They did not sleep that night.
Not because of fear — but because sleep no longer recognized them as its own.
Elías and Tirian sat in a hollow carved by forgotten questions, surrounded by stones that whispered unsolved riddles. The darkness here was not absence of light — it was rejection of it. A willful denial. The kind of dark that remembered when gods first lied.
The pen Elías carried pulsed again. It hadn't written since the Library, yet it throbbed like a buried heart.
"You feel it too?" Tirian asked, watching the ink-feather bleed gently into the air.
Elías nodded.
"It's trying to write again."
"But what?"
Before Elías could answer, the stone wall cracked.
A thin fissure split open — not with violence, but with invitation. From within, light poured out. But not warm, golden light. This was the glow of memory — cold, pale, exact. As if the past itself had been boiled down to radiance.
The crack widened, revealing a staircase.
Not of stone, but of thought.
Each step inscribed with a single word: Echo. Echo. Echo.
Without a word, Elías began to climb.
Tirian hesitated, then followed.
The deeper they ascended — for the staircase twisted upward like a spiral idea — the more they heard voices. Not from outside, but from within.
"I shouldn't have left her behind."
"Why didn't I run?"
"He was still breathing."
Regret.
Thousands of regrets, echoing in the stone.
The pen twitched violently now.
At the top of the spiral, they found the vault.
No doors. No guards. Just silence shaped like a sphere — a room not built, but remembered.
Inside: shelves.
Not books. Memories. Bottled, labeled, sorted.
Names written in the margins of lives that no longer had owners.
And in the center — a sphere of polished bone.
It pulsed with a rhythm too old to be mortal.
A vault of echoes. Where the memories of the world came to die.
Elías stepped closer, feeling the pen scream in his hand.
The bone sphere opened — not physically, but conceptually.
It allowed them in.
Inside: a reflection of the world.
But broken.
Skies torn into ribbons of thought. Oceans frozen into failed prayers. Mountains that wept stone tears. And wandering through it all: copies of Elías and Tirian.
Some fought monsters.
Some begged gods.
Some wrote.
One version of Elías walked alone into a screaming sun — and never emerged.
Another version stood crowned in silence, surrounded by ash.
But none of them looked back.
"They're not us," Tirian whispered.
"No," Elías said. "They're what we could have been."
The sphere whispered.
"Choose."
And Elías understood.
This was not a vault.
It was a crucible.
He could select one of these paths — accept a version of himself already written.
Or...
Write his own.
He stepped back.
"No."
The sphere trembled.
Tirian grabbed his arm. "Are you sure?"
Elías didn't blink.
"I won't borrow fate. I'll earn it."
The vault screamed.
A sound of disapproval, of broken symmetry, of unwritten futures.
The copies began to fade.
All except one.
A version of Elías — older, scarred, blind in one eye, holding the scythe not as a weapon, but as a torch.
It looked at them.
And it spoke.
"You are not the last."
Then it crumbled into dust.
The sphere sealed itself.
The shelves burned.
And the staircase collapsed.
---
Elías and Tirian fell through memory.
Not air — memory.
They saw the first blood spilled in the name of a lie.
They heard the scream of the god who realized they were a metaphor.
They passed through a child's last hope, and an old man's final silence.
And then—
They landed.
Not gently.
But purposefully.
In the middle of a forest where the trees wore faces.
And all the faces were weeping.
---
Question for the reader: If you saw all versions of yourself… would you kill the one you feared becoming?