chapter 13 of memory and interlude

Only the eternal pearl-gray light that came from everywhere and nowhere, casting no shadows, marking no time. The echo-people drifted through their loops, performing actions they'd forgotten the purpose of, waiting for something they couldn't remember.

And among them, barely distinguishable from the background, a smudge of faded color moved without direction.

Echo-Marcy had no sense of how long she'd been drifting. Time didn't work properly here.  Maybe she didn't work properly anymore. She moved because moving was what people did. She breathed because breathing was what people did. She existed because... because...

She couldn't remember why.

Sometimes fragments surfaced. A courtyard. A tree with no leaves. A man with scales and horns who reached for her and called her name. But the fragments dissolved as quickly as they came, slipping through her fingers like water, like smoke, like everything in this place that refused to stay solid.

She was so tired.

Not physically—she wasn't sure she had a body that could feel physical tiredness anymore. But something deeper than bone was exhausted. Something that had been holding on for too long and was finally, finally letting go.

Maybe, she thought distantly, I should just stop.

Stop moving. Stop trying to remember. Stop being.

It would be so easy.

It would be such a relief.

She drifted toward the Fountain of Lost Names, drawn by habit or instinct or the echo of a purpose she'd long since forgotten. The names carved into its surface shifted as she approached, rearranging themselves in patterns that might have meant something once.

She didn't look for her own name.

She wasn't sure she had one anymore.

And then.

Something changed.

The gray light flickered. Just for a moment, just at the edge of her faded perception. A ripple in the endless sameness of the City.

Echo-Marcy stopped drifting.

She didn't know why. Didn't have enough coherence left to analyze the instinct. But something old, something that predated her fading made her turn around.

It stood at the far end of the plaza.

At first, Echo-Marcy thought it was another echo. The City was full of them. The figures caught in loops, drifting through patterns they couldn't escape. This one was shaped like a deer, which was unusual but not impossible. The City contained echoes of everything that had ever been lost.

Then it moved.

And she understood, with whatever fragment of understanding she still possessed, that this was not an echo.

This was something else entirely.

The creature stepped forward, and its body shifted layers of translucent cards shuffling and reshuffling with each motion. Hearts. Dozens of them, hundreds of them, layered over each other like scales or feathers or pages in a book that never ended. They caught the gray light and refracted it into something almost like color: deep reds, faded pinks, the purple-black of old bruises.

Its eyes opened.

Hundreds of eyes, scattered across its form along its neck, its flanks, its legs, clustered around what might have been a face. They blinked independently, each one a different color, each one focused on something different.

And then, one by one, they all turned to look at her.

Echo-Marcy felt something she hadn't felt since fading.

Fear.

Not the dull, distant echo of fear that sometimes surfaced when she slipped too deep into her loops this was sharp. Present. Real. Her faded form trembled with it, colors flickering in distress.

She didn't recognize this creature. Had no memory of ever seeing anything like it. But something older than memory, something written into whatever was left of her, understood what stood before her.

Predator.

And she was very, very small.

The creature took another step forward.

She pressed herself against a crumbling wall and watched the Mnemophage enter the courtyard.

It moved like something out of a nightmare if she could still have nightmares, if she could still sleep, if she could still do any of the things that living people did. Cards layered and shifted across its form, rustling with each step a sound like shuffling decks, like whispered secrets, like the flutter of a thousand letters never sent. They suggested the shape of a deer without committing to it. Always moving. Always rearranging. A creature glimpsed through a kaleidoscope of red.

Its antlers were wrong.

Not the branching architecture of something grown, but bleached bone smooth, pale, stripped by time or violence into something that looked more like remains than crown. Bone-white vines wound through them, delicate and still, and from those vines hung flowers. Bleeding hearts. They glowed softly, pulsing with light that had no source, hanging like little lanterns. Like offerings. Like warnings.

Another echo stumbled into the courtyard.

Echo-Marcy saw it happen saw the creature's head turn with slow, terrible patience. Saw its body shift, cards rippling, revealing gaps where a ribcage should be.

Something moved in those gaps.

Vines. Dark and organic where the ones on its antlers were bone white. They coiled in the hollow of its chest like nesting serpents, thorned and waiting.

The other echo tried to run.

The vines struck.

They moved with a speed that made their previous stillness obscene lashing out, wrapping around the fleeing figure, dragging it back. The echo struggled, flickered, made a sound like static and grief. And then the vines pulled it in.

