Echoes of the Heart
Suddenly
Everything split.
"Hey Echo!"
Eli's voice cut through the suffocating darkness, a desperate, fiery beacon against the chaos that sought to devour him. The air snapped with pressure as Echo screamed, unleashing a blast of blue flames that shattered the encroaching gloom into a thousand shards of light.
But Eli's heart pounded as he watched his Echo his other self falling.
Not just falling.
Dragged.
The Spiral cracked open like a wound in the sky raw, grotesque and through it, the other Eli tumbled in slow, torturous descent. His limbs dangled, eyes wide yet hollow, caught in a limbo between sleep and scream.
Below him lay nothingness—an abyss that breathed. Whispering shadows clawed up from the void, reaching with fingers made of grief and memory. Eli's breath caught in his throat, a knot of helplessness threatening to choke him.
The Echo's blue coat fluttered, darkening as the spirals licked at its edges. Memories swirled in the air like moths to flame birthdays that never happened, laughter that curdled into silence, smiles twisted into nightmares.
"Stop!" Eli screamed, his voice breaking beneath the weight of terror and love.
But the Spiral was hungry.
And it listened to pain.
Behind it all, like a red god blinking awake, rose a massive eye its lid slow, deliberate. Watching. Amused. It blinked once. Then again.
It enjoyed the fall.
And Eli the real Eli could only float. Powerless. Watching his other self descend like a cursed star into something far worse than death.
A few minutes earlier.
The sun was shining.
Warm, golden light kissed the broken fields of the real world. The sky, empty and blue, stretched endlessly over twisted trees and scorched earth.
But the air was wrong.
Despite the sun's warmth, the wind bit like winter. Not a breeze a presence. A warning.
The trees stood perfectly still, petrified. Not a single leaf moved. Even the insects had gone silent, the usual buzz replaced with an eerie hush that gnawed at the edge of perception.
In the center of the dead clearing, a circle of frosted earth lay untouched by light. It shimmered faintly, rimmed with ice crystals, like a wound frozen mid-bleed. And at its heart…
Lay Eli.
His body was curled slightly, one hand twitching in the grass. Around him, frozen droplets hung in the air tiny orbs of suspended sorrow. They didn't fall. They didn't melt. They hovered, caught in the stillness of trauma.
No wind could pass through here.
No sound could stay.
Only one unspoken truth echoed from the place:
"This place remembers."
"And it does not forgive."
Eli's face was pale, lips tinged with blue. Even in unconsciousness, his brow creased with pain not the fleeting kind, but the kind that etches itself into bone.
"Why?"
The word tore from Eli's throat, somewhere between a scream and a sob. "Why can't I save them?"
His fists clenched at his sides. Nails bit into flesh. Warm blood spilled into his palms, grounding him in pain. He wanted to strike the Spiral. To burn it. To tear the eye from the sky.
But the sadness…
The sadness weighed heavier.
It crushed him. Wrapped around his heart like cold metal, squeezing until breath became labor. Until hope seemed distant.
"Eli…" His voice cracked. "I'm here. I won't let you go."
The other Eli—his Echo—kept falling. Kept descending into the Spiral's gut.
And Eli could feel him. His pain. His surrender.
They were bound.
Two halves of a broken whole.
"Stop falling!" Eli cried. "Please! You have to fight!"
But the Echo's eyes remained vacant haunted.
Eli's fists crashed into his Echo's face, again and again, each blow fueled by grief and desperation. Tears streamed down his cheeks, mixing with blood as his knuckles split, bones cracking beneath each strike. "Wake up," he cried, voice trembling, "please… wake up." But the Spiral's grip was suffocating, its dream world clinging to them like tar. Shadows screamed around them. The air thickened. And still they were falling.
Falling through layers of memory, through firelight and frost, through echoes of pain that didn't belong only to them.
Thencrack. The illusion broke like frozen glass.
Eli's Echo jolted. Gasping. Half-awake. But still falling limbs weightless, heart thrashing against his ribs. The echo-world splintered around him, but the Spiral hadn't let go.
And then he saw it him.
Just beyond the tearing veil of frost and memory stood the real Eli.
Watching him. Waiting. Falling beside him.
His presence sent a chill deeper than the void. Not warm. Not safe. But knowing. As if time itself paused around his figure. The air between them whispered a warning:
You're not alone… but you're not out yet.
And beside them both, slowly stirring, eyes blinking open in the cold…
And then, the Spiral roared.
A thousand screams merged into one. The shadows writhed with glee, surging forward like a black tide. The ground beneath Eli trembled, threatening to split.
"You won't take him!" Eli screamed, fury rising to meet grief. "You won't have him!"
He threw out his hand, reaching for the falling figure. "I won't let you go!"
The Echo twisted mid-air. For a heartbeat, their eyes met.
And in that glance
Hope.
A flicker. A flicker was enough.
"Fight!" Eli shouted. "Fight for us!"
The red eye flared. Furious.
The shadows lunged.
But Eli stood unmoved. Heart hammering. Teeth clenched.
Blue flames erupted. A cyclone of raw defiance.
They danced around him like living stars, blazing against the Spiral's darkness.
And for the first time
The Spiral flinched.
The void rippled.
The eye blinked erratically, its gaze no longer amused but threatened.
Eli felt it. The pull. The thread between him and his Echo growing taut.
A tether. A bond.
The shadows recoiled, hissing like burned flesh. And Eli burning bright stepped forward.
"Together!" he yelled.
The flames surged higher, a furious blue beacon that lit the void like a sun.
They weren't just different.
They weren't just fragments.
They were one.
Bound by blood. Bound by suffering. Bound by purpose.
And in that unity, they would fight.
Meanwhile back to the real world,
The Eye covered the world.
It stretched across the heavens limitless, grotesque, unblinking until there was no sky left, only the maddening spiral of its bleeding gaze. The clouds dissolved into threads of flesh. The sun, a distant memory. The Eye had become the new sky, and the world below turned red beneath its tears.
Its weeping wasn't rain, but slow, viscous droplets of something alive—each one crashing to earth with a sickening hiss, burning through trees, walls, and stone. Where the tears fell, the ground pulsed. Crops rotted in seconds. Rivers screamed as they boiled. The oceans stilled, as if listening.
People fell to their knees—not in worship, but in sheer terror, clawing at their ears to silence the whispering that came with every drop. Cities went dark. Power grids blinked out. Machines stopped humming. Even time felt slower beneath the crimson sky, as if the Eye had reached inside the heartbeat of the planet and gripped it tight.
And far below, where no one could see, something ancient… stirred.
It twitched once beneath the crust of the earth then again, slower, heavier like bones remembering how to move after centuries of stillness. The Eye pulsed in response, its bleeding intensifying, each tear now falling with a sound like shattering glass and screaming flesh.
Then
The ground cracked. A single fracture. Quiet. But deep.
And from that crack…
A hand began to rise.
Not human. Not alive. Not dead either.
Just… returning.
And high above it all, the Eye blinked.
Only once.
And the world forgot how to scream.