Chương 94: 3.19 As the World Caves In - Sarah Cothran (2:41)

Imperial_Fister She knows his name! +1 to Blooming Zeke truthers. Mchiavelli Oh, this is so going into my romance fic. Zeke coming back to save his one true love. He finds a way to save her from a broken House and they wander the Deadlands together, righting wrongs and saving damsels in distress and romancing each other by the campfire at night. Forty_Forty I am gonna be honest Z3ke.

When the ghosts start referring to you by saying your full government name, it's time to skedaddle Z3ke (Original Poster) The Blooming Witch was in front of me and she was giving that same gentle smile I remembered from back when she gave me my dimensional storage space.

"Hello Ezekial." My brain locked up and all I could do was just stare at the echo in front of me. Beside me, Elnor's eyebrows had crawled all the way up his head and threatened to disappear into his hairline. He looked at the echo and then back to me and then back to the echo and it was like he was trying to figure out what fresh insanity was happening now.

"I thought you were dead," I finally managed to croak out.

"I am. Sort of." That non-answer left me with hundreds of extra questions, but before I could say anything she lifted a finger with a calm and patient look on her face and it was like she knew exactly what I was going to say.

"This echo isn't really me. It's what's left bouncing around after all that happened. It's a memory with enough shape to keep moving for a little while longer." She looked down at herself and I watched as she slowly flexed her fingers. It was like when you fall asleep on your hand and you've got the pins and needles and you don't really have any feeling in it so you start trying to stretch it out to get your sense of touch back.

"I only have a few minutes. That should be just enough time to show you something important."

"What do you mean 'a few minutes?'" I asked.

"Why only a few minutes?"

"The doll you gave me didn't have a whole lot of juice." Again, it was a non-answer. I just stared at her while my mind thought of that scene from Pulp Fiction when Samuel L. Jackson was talking to the people who'd stolen the briefcase and one of those poor idiots just kept repeating the same question over and over and over again.

"What?"

"The doll," she said patiently.

"I took its weight and added it to this echo. It's what's keeping me together right now." Individually, all those words made sense. I knew what weight and echo and keeping me together meant. At least, I thought I did. But when I added them all up it was just a bunch of nonsense. You all have to remember that I didn't know about that whole weight theory or anything. Even now, after you all told me about it and how weight means the accumulation of a life, I still only understand a bit of it.

I definitely have no clue how weight can act like a battery.

"I don't know what that means," I finally stammered out.

"Of course you don't," she said and she sounded almost surprised that I expected otherwise.

"You don't need to understand the mechanics of it. You just need to watch carefully and listen. I can only show you this once." Before I could ask another question or babble some more, she stepped forward and reached out and pressed two fingers on my forehead. Reality vanished. There wasn't a smooth transition or anything. One moment I was next to Elnor, standing in the ruins of the House, and the next everything had been replaced. All around me the House trembled.

I watched as the cracks in the walls knit themselves shut. Floorboards slid back into place, burn marks retreated across the wood, and blackened beams straightened. The broken doors hanging off their hinges righted themselves and all the destruction flowed backwards. The hallways unfolded from the rubble and the ceilings stitched themselves back together.

Painting returned to the wall and the little ceramic figures that had been scattered across the floor hopped up into the air and landed neatly on shelves that, moments ago, had been splinters. Small clocks gathered themselves up and all the mechanical gears and screws sprinted back in place. Books erupted from piles and corners and streamed through the air, sliding back into towering shelves that rebuilt themselves. And once the House repaired itself, I could feel something that I hadn't felt before.

The walls of the place were breathing. The floors shifted with a deliberate purpose. The corridors stretched into impossible distances and they felt like veins carrying blood through a living body. All the rooms felt connected to each other and it was all contributing to a greater whole. The Blooming Witch pulled her hand back and stepped up next to me. I glanced over at her and noticed that she looked paler now. Parts of her outline flickered.