Into the gaps. Into the hollow. Into the creature itself.

For a moment, light pulsed in the cage of the Mnemophage's chest. Then the light dimmed. Faded. Compressed.

A new card formed among the others. Faint impressions on its surface. A face. A moment. A life reduced to decoration.

The cards that formed its body caught the gray light and held it. Each one bore a faint impression a face, a moment, a feeling frozen in translucent red. She saw a woman laughing, head thrown back. A child clutching a parent's hand. Lovers embracing. Soldiers weeping.

Memories.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. All the precious moments of all the people this creature had ever fed upon, preserved like pressed flowers in a book of horrors.

The creature stopped a few feet from where Echo-Marcy had collapsed.

It had eyes.

Two of them set in that shifting card-skull where a deer's eyes should be, wrong in every way that mattered. The whites showed too much. The irises tracked her with awareness no animal possessed.

The Mnemophage didn't rush.

It crossed the courtyard with that same terrible patience, hooves silent on the cobblestones. The cards that formed its body rustled and shifted, rearranging themselves with each step like a deck being perpetually shuffled. The bleeding heart flowers swayed gently from its crown, their soft glow pulsing in rhythms that matched no heartbeat she could name.

Echo-Marcy tried to run.

Her legs refused to move.

She tried to look away, but she couldn't. They held her pinned. Not with interest or with malice.

That was the worst part. There was no hunger in that gaze. No cruelty. Just the flat, patient attention of something doing what it had been made to do. She wasn't prey to be savored. She wasn't a mystery to be solved.

The creature stopped in front of her.

Its head tilted. Considering. Assessing.

The gaps in its chest rippled. The vines began to move and struck her.

Echo-Marcy didn't even see them move one moment they were coiled in the darkness of the creature's chest, the next they were around her. Thorns bit into her faded form, not quite pain but something adjacent to it.The echo of hurt.

She struggled.

It didn't matter.

The vines tightened, lifted, pulled her closer to that hollow ribcage. She could see into it now into the gaps between the shifting cards. There was nothing inside. No organs, no structure, no center. Just darkness and the slow writhing of more vines, waiting to receive her.

The creature's head lowered.

Those human eyes met hers. Close enough now to see the details she wished she couldn't the way the irises caught light wrong, the way the pupils dilated with something that wasn't quite interest. It blinked once. Slow. Deliberate.

Then the vines began to pull.

Not into the chest. Not yet. But through her. She felt them threading into her faded form, finding the places where her memories lived, where the fragments of who she'd been still clung to existence.

And they began to read.

Echo-Marcy relived it in fragments. The shop. The door. The garden with its hungry flowers. Hands pulling her back from the edge. Fire burning through her veins. A voice saying her name like it mattered.

She felt each memory dim as the creature took it. Felt herself becoming less with every passing second. Soon she would be nothing. Just another card in the collection. Just another face pressed into red.

Then the creature stopped.

The vines went still inside her not withdrawing, not continuing, just frozen. Those human eyes blinked. Once. Twice. Its head tilted at an angle that looked almost like listening.

Something had changed.

Echo-Marcy didn't know what. Couldn't know. But she felt the shift in the way the vines loosened their grip on her memories. The way the creature's attention sharpened into something almost careful.

It withdrew the vines from her mind.

But it didn't release her.

Instead, the thorned tendrils adjusted their hold, gentler now. Not the grip of something feeding. The grip of something keeping. The creature's head lifted toward its own crown of bone and bloom.

A new vine began to grow from the bleached antlers.

It unfurled slowly bone-white, delicate, curling outward like a question. At its tip, a bud formed. Swelled. Opened into a bleeding heart flower larger than the others, its glow soft and waiting.

The vines around Echo-Marcy tightened once more.

And pulled her up.

She couldn't scream.

Didn't know if she'd forgotten how or if the vines had taken that from her too. She could only watch as the flower opened wider its petals unfurling like hands reaching to receive her. The glow inside pulsed. Waiting. Hungry in a way that was different from the creature itself.

The vines lifted her higher, positioning her above that open bloom. She could see the other flowers now, hanging beneath her. Could see the faint shapes inside some of them suggestions of forms, of faces, of things that had once been echoes and were now just specimens.

She fell into the flower.

