[POV: Ezekiel]
It didn't move like a person.
It moved like an idea caught in a storm.
Joints shifting a second too late.
Muscles tensing before motion.
The breath—not real.
Just a habit the body hadn't fully let go of.
Its head turned toward him.
The mirrored sockets didn't gleam.
They absorbed light the way water absorbs ash.
---
The glyphs carved across its skin pulsed.
Not randomly.
They reacted to him.
Some recoiled.
Some lit up faintly—as if recognizing kinship.
And one, just above its heart, blinked in an ancient syntax form:
> Is?
---
Ilhera raised her mirrored blade.
> "Don't move," she hissed.
"That thing is already halfway to rewriting your face."
Ezekiel didn't respond.
He stepped forward.
Carefully.
One pace.
Then another.
The Echo Collapse shifted.
Its body glitched, rippled, reshaped—and then settled.
---
It raised its hand.
Fingers like glass filaments, bones inked in layered contradictions.
It traced a word in the air:
> Me?
Ezekiel nodded once.
> "You were someone."
The glyph on its chest blinked again.
> Yes. / No. / Was / Became / Lost / Again / Not
---
Ilhera's voice lowered, cautious now.
> "Do not give it anything."
> "Anything?"
> "Not your name. Not your role. Not your thoughts. It'll latch onto the nearest stable syntax and consume it."
He nodded.
But didn't back away.
Because something about this thing…
Was familiar.
Not the form.
Not the glyphs.
The silence.
The kind that isn't empty.
The kind that's waiting to be told what it is again.
---
He crouched slightly.
Looked into the mirrored sockets.
> "Who broke you?"
The glyphs shuddered across its body.
Then they flattened into a single line across its ribs.
Ilhera whispered:
> "It's forming a memory string."
The string formed five glyphs.
They glowed in blue-violet—
Ilhera's breath caught.
> "That's Quinsley Royal Pattern."
Ezekiel blinked.
> "You're saying this thing—"
> "Was once a noble."
---
The Collapse raised its hand again.
Slow. Precise.
This time it wrote a longer phrase—
Not on air.
On itself.
It etched the glyphs into its shoulder with one finger, bleeding liquid syntax as it wrote:
> Tried to be a prince / Was called a god / Branded a traitor / Sworn a tool / Named a son
The glyphs blinked. Fizzled.
> Too many definitions.
> Syntax... consumed.
---
It looked at Ezekiel again.
And one final glyph bloomed—
Not asking.
Stating.
> You are me / But not yet
---
Ilhera stepped forward.
> "That's it. We're leaving it. Now."
> "It isn't attacking."
> "It doesn't need to. It's already eating itself."
She moved to strike.
But Ezekiel stepped in front of her.
> "Don't."
> "Move."
> "It's trying to remember."
> "Exactly. And if it remembers the wrong thing, it becomes it."
---
He turned back to the thing.
Its body had begun to shudder.
Its feet were dissolving into static glyph-dust.
The name on its chest split.
New ones emerged.
Random.
Incoherent.
Then one—
Clear.
Old.
A name Ezekiel had never heard.
Yet something inside him—Azrael?—stilled.
> Voric.
The Collapse whispered it.
Soundless.
Final.
And then—
It collapsed fully into ash.
The name lingering in the air like smoke.
---
Ilhera was already pulling him back.
> "We're moving."
> "That name—"
> "Gone now. And that's a blessing."
> "But it knew—"
> "It knew too much. And it didn't know enough. That's what Echo Collapse is."
---
Ezekiel turned as they left the arch.
The ash didn't stir.
But somewhere deep in the corridor behind them—
He thought he heard a word blink into shape.
One he hadn't said aloud yet.
One that sounded a lot like his own.