"What was that?" I whispered. She smiled at me and then tapped a finger against my chest. The world lurched and… I don't think I can do what happened next justice. I'm just gonna say what happened and hope that you can all picture it. I fell through memories. I was a little girl, running through the hallways. My bare feet were slapping against the polished wooden floors while colored light spilled through stained-glass windows. The House was alive with people. Laughter echoed through the corridors.

Servants smiled as I tore through the place and somewhere nearby I could hear my mom laughing. Music drifted through the halls and everything felt warm and impossibly full. My sister was there and we were playing games in the gardens and exploring a House that felt truly enormous to our child bodies. We chased each other through the hedges and climbed trees and spent entire afternoons inventing stories. And while we played I could feel something there, just underneath. It wasn't resentment or jealousy.

At least, not on my part. She was living in my shadow. I knew it. I could tell what was happening. Maybe not at the time. I was still a young child. But looking at it now, I could tell. People were paying attention to me and praising me and expecting great things. She never blamed me for it. She didn't send any of the jealousy my way. But there was a feeling of it all the same. It was buried underneath the years of affection and I don't think I really understood what it was when I was younger. A boy showed up.

He was the son of the gardener and he was learning to follow in his father's footsteps. The memories showed him trailing behind us as my sister and I explored and played our games. I saw the moment his crush on my sister developed. He'd light up whenever she entered a room and his smile lasted a little too long when he saw her and he'd blush and stammer when she asked him a question. The memories shifted and years passed.

I was a young woman now, and I found myself sitting through candlelit dinners and family gatherings. There were arguments and celebrations and holidays. There were countless small moments that somehow felt so much bigger than any grand event. I was shown off to the neighborhood and I met Tomas, the boy who would be my crush. My father read by the fireplace and my mother corrected my manners at dinner.

My sister laughed so hard she nearly fell out of her chair and I remember the gardener boy standing beside her, trying and failing to not laugh along. I was loved and I felt belonging and comfort. But as the memories swept past, I realized those feelings were few and far between. The years passed and people started disappearing. The changes were subtle at first. There was an empty chair at dinner and a bedroom door that stayed closed. Conversations ended in uncomfortable silence.

My mother was there and then she wasn't. My crush was there and then he wasn't. My sister was there and then she wasn't. My father was there and then he wasn't. The gardener was there and then he wasn't. The grief of it all threatened to drown me. I was nearly doubled over with it. Somewhere in the back of my head a small voice cried out to me, letting me know that it wasn't my grief, but the grief of a young woman who'd one day become the Blooming Witch. Decades of funerals blended together.

The House grew quiet and the halls became emptier and dust piled up in rooms that nobody visited anymore. I mourned. And then I became obsessed. The memories showed me the library where I spent sleepless nights surrounded by books and handwritten notes. Tables disappeared under papers and theories and diagrams. Ink stained my fingers. Candles burned down to stubs. Years vanished between blinks while every waking moment of my life was devoted to a single question: how do I get my family back?

I came to the answer by accident. There were small items that had stayed in the House. Items that should have been meaningless but, one day, I felt something there. This is the hardest part to explain to you all and even now I don't think I can do it justice. It's like waking from a dream and trying to remember everything but it's all slipping away. The best I can say is that I touched the objects and could feel traces of the people who'd owned them.

There were impressions and patterns and fragments there, and the realization of that consumed me. If traces of people existed in these objects, then maybe death wasn't as absolute as everyone believed. Maybe something of the people survived and maybe it could be recovered. More years blurred together and the workshops of the House were filled and the place became dedicated to my studies. Shelves were packed with possessions. Travelers came to the House carrying artifacts and relics from distant lands.

Some came to trade and some came seeking answers and some tried to take advantage of a woman living alone in a strange House filled with strange treasures. Those people didn't leave with what they wanted. My collection grew. There were thousands of relics now, and each of them carried fragments of lives and fragments of memories and fragments of emotions. Finally, I succeeded. For a moment, hope flooded through me. I was trying to resurrect my family and had finally made tangible progress.