The petals closed around her like a fist. Soft and firm and absolute. The glow wrapped her in warmth that should have been comforting but wasn't couldn't be, not when she could feel herself being held in a way that allowed no movement, no fading, no escape.

She couldn't see anymore. Couldn't hear the shuffle of cards or the silence of hooves on stone.

But she could feel.

She felt the creature begin to move.

Warmth.

That was all Echo-Marcy knew for a long time. Warmth and softness and the gentle pulse of light through petals she couldn't see past. The flower had sealed around her completely a cocoon of faintly glowing tissue that held her suspended, preserved, kept.

She couldn't move.

Couldn't fade.

Couldn't do anything but exist in this strange amber state, neither awake nor asleep, neither alive nor gone.

Time passed. Or didn't. She had no way to measure it.

But she felt things.

Motion. The creature was walking she could sense the rhythm of its hooves through the vine that connected her bloom to its crown. A steady, patient pace. Unhurried. Certain of its destination.

Sound. Muffled through the petals, but present. The shuffle of cards. The distant murmur of other echoes scattering. The creak of something old settling into new shapes.

And color.

Even through the flower's membrane, she could see it bleeding in. Gray giving way to red. Soft at first, then deeper. Arterial. The color of roses and wounds and things that grew by drinking pain.

The City was changing around them.

Or they were leaving the City behind.

She didn't know which. Couldn't know. Could only drift in her preservation and feel the world shift from the forgotten.

The creature stopped.

Echo-Marcy felt it in the sudden stillness. The bloom swayed gently, then settled.

Voices.

She could hear them now, no longer muffled by the City's gray silence. Real voices, sharp and clear, speaking words she couldn't quite parse through the petals.

Then light as the bloom opened.

It happened slowly, petals unfurling like hands releasing a gift. The warmth receded. The glow faded. And Echo-Marcy tumbled out, spilling onto stone that was cold and hard and real in a way nothing in the City had been.

She couldn't move. Could barely see. Her faded form lay crumpled on dark flagstones, flickering at the edges, too weak to do anything but exist.

But she could look up.

The Mnemophage stood above her, its card-layered form rustling in a breeze she couldn't feel. Those human eyes gazed down at her for a moment. Assessing. Confirming delivery.

Then its head lowered.

A bow. An offering. A hunter presenting its catch to something greater than itself.

Hooves clicked on stone. Someone was approaching.

"Well, well." The voice was warm. Pleasant. The kind of voice that offered comfort before cruelty. "What have you brought me?"

Echo-Marcy couldn't turn her head. Could only wait as footsteps circled her fallen form, slow and considering.

Boots entered her vision. Dark leather, polished to a gleam. They stopped inches from her face.

A pause.

Then a sharp intake of breath.

"Turn her over."

Hands grabbed her not the vines, but actual hands, rough and careless. She was flipped onto her back, her faded features exposed to gray-red light and the gaze of whoever stood above her.

Silence.

Long. Heavy. The kind of silence that meant something had changed.

"Leave us."

The words were quiet, but they carried command. Echo-Marcy heard the Mnemophage move hooves on stone, cards rustling, retreating into whatever shadows had spawned it.

Then he crouched down.

And she saw him.

Beautiful.

That registered first, because it was impossible to miss. The kind of beautiful that existed in paintings of angels . Perfect, cold, designed rather than born. Dark hair pulled back from a face that could have ended wars. Armor of leather and metal worked with patterns that might have been hearts or might have been wounds.

And his eyes.

Deep crimson. Almost black in the strange light. When they found hers, Echo-Marcy felt something she hadn't felt since fading.

He studied her the way a collector studies a new acquisition. Searching. Assessing. His head tilted slowly, and something flickered across his expression recognition, then a pleasure that made her want to dissolve entirely.

"I know you," he said softly.

He reached into his armor and withdrew something. A folded piece of parchment, worn at the edges from handling. He opened it with careful fingers, glanced at it, then back at her.

A portrait.

Echo-Marcy couldn't see it clearly from her angle, but she saw enough. A face. Her face. Rendered in precise strokes, every detail captured the shape of her eyes, the set of her jaw, the particular stubbornness that lived in her expression even when she didn't mean it to.

"Ace painted this from memory," Red Jack said, almost conversationally. "After your little encounter. He was quite impressed, you know. A Waywalker who killed one of our Roses." His smile sharpened. "Mother has been very eager to meet you."

