Pain.
I woke to a deep, lurching pain.
Not like a knife. Nor like a burn.
This was the kind of pain that didn't have a shape.
The kind that lived in the marrow.
The kind that dripped through the cracks of my skull like tar and whispered, You are not supposed to be here.
My eyes wouldn't open.
Or maybe they were open—and the world just didn't have light anymore.
I couldn't tell if I was lying down, falling upward, or floating through oil.
I could feel my chest rise—but it didn't feel like mine.
Too slow.
Too shallow.
Too… unfamiliar.
And then, like a snapped bone realigning—
My breath caught.
My back arched.
My hands clawed at the floor beneath me—a floor I hadn't seen.
Cold, stone-textured, but warm.
Too warm.
Breathing?
I choked out a sound, low and broken.
I was awake.
But this body… wasn't.
My heart didn't beat the way I remembered.
There was a second rhythm—soft, distant, pulsing through me like the aftershock of a storm at sea.
Thmm… thmm… thmm.
I reached up to my face and touched skin that wasn't my own.
The cheekbones were sharper. The jaw tighter.
A neck that tensed with wiry muscle I'd never earned.
I stumbled to my feet, nearly falling again.
The room was dim, lit by strips of glowing vein-glass running along ribbed walls—walls that curved inward like the belly of a ship, or a massive hollowed-out beast.
I tried to speak, but my voice came out different. Raspy. Tight.
"Whose—"
My voice caught in my throat.
It hurt.
I said it again.
"Whose body…?"
That's when the first memory hit.
It wasn't mine.
A climb up a spine of stone.
A ritual chamber.
A hand, outstretched toward something glowing red inside the cracked skull of a creature I didn't recognize.
Then—black.
I staggered back from nothing. My breath hitched.
A thousand shivers clawed their way up my spine.
A name surfaced next.
Not my name.
Along with it, information. Facts. A weight pressing into my thoughts.
It rang in my head:
Tairen Solt.
Age sixteen.
Second-ranked technician.
Former Echo-link candidate.
Now declared unbound, cast to the maintenance rings of a city built atop a dead whale.
This isn't my life.
But the memories say it is.
I crossed to the wall. There was a shallow mirror etched into the plating—crudely melted glass, smoothed by hand. I leaned close.
A stranger stared back.
Young. Gaunt. With deep grey eyes that shimmered faintly beneath the skin.
There was a scar along the base of the neck.
A line of graft metal, barely visible under the skin, blinking faint blue.
"Who are you?" I asked the mirror.
The reflection didn't answer.
But the second heartbeat did.
Thmm… thmm…
Echoes, they called it.
Not magic. Not energy.
Echo.
And somehow—I was feeling it. In this body.
And I knew, with a crawling certainty in my gut:
I'm not the only thing inhabiting this body.
Something was here before me.
Something's still echoing through the bones.
My fingers trembled as I reached for the door.
A handle made of coiled Leviathan tooth turned with a soft click.
Beyond it, the light thickened.
The smell of salt.
Of blood.
Of oil burned in brass crucibles.
Voices echoed in the distance—ritual chants, maintenance bells, pipe steam whistles.
The soundscape of a city that shouldn't exist.
A city built on the back of a dead god.
And somehow, I was part of it now.
I didn't know how.
I didn't know why.
But I knew this:
This world had power.
And pain.
And possibility.
And I was going to find out what kind of person Tairen Solt was—
and what happened to him.
Or—
what kind of person I could become using his body.