An echo stood before me and it was a piece of what I'd lost. It spoke to me and remembered me and recognized me. The joy I felt in that instance nearly broke me. After decades of an obsession, I'd finally done it. I'd brought my sister back. Then reality set in and behind my joy was disappointment. The echo remembered some things, but not everything. It felt emotions. Sort of. It loved me. Sort of. It knew who I was. Sort of.

I talked with the echo and found a hidden flaw beneath the surface and the flaw consumed me. The echoes weren't people. Not really. They were pieces and suggestions and reflections cast by a life that no longer existed. My crush smiled at me but that was all. My sister laughed with me but then would repeat conversations we'd already had. The gardener boy knew my name but there was something missing behind his eyes.

The echoes were all close enough to the originals to be recognizable, and they were close enough to make hope impossible to abandon, and they were close enough to force me to keep trying, and they were close enough to be wholly heartbreaking. Decades became a century and entire wings of the House were converted to try and build onto the echoes. The library expanded and my collection grew and objects were catalogued and preserved.

I refined the process in creating echoes and developed new techniques and improved everything and the results never changed. No matter what I did, the echoes were never whole. There was something missing there. There was a gap I couldn't bridge and the realization of that hollowed me out. But I refused to stop. Ending my research would have meant admitting that my family was gone. It would have meant accepting that all my years had failed to produce the one thing I truly wanted.

Once more, years passed and this time it brought another understanding. I found myself staring into a mirror with a face reflecting back at me and it was old. The House had sustained me for longer than a normal human lifespan. It had stretched decades into centuries and given me more time than could be expected, but even the House had limits. Fear gripped me. I'd spent so long trying to preserve the memories of my family that I knew what waited for me.

One day I would die and all my memories and all my weight and everything that I was would die with me. Everything I'd learned and loved and suffered through and sacrificed for would disappear. The horror of that consumed me. I understood, with absolute certainty, that I was going to be erased from this world. Panic and desperation gripped me, but it was slowly replaced by a frantic determination. I needed to find a way to preserve myself.

I needed to find a way to leave something behind that would survive after I was gone. So that's what I did. It was my greatest work. With everything that the echoes and objects had taught me, I knew how to do it. It wasn't ambition so much as the only reasonable conclusion. It was a necessity. I needed to move the weight of myself so I could survive and my work could continue. I poured myself into the only thing that'd never left me. The House. It started with my memories.

I pressed them into the walls and the stone and the wood until the House carried me the way my body had. Then I went deeper. My emotions were pushed into the foundation of the House. My dreams spread into the gardens. My thoughts went into the support beams and the hidden architecture. My everything was layered into the bones of the House until every hallway, stairwell, and room had a trace of me. It wasn't enough. I'd collected a lot of weight over the years and the House couldn't hold everything.

I started putting my consciousness into all the objects that people had traded with me. There was a mirror and clocks and the ceramic figures. There were books and tools and small personal things that could hold a fraction of my weight. I dissolved myself through the House and the immortality meant that time couldn't erase all of me. I was becoming too large and too scattered and too embedded to be erased cleanly. Memories blurred and years passed and then a man stumbled into the House.

It had been such a long time since anyone had bothered stopping by to trade. I don't even know if people still remembered me out in the wider world, and frankly, I didn't care. The man stumbled into the foyer and he was covered in dust and sweat. He was shaking like he'd been running for his life and he stank of fear. He stood and looked around and I could see him trying to understand the House.

I could feel the fear and panic radiating off of him and I watched his eyes settle on the staircase that led to where my body still sat at the center of everything. He was lost and afraid. I could have smashed him to pieces. I could have pulled him to the second floor and devoured him there. But instead I just watched as he stumbled through the House. He wandered into one of the wings and met one of the echoes - the gardener - and tried making sense of what he was seeing.