He tucked the portrait away and reached down, gripping her chin with fingers like iron wrapped in silk.

"You're faded," he observed. "An echo. Not the real thing." His thumb traced along her jaw. "But you wear her face. Carry her memories." His eyes glittered. "That makes you useful."

He straightened, looking down at her with satisfaction painted across his terrible, beautiful face.

"I have someone who needs to see you."

Red Jack didn't carry her himself.

He gestured, and others came. The figures she couldn't focus on clearly, as their shapes that moved with purpose and cruelty. They lifted her faded form between them, careless of how she flickered at their touch, and followed as Red Jack walked deeper into the Court.

Echo-Marcy saw it in fragments.

Gardens. Vast and impossible, stretching in directions that didn't make sense. Roses in colors that hurt to look at. Vines that turned to follow her passage. Flowers that opened wider as she passed, their centers dark and hungry.

Everything here fed on something.

She could feel it. Even faded as she was, even barely coherent, she felt the reaching. The wanting. Every bloom and tendril straining toward her, sensing what she carried, desperate for a taste.

Red Jack walked through it all like a prince in his kingdom. The thorns parted for him. The roses turned their faces to track him. This was his place. His power. His garden of beautiful horrors.

All to soon they arrived.

The Garden of Specimens opened before them like a wound.

A vast circular space, ringed by hedges so tall they vanished into darkness above. The ground glowed with phosphorescent moss. And scattered across that moss like sculptures in a gallery.

People.

Echo-Marcy's faded mind recoiled.

They were everywhere. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Wrapped in thorns. Floating in crystal. Posed like mannequins with peaceful expressions that felt more like death than sleep.

But they weren't dead.

She could feel them. The spark of life that remained in each one. Trapped somewhere between existence and oblivion, their essence drained but not extinguished. Preserved. Kept. Collected.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Red Jack's voice was soft. Reverent. "Mother's masterwork. Centuries of careful cultivation."

He gestured as they walked, pointing out specimens like a curator giving a tour.

"A dreamer. Could shape reality with her imagination." A woman in crystal, eyes moving behind closed lids, hands twitching toward something only she could see.

"A speaker of the dead." A man wrapped in thorns, mouth forced open, throat filled with roses that bloomed and wilted in endless cycles.

They passed a child. Couldn't have been more than ten. Frozen mid-flight, arms outstretched, wings of crystallized light growing from her back half-formed, forever incomplete.

"A nascent Waywalker of the Featherclaws in Fractura" Red Jack said. "Found her before she fully manifested. Mother is patient. She'll wait until the gift ripens."

Echo-Marcy wanted to close her eyes. Wanted to look away. But her faded form didn't obey her anymore, and the hands that held her kept her facing forward.

This is what awaits the real Marcy.

This is what she's walking into.

Red Jack stopped.

"And here," he said, his voice dropping to something soft and cruel, "is our most recent acquisition."

Echo-Marcy looked up.

And her faded heart shattered.

He hung at the center of the Garden.

Chains grew from the thorns themselves, wrapping around his wrists, his ankles, his throat. Iron links wound with vines that dug into his scales, drawing thin lines of blood that dripped onto the moss below.

His wings were pinned. Spread wide, cruelly displayed, each membrane pierced by thorns that held them open like a butterfly in a collector's case.

His claws were bound in iron that glowed faintly red.

And his on his mouth a muzzle. Metal and thorn, clamped around his jaw. She could see the wounds where it had been fitted places where thorns had driven into scale and flesh, scarring over, tearing open, scarring again.

He couldn't speak.

Couldn't roar.

Couldn't summon the fire that was his birthright.

They had reduced him to something caged. Something silenced. Something powerless.

But his eyes were still him.

Amber-green, bright with fury that hadn't dimmed. When he saw Red Jack approaching, they burned hotter. When he saw the figures carrying something between them.

Then he saw her.

Caelum went rigid.

Every muscle tensed. Chains rattled. Thorns dug deeper into wounds that had barely begun to heal. His eyes fixed on her with an intensity that stole what little breath Echo-Marcy had left.

He recognizes me.

He thinks I'm her.

A sound escaped him. Low, broken, muffled by the muzzle, but unmistakable in its desperate hope. He strained against his bonds, reaching toward her with hands that couldn't reach, calling to her with a voice that couldn't call.

And Echo-Marcy felt something she hadn't felt since fading.

