CHAPTER ONE:
The Day the World Forgot
The mountain screamed before it fell.
Not with sound—stone had no lungs—but with memory. Aerin felt it tear through the Weave like a ripped nerve, a violent shudder that made the air taste of iron and old rain. Every Listener within a mile collapsed. Every bird fled. Every echo that had slept beneath the earth woke at once.
Aerin stood frozen at the edge of the market square, hands trembling, breath caught halfway between fear and recognition.
It's happening again.
The scream reached them a heartbeat later—people shouting, stalls splintering, the ground buckling as if the world had forgotten how to hold itself together. Somewhere, glass shattered. Somewhere else, someone laughed hysterically, the sound sharp and wrong.
Then the mountain fell.
Stone folded inward, not outward. Towers of rock collapsed into themselves as if pulled by invisible hands, swallowed by dust and shadow. Ancient walls—older than the city, older than the kingdom—cracked open like brittle bone.
Aerin dropped to their knees.
Memories flooded in.
Not theirs.
A fortress being raised, hands blistered and proud. A child carving a name into stone that would outlast them. A battle fought and lost so long ago no one remembered why it mattered. The echoes slammed through Aerin's chest, heavy and suffocating.
Around them, the world unraveled.
Cantors of Stone ran toward the collapse, chanting through bloodied mouths, their voices low and desperate. Veilbound Choir members screamed as emotions not their own tore through them—panic, grief, awe, devotion. The air thrummed with failed bindings and broken resonance.
And beneath it all—something else.
A hollow space.
A wound where memory should have been.
Aerin felt it like a missing tooth they couldn't stop touching.
Someone did this.
The thought arrived fully formed, sharp as glass. This wasn't an accident. This wasn't a spell gone wrong. The echoes weren't fighting to escape—they were confused. Disoriented. As if part of their past had been ripped away mid-scream.
Echo Severing.
The forbidden art. The lie that claimed forgetting could save the world.
Aerin staggered to their feet as dust swallowed the square. Through the haze, they saw a woman standing perfectly still amid the chaos, her robes unmarked, her face calm in a way that made Aerin's skin crawl.
She was watching the mountain die.
Their eyes met.
In that instant, the hollow space inside Aerin flared—painful, blazing recognition. Images slammed into place: fire racing through streets, hands pulling Aerin away, a voice screaming their name as the world burned—
Then it was gone.
Ripped away like it had never existed.
Aerin gasped, clutching their chest.
The woman smiled.
Not cruelly. Not kindly.
Like someone relieved to see a lock still holding.
The dust thickened. Bells rang. People cried out names that would soon mean nothing.
And as the echoes settled into uneasy silence, Aerin understood something terrifying and absolute:
The world had forgotten this disaster before.
And whatever had been taken from it—
whatever had been taken from them—
was not done being lost.