Echoes of the Forgotten Dawn

They were already running when the light began to bend.

Aela didn't look back. She didn't need to.

The air behind her shimmered with fractured echoes—like glass sheets slamming together in rapid succession. Trees bent toward the sound and then froze, as if time itself had been trapped mid-breath.

Kael ran just ahead, leading her along the half-formed path between crumbling stone arches and memory shadows. The terrain had shifted. This wasn't the forest anymore.

This was a loop zone.

"Keep moving!" Kael shouted over the pulse of echo energy. "If we stop now, we'll end up reliving the last ten minutes until our minds bleed!"

They jumped a collapsed bridge, landing hard on shifting earth.

Around them, visions flared in and out of existence.

Aela saw flashes:

Herself at age ten, chasing Sylen through Elowen's orchard

Her mother's face, fading into mist

A young Kael standing in firelight, arguing with someone Aela couldn't see

Riven… laughing in an empty field

Each time she blinked, reality hiccuped.

Then came the first loop.

---

They hit a clearing.

The exact same clearing they'd passed five minutes earlier.

Aela skidded to a stop. "Kael—we've already—"

He nodded grimly. "It's starting."

A voice echoed from the trees.

Her voice.

From the future.

> "If you're hearing this, then I didn't make it."

Kael turned sharply. "What is that?"

Aela looked around. The voice wasn't coming from a person—it was playing from a shimmer in the air, like a memory projection.

> "You're close to the fourth shard. But it's protected by a fracture loop. It learns your patterns. It feeds on hesitation. Don't stop. Don't reason with the fragments. And don't trust anyone who looks like me."

Kael muttered, "That's comforting."

The shimmer pulsed again.

> "There's only one way out: the mirrored tree. Burn the roots. That breaks the cycle."

Then the projection snapped off with a whisper like dry leaves.

Aela turned to Kael. "We have to find it."

"Mirrored tree," he muttered, scanning the looping forest. "Not exactly a common landmark."

"Maybe not." Aela drew the third shard from her pouch. It hummed as she held it aloft. "But maybe it remembers where it is."

She closed her eyes and let the shard's resonance guide her.

In the darkness of her mind, echoes surged.

One image rose to the surface.

A silver-barked tree growing upside down, its branches buried in stone, its roots reaching for the sky.

Aela snapped her eyes open. "That way."

---

They ran again, and the forest began to fight back.

Twice they nearly collided with versions of themselves—ghostly doubles that played out alternate events like broken memories caught in rewind.

In one loop, Kael died protecting her from a Wraith she never saw.

In another, she stabbed Kael with a blade of pure light.

Neither of them spoke as they passed those scenes.

They didn't need to.

They found the mirrored tree at the edge of a shallow ravine.

It grew upside-down from a chunk of crystal-encrusted rock. Its reflection shimmered above it, like the sky itself mirrored the roots. Its presence distorted the air, as if it were the fixed point around which the rest of the loop bent.

Aela reached for her firestone flint.

Kael stopped her. "Wait. Look."

He pointed to the roots. They were wrapped in strands of memory-thread—golden, fragile, humming like silk strings drawn too tight.

Each strand bore a name.

One of them was hers.

Another was Sylen's.

Another was Kael's.

"If we burn it," he said, "we may lose part of ourselves."

Aela hesitated. "We don't have a choice. We were warned."

"What if the warning was the trap?"

A voice—her voice again—echoed behind them.

But this time, it wasn't a projection.

It was another Aela.

Older. Weathered. Pale scars across her face. Eyes dull with loss.

"You can't break it," the older version said. "Not yet. You're not ready."

Aela turned slowly. "You're me."

"I was," the echo said. "Until I broke the loop too early. It took Kael. It rewrote Sylen. It tore the shard in half and made Riven whole."

Aela felt her heart thudding wildly.

Kael stepped forward. "Is this the real future?"

"There are no 'real' futures anymore," the older Aela said. "Only the ones we can hold long enough to call our own."

"You said don't trust any version of you," Kael whispered to Aela.

"I know," she said, stepping between them.

She met her future self's eyes.

"Then tell me this," she said quietly. "What did I say to Sylen the day she disappeared?"

The older Aela blinked.

"I don't—"

Too slow.

Aela dropped the shard and struck the flint.

Flame burst against the mirrored roots.

The forest screamed.

Not audibly—but through every tree, every shifting image, every false loop.

The loop shattered.

The false Aela vanished like steam.

---

They collapsed to the ground as the world realigned around them.

The real forest returned—quiet, heavy, still.

Kael sat back, breathing hard. "That was reckless."

"It was necessary," Aela said. "I'm done letting echoes tell me who I am."

He looked at her for a long time. Then nodded.

They stood.

And far away, on the southern horizon, a thin beam of blue light pierced the sky.

The fourth shard had awakened.

And it was waiting.