Guilt.

Because she wasn't her. Wasn't the Marcy he loved, the Marcy he'd sacrificed everything to protect. She was just an echo. A copy. A pale imitation wearing a familiar face.

And she was about to be used to destroy him.

"Caelum." Red Jack's voice dripped with mock sympathy. "Look what I found. Wandering in the City of Echoes, all alone."

The sound Caelum made was anguished.

Not a roar the muzzle prevented that. Something deeper. Something primal. A sound from the core of him, from the place where draconis kept their fire and their fury and their grief.

"Don't worry," Red Jack continued, circling Caelum's suspended form with lazy grace. "It's not actually her. Just an echo. A memory given form."

He reached out and ran one finger along Caelum's jaw, just above the muzzle. The dragon snarled or at least tried to, but the sound came out strangled. Weak.

"She has all her memories, though. Every moment you spent together. Every lesson. Every lingering glance." Red Jack smiled. "All that love, locked up inside this fragile little shell."

He turned to the figures holding Echo-Marcy.

"Put her down. Let him see."

They released her. She crumpled to the moss at the base of Caelum's prison, unable to stand, unable to do anything but look up at the draconis she had loved in another life.

Red Jack crouched beside her, speaking softly not to her, but to Caelum.

"She's coming for you, you know. The real one. Gathering fragments. Fighting her way across worlds." He tilted his head. "Romantic, really. Nauseating, but romantic."

His eyes glittered.

"And when she walks through our door we're going to take her. Add her to Mother's collection." He gestured at the specimens surrounding them. "She'll look lovely next to the dreamer, don't you think?"

Caelum thrashed.

Chains groaned. Thorns tore deeper. Blood flowed faster. And still he fought throwing everything against bonds that wouldn't break, wouldn't give him even an inch.

Red Jack watched with satisfaction.

"There it is. That fire." He straightened, brushing moss from his knees. "Keep the echo here. Let him look at her. Let him remember what he's lost."

He turned away.

"And what he's about to lose again."

Red Jack's footsteps faded into the garden.

Silence fell.

Just Echo-Marcy and Caelum.

Surrounded by the preserved bodies of everyone the Queen had ever deemed valuable.

Caelum's eyes hadn't left her.

He knew she wasn't real. Red Jack had twisted the knife with obvious pleasure as he made sure that was known. But knowing didn't stop him from looking at her like she might become real if he stared long enough.

Amber-green eyes, swimming with grief that had nowhere to go.

She wore Marcy's face. Carried Marcy's memories. And he had to look at her and feel all of it anyway.

Echo-Marcy wanted to look away.

She couldn't bear that gaze. The love in it. The loss.

But her faded form didn't obey her anymore.

So she lay there on the glowing moss and let him grieve what she wasn't.

Her form collapsed into a smudge of color on the moss. Barely visible. No longer coherent enough to speak or think or feel.

But still there.

Still existing, in whatever way echoes existed.

Caelum stared at what remained of her.

She loves you.

She's coming.

You have to stop her.

For a long moment, the words didn't make sense.

They hung in his mind like fragments of a language he'd forgotten. Sounds without meaning. Shapes without form. He heard them, but they couldn't be real, couldn't be true, because if they were true then.

She's coming.

The first crack.

Small. Almost imperceptible. A fracture in something that had been holding him together through weeks of chains and thorns and silence.

She's coming here.

The crack widened.

Marcy is coming here.

And something inside him shattered.

She was supposed to be safe.

That was the only thing. The only thing. Through everything they'd done to him, through every moment of agony, through the muzzle and the chains and the thorns digging deeper every time he breathed he had held onto one truth.

She's not here.

She's somewhere else.

Somewhere they can't reach her.

He didn't know where. Didn't need to know. It was enough that she existed in some place that wasn't this garden, this court, this endless red hell that had swallowed him whole.

He had let them break him because she was safe.

Let them take his voice because she would never have to hear him scream.

Let them pin his wings and bind his claws and drive iron into his jaw because none of it mattered as long as she was out there. Alive. Free. Beyond the reach of everything that was killing him.

That belief had been the only light left.

And now it was gone.

She's coming.

Not safe. Not free. Not beyond their reach.

Coming here.

Walking toward the Court with her stubborn jaw set and her reckless courage burning and no idea what was waiting for her.

Because of me.

