Luminos Prime never slept. Beneath its false suns, the city shone with relentless brilliance, a blinding truth forged by the Lightbringer Dynasty. Towers of alabaster stone pierced the ever-twilight sky, casting razor-thin shadows across marble streets. Lanterns glowed with artificial day, designed to burn away even the hint of dusk. Here, shadows were a threat—something to be feared, chained, or purged.
But some shadows refused to be erased.
Izen Callow ran like the devil's breath chased him.
Boots slapped pavement slick with morning mist. Down alleyways where the sunstones didn't reach. Past rusting gutter-pipes that belched steam. His lungs burned. In his right hand, clenched white-knuckle tight, was the thing he shouldn't have stolen: a Memory Coin. Smooth and cold, the size of a thumbnail. Ink-black, with veins of faint violet pulsing through its shell.
It throbbed with a pulse not his own.
Behind him, shadows lengthened unnaturally. Two Binder Guild Enforcers gave chase, their footsteps precise and methodical. One of them whispered, and the street behind Izen twisted—a low wave of black rising like liquid glass. He leapt over a shadow pool just as it tried to grip his ankles.
"Third offense," one of the Enforcers called. "No trial this time, Lightless."
He didn't respond. There was no point.
Lightless. The word burned worse than their pursuit.
He had no shadow. None. Not even a flicker under the harsh suns of Luminos Prime. To be born Lightless was to be an error in a world built on shadow. No echo, no Aspect, no heritage. It made him lower than the gutter-kin. Barely human.
And yet—he could feel the Coin.
It beat like a second heart against his palm, and that terrified him more than the Enforcers. The stories said only binders could feel the pulse. That memory shadows couldn't react to those without their own.
So why did this one whisper to him?
He turned sharply into a passage barely wide enough for two shoulders. One Enforcer followed. The other took the high path—boots clanking up metal stairs to cut him off. They were trained, precise, and bound to their Aspect Shadows.
Izen had only desperation.
And maybe something worse.
He skidded to a halt. A wall. Cracked, salt-wet brick and copper pipes. Dead end.
A soft, rippling sound behind him. The Enforcer's Aspect Shadow detached, stretching like a scythe across the wall. It lunged.
Izen turned, drew a knife—pointless, but instinctual—and flung it at the Enforcer's legs. It missed. The Enforcer laughed once, low and confident, and raised his gloved hand.
"Yield."
The Coin pulsed violently.
And then, for the first time in Izen's memory-starved life, he cast a shadow.
It wasn't like the others. It didn't stretch naturally, or fall from his feet. It bloomed, black and violet, rising like a flame behind him. The Enforcer hesitated.
"What…?"
Izen didn't wait. He sprinted toward the wall and leapt. The Coin flared, and the world bent. Just for a second.
He fell through his own shadow.
***
He woke to a skyless ceiling.
Everything was dim. Stone walls rippled like oil, and the air smelled of ink and old parchment. His limbs ached. The Coin was gone.
But something else was in its place.
"Not many can survive raw echo like that," said a voice. "Even fewer can wear it."
Izen sat up sharply. A figure stood nearby—neither man nor woman, clothed in layered robes of dark silk, with no visible face. Just shifting shadow. It shimmered with fragments of old memories, like flickers of someone else's dream.
"Who are you?"
The figure tilted its head. "Call me Velrith. A shadow once bound to a man who tried to rewrite history with ink and grief."
"Am I dead?"
"Would it matter?"
Izen's throat tightened. He looked at his hands. They shimmered faintly in the dim light, and behind him… he saw the flicker of a shadow again. Faint. Unstable.
"You're not dead. You're something new. Something unfinished."
Velrith stepped closer. "I've been waiting for a vessel. One who could bear memory not their own. One who knew the ache of absence."
Izen's mind flashed with dreams not his—glimpses of war, of ink bleeding from veins, of names carved into stone only to be erased.
"What do you want from me?"
Velrith smiled, or seemed to. "To be remembered. And in exchange, I'll give you something this world has denied you."
He extended a hand of pure shadow.
"A name that echoes. A shadow that obeys. A path."
Izen stared.
Outside, the suns of Luminos Prime flared—but for the first time in years, he didn't feel their heat.
Only the pull of something older.
The first echo of a Chronicle Reaver.
***
Time slowed.
Izen hesitated, heart pounding. He wanted to ask a dozen questions. About the Coin. About Velrith. About why the world had always hated him for something he could never control.
But instead, he reached out.
The moment his fingers touched Velrith's, his mind erupted.
Not pain. Memory.
A cascade of thoughts that weren't his flooded in—names in languages he'd never spoken, feelings that carved new scars across his soul. A village burning. A lover's betrayal. A throne room submerged in ink.
He fell to his knees, gasping. The floor rippled like shadow-stuff.
Velrith stood silent, watching.
The wave passed. Izen blinked, trembling, and realized something.
He remembered all of it.
Every foreign memory. Every strange echo. And they were real.
His hand shook as he lifted it. His fingers glowed faint violet. And behind him, a thin line of darkness stretched—his own shadow, flickering like a wounded flame.
"I… I remember things that never happened," he whispered.
"No," Velrith corrected, voice soft and reverent. "You remember things that did. Just not to you. Not yet."
"What am I now?"
Velrith approached, eyes glinting from the dark.
"You are what the world tried to bury. A bearer of echoes. A child of absence. A Reaver of the forgotten."
A pause.
"Do you accept the Path, Izen Callow?"
He didn't know what waited ahead. He didn't know what it would cost. But he had nothing. No name. No shadow. No past. Only the hunger to be more than nothing.
"I accept."
Velrith extended both hands, and black ink spiraled in the air between them. Symbols formed, runes from a language Izen felt deep in his bones.
Then the ink sank into his skin.
He didn't scream. He bit down on the noise, curling forward as the symbols branded themselves into his arms, neck, spine.
When it ended, he was lying on his side.
Velrith knelt beside him.
"Welcome, Chronicle Reaver. Sequence Nine."
The chamber pulsed.
Far above, in the city of light, a new shadow stirred—and the world began to shift.