He picked up the journal that had once belonged to the gardener, the same journal I'd used to anchor him into place. There was confusion splashed across his face but, there was also something else. Again, I could have stopped him. It would have been simple. If I'd thought he was a threat there wouldn't have been anything he could do about it. But he wasn't trying to take anything from me. He was just moving through the House and trying to understand it. Then something changed.

The echoes had long since become unstable. They were more repetition and their expressions had dulled and they'd become something like a reflection of their original people. They still remembered fragments of who'd they'd once been, but it was getting harder and harder for me to believe there was anything stable there. The man did something. He gave my sister the gardener's journal. He gave Tomas the music box. He placed small things in front of the echoes and they all reacted.

They jolted awake and seemed to come alive. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. He changed them. He freed them. For once in their lives, they were more than they'd been. They were touched and had taken the first shaky step out of the roles I'd inadvertently built for them. They hadn't collapsed or vanished. Not entirely. It was more that they'd moved on, like all the weight that had held them there had finally loosened its grip and let them become something different.

I should have been angry. There was a small part of me that expected the anger. I'd spent years building the House. I'd refined it and corrected its failures and convinced myself that the echoes had all been one great act of mercy. Then I watched a stranger walk through my House and undo parts of it. I should have felt anger but instead only felt relief. It was the relief that scared me. Relief meant that I'd started doubting myself and my path forward.

It meant I'd subconsciously understood something I'd been avoiding for a very long time. I'd started my project with the hope that I'd be able to bring back my family but… somewhere it had turned. I wasn't trying to save them anymore. I'd been simply keeping the memories of them close because I couldn't stand the idea of letting them go. When he was finished I gave the man a gift and let him leave. The gift was a small thing compared to everything he'd given me and everything I'd built.

And as he left, I felt the shape of my certainty begin to shake loose. The transformation of myself, the sending of my weight into the House… what was it all for? I'd embedded so much of myself into the place but… what now? Was it truly something I wanted? Was my work that important? I'd poured myself into the House and knew I'd never be able to go back to being a normal person.

I now existed in that uncomfortable space between two states, caught between the woman I'd been at the beginning and the House that I'd turned into. I sat with that for a long time. The House around me settled and everything was still and I could feel myself threaded through the place, distributed through the walls and sunk into the stone. My room on the second floor was one of the few places in the House that was still somewhat normal.

Over the years it had become cluttered with journals that were stacked around the place in uneven little towers. Some were finished and some had been abandoned and none of them felt important enough for me to pour through them while I thought. I turned questions over and over in my mind. What comes next? What am I now? What should I become? I would have kept pondering those questions if it wasn't for the next interruption. A man approached the House and he was heavy and layered and complicated and ancient.

Grief sat on him and he was covered in regret and obsession. People carried weight. All my research told me that much. It was something I'd come to understand after decades and centuries of study. People carried weight, but this man carried a mountain. There was an uncomfortable familiarity about him too. When I looked at him it was like looking in a funhouse mirror. Here was this ancient thing that had refused death and he was filled with regret and longing and obsession and sadness.

We met in the foyer and sat down to talk. The moment he looked at me, I knew he understood what I was. Not completely of course. Nobody ever did. But he recognized enough of himself in me. He recognized the same similarity that I did, that I was something that had stretched itself beyond the boundaries of a single life and had survived far longer than it should have. At first our conversation was careful. He asked about echoes and memory and identity. We talked about my research.

He asked how far reconstruction of an echo could go before it became a pale imitation of the original. We spoke about souls and weight and history and hours passed like that. He asked thoughtful questions and I gave him cautious answers. I didn't have any intention of handing over decades of research to a stranger. The discussion might have gone on like that if he hadn't mentioned the Valley of Echoes. The name hit me hard. Tomas had gone there. Tomas had died here.