The thought hit him like a physical blow.

I'm the trap.

His breath caught. Stuttered. The muzzle pressed against his jaw as his chest heaved with something that wanted to be a sob and couldn't find its way out.

I'm the bait.

Every moment of his suffering suddenly rearranged itself into a new and terrible pattern. The chains. The display. The way they'd kept him alive when killing him would have been easier.

They weren't punishing him.

They were using him.

And it was working.

He wanted to rage.

Wanted to tear himself free and burn this garden to cinders and fly until he found her. Wanted to put himself between her and every horror the Court could conjure. Wanted to be the dragon he was supposed to be, the protector, the fire, the thing that kept her safe.

But he couldn't move.

Couldn't roar.

Couldn't even whisper her name.

The chains held him suspended. The thorns held him bleeding. The muzzle held him silent. And somewhere out there, beyond worlds he couldn't reach, she was coming to save him.

She was going to die for him.

Or worse.

No.

The word came from somewhere deep. Somewhere beneath the pain and the despair and the crushing weight of his own helplessness.

No. No. No.

Not a plan. Not a strategy. Not even a coherent thought.

Just refusal.

Raw and desperate and absolutely useless.

He couldn't stop her. Couldn't warn her. Couldn't do anything except hang here and watch the smudge of color on the moss that wore her face and know that he was going to lose her.

That he was going to be the reason he lost her.

His eyes squeezed shut.

Marcy.

Her name. Just her name. Pulled from somewhere that still remembered what it felt like to say it. To see her look up when he called. To watch her face shift into that expression that meant she was listening even when she pretended not to.

Marcy.

He wasn't praying. He didn't believe in anything that would listen.

He wasn't reaching out. There was nothing to reach for.

He was just...

Breaking.

I'm not worth it.

I was never worth it.

Please....

The Codex fragments spread across the table like pieces of a puzzle that didn't want to be solved.

Marcy had been staring at them for hours. Comparing symbols. Cross-referencing passages. Trying to find the pattern that would tell her where to go next, what door to open, how to get to—

She didn't let herself finish the thought.

"You should rest."

Frontia's voice came from somewhere behind her. The captain sat in one of the curved chairs that grew from Quillotl's walls, staff resting across her knees.

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

Marcy didn't answer. Just turned back to the fragments.

The ship creaked around them. Gentle. Almost like breathing.

And then the wall began to change.

It started as a ripple.

The surface in front of Marcy shifted like skin remembering something it had seen. The soft light of the browsing deck flickered once, twice.

"Quillotl?" Frontia was on her feet. "What did you catch?"

The ship didn't answer in words.

Color bled across the wall instead. Gray at first. Then red. Deep and arterial, spreading like veins through the surface.

Marcy's hands stilled on the fragments.

She knew that red.

The image resolved.

A garden. Circular. Ringed by hedges that vanished into darkness above. Moss glowing beneath bodies that were

Preserved.

Marcy's stomach turned. People wrapped in thorns. Floating in crystal. Posed like dolls with expressions too peaceful to be real.

But Quillotl wasn't showing her them.

The image shifted. Guided her attention to the center.

And she saw him.

Caelum.

Chains around his wrists. His ankles. His throat. Thorned vines digging into his scales, drawing blood that dripped onto the glowing moss below.

His wings pinned wide. Pierced.

His claws bound.

And his mouth

A muzzle. Metal and thorn. Wounds where it had been fitted, scarred and torn and scarred again.

Marcy couldn't breathe.

Something flickered at his feet.

A smudge of faded color. A shape she almost recognized.

It reached for him. Tried to speak.

Caelum's eyes squeezed shut.

And Marcy felt it.

Just the echo the raw, bleeding impression of a moment the ship had caught and was showing her now.

Grief.

Despair so heavy it had texture.

The sound of something inside him breaking.

She's coming.

The thought bled through. His thought. Captured. Preserved.

She's coming here because of me.

Marcy.

Her name. Not spoken aloud. Just the shape of it in his mind, torn out like something vital.

Marcy, don't.

Don't come for me.

I'm not worth it.

I was never worth it.

Please.....

The wall went dark.

The echo ended.

Marcy stood frozen, hands gripping the table's edge, tears running down her face.

Frontia said something behind her. A question, maybe. Concern.

Marcy didn't hear it.

All she could hear was his voice.

Broken.

Desperate.

Don't come.