Chapter 22: The Echo Between Worlds
When the dark receded, I wasn't sure if I was still standing.
There was no sound, no air—only a soft vibration that felt like thought instead of noise. The world had folded inward, layers collapsing until nothing remained but pulse and memory.
And then, slowly, the light began to return.
It didn't come from above or below but from within—threads of silver winding through the black like veins of mercury. I could see my hands again, though they weren't entirely mine. They shimmered between flesh and smoke, as if the body I once owned was trying to remember how to be real.
The girl stood before me.
Still. Silent. Watching.
But she wasn't the same either. Her form flickered between faces—child, elder, shadow, flame. Each breath she took seemed to weave time itself tighter around us.
"Where are we?" I asked, though my voice sounded far away.
She turned her gaze toward the horizon—if it could be called that. It was a curve of endless gray, bending upward like a great mirror. "Between," she said. "The echo between worlds. The place the breath hides when it sleeps."
Her words rippled through the air, bending it like heat.
I looked down. Beneath my feet lay reflections—countless versions of myself, all frozen mid-breath. Some looked broken. Some were still screaming. One knelt, hands pressed to the soil, light spilling from his mouth.
It was me.
It had always been me.
Carrow's voice reached me through the distance—muffled, strained. "You're… still here?"
I turned. He stood at the edge of the rift, sword buried in the ground, his armor cracked and smoking. The light around him flickered weakly. "You shouldn't be," he said. "No one survives the breath."
The girl's eyes found him. "He doesn't survive it," she whispered. "He is it."
Carrow shook his head. "You speak in riddles—like the dead."
She smiled faintly. "We all speak as we are."
I stepped forward, though the distance didn't change. "Carrow, I remember now," I said. "The breath… it wasn't meant to destroy. It was meant to return."
"Return where?"
"To the beginning."
The silver beneath us rippled again. Images bloomed like blossoms on water—cities turning to dust, oceans rising, skies folding back into fire. But through it all, one image stayed: a single figure kneeling in the ashes, exhaling light into the soil.
"That was me," I said quietly. "Before there were names. Before there was you."
Carrow's grip tightened on his sword. "Then why bring it back now?"
The girl stepped beside me. "Because the circle was never closed. The world kept breathing out but forgot how to breathe in."
Her hand touched my chest. The black fire there pulsed once, twice—then steadied. "He remembers how."
Carrow's face twisted with grief and fury. "And what happens to us when he does?"
The girl's eyes dimmed. "You dissolve. You return. Everything does."
He stared at her, then at me. "You can stop this, brother. You can choose."
That word again. Choose.
It echoed like thunder under my skin.
I looked at my hands, at the threads of shadow and light coiling there. For the first time, I understood—they weren't fighting each other. They were reaching for balance.
Maybe Carrow was right. Maybe I could still choose.
The girl's expression softened, as if she heard the thought. "Every circle has two ends," she said. "You may close it… or break it."
The air trembled. Beneath us, the reflections began to stir, their eyes turning upward, mouths opening in silent unison. The breath—the real breath—was waking.
Carrow lifted his sword again, its edge gleaming like a shard of memory. "Then choose, before the world does it for you."
I stepped toward him, toward her, toward the trembling horizon that no longer looked like sky but skin—alive, waiting.
"I remember what I was," I said. "But I don't know what I want to be."
The girl smiled through her tears. "Then that is where the next world begins."
And as the silver light rose around us like a tide, I drew a final breath—not to end the circle, but to bend it.
The world inhaled.
The echoes fell silent.
And in that silence, I chose.
To be continued…
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