inside, walls of old stone gave way to veins of unnatural crystal. The air shimmered.
"Echo-bleed," murmured one mage.
Toji didn't speak.
He felt it before they reached the breach.
A pressure behind his eyes.
A pull—not outward, but inward.
They turned a corner.
And saw it.
A rupture in space—irregular, jagged, glowing from the inside out.
Shapes moved behind it.
Not beasts.
Memories.
Fragments.
Toji stepped closer.
A phantom lunged through the breach.
Too fast.
It struck the nearest mage—a direct hit to the chest—and sent her flying back into the stone.
The others shouted, casting containment runes.
Toji didn't chant.
He drew.
The vector formed in his hand like condensed twilight—obsidian and violet veins, edges etched with shimmer.
The jackal surged forward.
The shadow-entity followed.
The two met in a clash of unreal force—howling silence and screaming stillness.
Toji moved in.
He slashed once.
The phantom split like silk.
It collapsed.
The blade sang with aftershock.
⸻
A second wave came through.
Not one.
Six.
Twisting silhouettes of old fear, malformed spells, and fragments of lived death.
The Class B mage shouted a containment seal.
Toji advanced.
The jackal flanked him, eyes alight.
He did not swing wildly.
Each strike was a memory made manifest.
Every slash a truth spoken in silence.
Each time the blade touched one of the phantoms, they cracked—recoiled—recognized him.
He was not just a threat.
He was familiar.
The tethered one.
The Echo-bound.
They hesitated.
And he did not.
⸻
By the end, three phantoms remained.
And they fled—back through the breach.
The rift pulsed red.
Then blue.
Stable.
Brannic's voice echoed down the corridor.
"Withdraw. Well done."
⸻
On the journey back, the Class B mage asked the question aloud.
"What was that sword?"
Toji met his eyes.
And said nothing.
⸻
Back at Valemont, Lysara waited.
She already knew.
The vector still hummed inside him. Not visible. But alive.
"Your tether remembered a shape it hadn't earned yet," she said. "And it listened."
"It felt… right," Toji admitted.
"It was. Because it's yours."
She studied him.
"But now the bleed has connected to you. Which means you're visible."
"To what?"
"Things that remember differently."
He didn't press.
But the words didn't leave him.
⸻
The next night, he was summoned again.
This time, not to the mirror chamber.
To a different place.
Beneath the western bridge. A hidden well.
Lysara met him there with three silver runes carved into her palm.
"You're ready," she said.
"For what?"
"To step into Echo-space willingly."
She drew a circle on the stone.
"Not guided. Not protected. Alone."
Toji looked down at the glyph.
"I'll find Seren?"
"No," she said. "You'll find you."
⸻
The circle activated.
And the world blinked.
⸻
He stood inside a sky of ink.
Below his feet, a field of mirrors.
Above, nothing.
The mirrors showed not reflections—but timelines.
In one, he saw himself with eyes like stormglass, standing on a throne of silence.
In another, he was broken, bleeding in a ruin, the jackal curled beside him, unmoving.
In a third, he wore the robes of an instructor, speaking to a class of shadows.
He walked forward.
The mirrors changed.
He approached a pillar of shifting aether, at its base a stone pedestal.
A figure waited beside it.
Robe. Hood. No face.
Just voice.
"You came through the bleed."
"Yes."
"You carry a name not your own."
"I made it mine."
"You walk with a shadow that knows your bones."
Toji gripped his blade.
"Speak your choice," the figure said. "What will you be?"
Toji looked up.
And said:
"I will be the first to finish what Seren started."
The figure nodded once.
Then vanished.
The pedestal opened.
Inside was not a weapon.
Not a scroll.
But a memory.
His.
One he hadn't lived yet.
⸻
He woke outside the bridge, gasping.
Lysara waited, watching.
"You saw it."
"I chose it."
She didn't smile.
But her voice was calm.
"Then we begin the real work."
.
.
.
The Forge of Whispers wasn't a real forge.
There were no bellows, no anvils, no walls of flame. Just a stone amphitheater buried beneath the Academy's oldest wing, accessible only through a sealed tunnel guarded by four wards and a forgotten oath.
Toji followed Lysara down the stairs without hesitation.
The air grew thicker the deeper they went—not in heat, but in presence. As if the walls themselves were holding their breath.
When they arrived, the chamber revealed itself as a circular space with twelve concentric rings of etched stone and one unlit pedestal in the center. No torches. No lanterns. Only dim lines of aether burning in the grooves of the floor.
Lysara motioned for him to sit in the center ring.
"You're ready," she said.
Toji lowered himself to the stone, the phantom vector across his lap. His shadow curled tightly around him like a coiled ribbon.
"This is not about power," she continued. "This is about understanding the self."
She placed a shard of obsidian crystal before him.
"This will catch the memory as it manifests."
Toji nodded.
He took a slow breath and closed his eyes.
⸻
The moment his heartbeat slowed, the tether stirred.
It wasn't a jackal this time.
It was fog around it.
Liquid. Shifting. Unsure.
The Forge of Whispers had changed.
Toji noticed it the moment he began to forge. The usual silence still lay heavy in the air, but now there was a tremor beneath it—a vibration too deep to hear, felt instead in the marrow.
The obsidian lines across the chamber's stone floor had shifted. New sigils had appeared, etched with silver, whispering languages his mind understood only when he stopped thinking.
