Shadows Over Soravin - Part 5

The once-proud ruin, hollowed halls of learning and vaults of buried arcanum, lay under a bruised sky. Ash still curled from fissures where forgotten magic had been disturbed, and the rain that fell was thick, laced with the taint of alchemical run-off, slicking the blackened stones and whispering like dying words into the cracks. The vault was gone. Collapsed. But its echoes still throbbed in the bones of the city.

Elira stood at the edge of a scorched overlook, eyes drawn to a vast burn pattern etched into the earth, a perfect, sprawling spiral ringed with elemental glyphs and a centerline bisected by the sigil of the Nightblade Circle. Not chalk or blood this time, seared into the land like a brand.

This had been Kael Morien’s design. A living vault. A trap baited with memory and bound with ancient oathfire.

Vaelin crouched beside her, hood down, rain pooling in the lines of his face. His gloved hand clutched a mask shard he’d pulled from the rubble, its surface fractured, but still faintly pulsing with Remnant energy. It shimmered under his shadowsight with broken oaths and buried grief, reacting to him.

“He planned this from the start,” he said, voice low. “The vault was never sealed. It waited.”

Elira’s throat tightened. Her magic still felt scorched, like some internal reservoir of fire had been stirred awake and hadn’t settled since. Phoenixblood had memory. It remembered when it burned.

Tovik paced a few strides behind them, his usual flair dulled by the weight of what they’d seen. The enchantments laced into his coat flickered, unable to maintain glamour illusions in this raw, memory-soaked atmosphere. Every time he blinked, he seemed to wrestle with another version of himself.

“We weren’t just trespassing,” he said quietly. “We were summoned. All of this... the sealed memories, the contract glyphs, the Remnants, Kael needed us to open the vault.”

Elira turned. “And now he has what he needs.”

Vaelin clenched his fist. “He’s begun building Echoborn.”

There was silence, thick, reverent.

Echoborn. A failed Nightblade project. Or so the records claimed. Beings forged from crystallized memories, given shape through oath-infused masks and soul-captured contracts. Not true people. Not quite Remnants. But something in between. And Kael had finished them. Perfect assassins, trained not with steel, but with your memories of pain. Your secrets. Your past.

A low tremor rolled beneath their feet. The air thickened, vibrating with tethered spell-threads, like harp strings plucked far beneath the earth.

Then the forest shifted.

Figures emerged from the treeline. At first glance: cloaked, masked, silent. But their forms distorted subtly with every step, faces flickering through emotions they hadn’t earned, limbs adjusting as if trying to remember how to move like the ones they imitated. Their masks gleamed, engraved with binding glyphs and luminous fractures.

Elira’s heart dropped.

“They’re not copies,” she whispered. “They’re... reflections.”

The lead Echoborn stepped forward, posture eerily familiar. Elira blinked and saw herself. Not her now, but a younger version. The way she had stood during her Crimson Library days, proud, aloof, fire burning just beneath the surface.

The voice it used was hers.

“Vaelin Duskborne. Elira Voss. Tovik Redmire of the Velvet Line. You are summoned. Surrender your truths.”

It was not a threat. It was an invocation.

Tovik drew a knife with a flourish, spinning it once between rain-slick fingers. “So they speak in creepy riddles. Good. I was afraid today might lack drama.”

“Don’t banter,” Vaelin said. “They’re designed to exploit weakness. Emotional recall magic. If they touch your mind...”

“...they become your regret,” Elira finished, igniting a ring of fire-sigils around them. “I remember the theory. I wrote the theory.”

The Echoborn charged.

The battle was a ritual of unmaking.

Vaelin met a masked figure wielding twin blades shaped like his own, but imbued with shadows that moved against the light. Its fighting style was his mentor’s, Master Korran, long dead, buried in a dishonored Nightblade grave. The way it moved, the feints, even the slight shift of weight before a parry, it was Korran. But not quite. An echo. And it knew every mistake Vaelin had ever made.

He fought defensively, not just to survive, but to remember who he was. Each strike drove shards of his past into the present. When he finally buried both blades into the echo’s heart, it whispered his full name, his birth name, before it shattered.

Tovik was dancing with death. His opponent changed every few seconds, his mother’s disappointed face, a noble rival who’d ordered his execution, the jester mask he once wore when he believed laughter could save him. His glamour magic failed again and again, each illusion overridden by stronger memories. He bled from his jaw. But he smiled through it.

“Elira!” he shouted. “Don’t let it speak!”

Elira’s opponent was her. Not a mirror, but a version born from suppressed memory. A woman bathed in phoenixfire, eyes like molten gold, wings of ash spiraling behind her. This version still bore the oath-brand she’d shared with Kael Morien. And she reached out with a hand of flame.

“You loved him,” it said. “And you still remember the warmth.”

Elira trembled, but only for a second.

“I remember what it cost me.”

She reached inward. Not for fire, but for clarity. Phoenixblood burned brighter when fueled by truth. And her truth was this: Kael had manipulated her memories, twisted her love into fuel, and carved her into a weapon she never wanted to be.

She ignited. White flame rippled out from her, burning not with heat, but with revelation. Her fire burned names from the Echoborn’s masks. They collapsed in screams of dissonant memory.

Vaelin stepped forward, his eyes hollow, blade slick with history. The final mask, shaped like a child, stood frozen.

Tovik approached.

The mask was his. A child version. One that flinched at every sound.

Tovik knelt. “You were made from fear. From the worst of me. But I outgrew you.”

He touched the mask.

“I forgive you.”

And the final Echoborn wept soundlessly, and unraveled.

The storm passed. Only steam and scorched soil remained.

The three of them stood in silence.

Elira turned to Vaelin, something new in her eyes, pain and tenderness intertwined. “He’s rewriting the world with memory magic. Turning truths into weapons. And he’s coming for us again.”

Vaelin held out the shard of the mask, now dark. “Then we hunt the architect. Not to kill him. To end what he started.”

Tovik wiped blood from his brow, cracked a shaky grin. “And here I thought today was just going to be emotionally scarring.”

Elira laughed, quiet, raw. “It was. But we lived.”

Vaelin nodded. “For now.”

Beneath the ruins of Soravin, in a chamber of glass and oathsteel, Kael Morien’s fingers traced a new mask.

On it were names he hadn’t yet spoken.

And at its core, bound in starlit ink, was a final contract:

“Rewrite the world. Begin with love.”

___________________________________________________

All Parts of the Series

Shadows Over Soravin Part 1

Shadows Over Soravin Part 2

Shadows Over Soravin Part 3

Shadows Over Soravin Part 4

Shadows Over Soravin Part 5