Lysara stood by the pedestal. Her eyes were darker than usual.
"This is your next forge," she said. "But it is not a weapon."
Toji approached slowly. His shadow crawled behind him, not in hesitation, but like a tide pulled toward a deeper current.
"Not a weapon?"
"Not in the way you've known," she said. "This is a lens. A threshold. An invocation of insight."
He looked down at the center ring of the Forge. The space was open, wide, and lined with twelve symbols—each glowing faintly, each pulsing like a heartbeat. He did not recognize them, yet they felt familiar.
"What am I shaping?"
Lysara handed him a silver shard.
"This is Memoryglass. It reflects not what you remember, but what your Echo does."
Toji felt the weight in his palm. Light, but humming.
Lysara raised her hand and drew a rune in the air.
The chamber dimmed.
And then it began.
⸻
The forge light flared once.
Toji closed his eyes.
Inside his mind, the tether responded.
But it did not take form immediately.
The jackal—gone.
Kareth—silent.
Instead, smoke pooled at his feet and crawled upward into the air around him, folding, folding, folding.
A single whisper echoed in his head:
"See."
Toji opened his eyes inside the echo-space.
Everything was shadow—but not darkness. It was perspective. Floating windows of scenes he had never lived, choices he had never made. Fears, desires, regrets.
He stood at the center, and before him, the Echo rose.
It did not form a beast.
It did not form a blade.
It formed an eye.
Massive.
Suspended in nothing.
Its iris was shaped like a spiral—twelve segments, twelve colors—and the pupil was a still void, absorbing light rather than reflecting it.
The eye blinked once.
And Toji remembered.
He fell to his knees, breath stolen from him. Not pain. Not terror. Just weight.
Weight of knowledge.
The Eye showed him—
Kaela standing beside him in battle, her aura flickering.
Levia falling behind in a duel, blood blooming across her robes.
A spell cast in desperation.
A death that hadn't happened. A betrayal that might.
"What is this?"
"It is the Echo of Potential," the eye whispered in his mind. "I am born from what might be. I see when."
The spirals rotated once.
And for a moment, the chamber blurred into gold.
Toji dropped the shard.
The vision shattered.
He gasped awake, still kneeling, Lysara crouched beside him.
The forge had gone still.
But floating behind him was the Eye.
Larger than a person, its spiral iris slowly rotating.
It watched him.
Without blinking.
Lysara breathed out slowly. "You forged the Mnemo-Eye."
Toji stood, trembling slightly. "What… does it do?"
"It sees conditions," she said. "Possibilities. Consequences. It doesn't tell the future. It remembers the futures that almost were."
He turned to face the Eye.
It rotated once, then became still.
Lysara approached it cautiously. "The Mnemo-Eye is rare. Seren never forged one. It's not offensive. It's awareness."
"And the condition?"
"It activates fully," she said, "only when you choose not to strike."
Toji froze.
"It feeds on restraint?"
"It unlocks when you stand in conflict… and step back."
He frowned. "That's dangerous."
She nodded. "But powerful. When activated, it grants vision—not just of physical movement, but magical intention. You will see what your opponent believes they're about to do."
Toji absorbed this.
"So it forces me to hesitate."
"It invites you to understand."
⸻
He dismissed the Eye.
It vanished cleanly into the shadow.
But he could still feel it watching from inside.
⸻
Over the next several nights, Toji trained in secret, bringing forth the Mnemo-Eye only when the grounds were empty.
He tested its activation by sparring with aether dummies and halting before the blow.
The Eye would appear—rotate—and whisper faint details into his mind.
"Projection rune forming behind the right shoulder."
"Her intent is feint, not fire."
Each time, it offered clarity.
Not vision.
But direction.
⸻
On the fifth night, he invited Kaela to the garden.
He didn't tell her what for.
She brought two training rods and a glint of interest.
"You've been ghosting," she said.
"I've been learning."
"I figured."
They faced each other in the circle of stones.
He didn't draw his rod.
Just stood with one hand behind his back.
"Go ahead."
Kaela hesitated. "You sure?"
"Hit me."
She moved fast.
He didn't block.
The Eye appeared behind him, spinning.
Kaela's form slowed.
Not literally—but in his perception.
Toji saw the twist in her wrist—the false angle. Saw the delayed breath. The twitch in her ankle.
She wasn't aiming for the chest.
She was testing feinting speed.
He stepped back.
Her strike cut air.
She blinked.
He didn't explain.
Just stood calmly.
Again, and again, he dodged.
The Eye whispered:
"Her center is open. Her balance shifted."
He never countered.
Finally, Kaela lowered her weapon.
"That's not normal," she said. "You're seeing too much."
He dismissed the Eye.
It faded.
She stepped closer. "What is that?"
"Something I made," he said. "In the Forge."
She stared at him, then finally nodded.
"Does it always come at the cost of holding back?"
He nodded.
She offered a quiet grin.
"Then it suits you."
⸻
That night, Toji sat alone in the garden, the Eye hovering above him like a silent sentinel.
He whispered to it.
"Will you show me the futures where I fall?"
The Eye blinked.
And showed him himself—broken.
Betrayed.
Crushed beneath weight he couldn't carry.
But each time, it ended with him standing again.
He smiled faintly.
"Good."