He'd been my first love and perhaps the first crack that eventually widened into all the obsessions that followed. His unit had vanished inside the Valley of Echoes. They'd been swallowed by it and there was an absence there that still hadn't closed despite the years. He spoke about it like he'd just walked out of it. He talked about it still being there and still happening but… that was impossible. Right? It had been years since the Valley of Echoes. Decades. Centuries.

Entire generations had lived and died since then. But he spoke of it with a familiarity. He'd seen echoes there and he described a place where memory didn't fade. We kept talking, but now I was listening less to his words and more to what was underneath them. And I recognized it. It was grief. There wasn't curiosity or scholarship or professional interest in his questions. Instead, they were all tainted with grief. Every question he asked was built on top of grief.

Every avenue of research he followed started with grief. Every theory he dismissed was there because of grief. I knew that feeling because I'd spent most my life carrying it myself. As he talked, the shape of his life's work became clearer. It wasn't some scattered collection of interests. It was a single-minded pursuit that had consumed his life. He'd studied animancy first. I knew that magic as a crude and unreliable school. Animancers learned how to pull weight from one vessel and force it into another.

They treated identity like clay that could be reshaped through brute force. It worked often enough to attract desperate people and it failed often enough to create monsters. Animancy was too incomplete and unstable and blunt to do what he needed, but he'd learn enough to understand how weight could be manipulated. He chased artifacts tied to memory. He plundered ruins and stole relics. He'd followed every story involving souls and identity and survival after death.

He'd combed through contradictory theories, half-finished research journals, forgotten religions, and superstitions that most scholars laughed at. None of it had brought him any closer to his goal. Finally, after hours of conversation, he finally arrived at the questions he'd been moving towards from the beginning. The first was a request for my research in echoes. The second was asking for information about the Eaters. I almost laughed because it explained everything. I knew about the Eaters.

I'd encountered them before and studied them briefly before dismissing them as not relevant. They were destructive, unpredictable things that consumed rather than preserved, and I'd pushed them to the side as a curiosity that was better left alone. He saw them differently.

"They don't destroy everything," he said. His voice had changed and had become more animated.

"Everyone assumes they consume whole identities but that's not what I hear. They consume selectively. A memory here, an emotion there. A fear. A habit. They can take pieces of a person without destroying the whole." The certainty in his voice was unsettling. He spoke as if he'd spent years thinking about it. Studying it. Obsessing over it.

"They can separate weight, and that's what makes them important." I understood what he was getting at. If Eaters could separate weight into individual components, and if he could learn how to do the same thing, then theoretically he could reassemble weight from hundreds of different objects. If he'd lost someone, like I had, he could take artifacts and objects they'd touched and held and loved, and extract small portions of weight and then combine them all together into a single whole.

"If I understand how they do it, then I can reverse the process. I can pull individual threads from objects and memories and artifacts carrying preserved weight." His voice softened then.

"I can weave them back together." There it was. There was the thing he'd been circling around for hours. The reason he'd come. The reason he'd spent decades chasing impossible answers. He was trying to bring back a family he'd lost. I listened to him talk about his wife and his daughters and his life from before. And when he finally ran out of steam and it was my time to talk, my tone had shifted into something less argumentative and more observational. An argument wasn't going to land with him.

"Fragments of people do survive," I said quietly.

"Memories persist and identity leaves impressions and weight lingers. You can find it in objects connected to people. You are right about all that." I gestured towards the House around us.

"A home remembers its owners. A tool remembers the hands that used it. Even moments can hold traces of what happened inside them." I saw the hope flicker behind his eyes but then I continued.

"But you're treating those fragments as if they're independent. They aren't individual. They can't be collected and reassembled completely. Memory isn't…it isn't modular. It can't be separated cleaning into individual components. It doesn't work like that." He frowned and I tried finding a way to explain it.

"Imagine if you took a thousand books. You've got histories, journals, letters, and stories. They are entire lives written down on paper. Now imagine shredding them all until all that's left are tiny strips. Now take those strips of paper and dump them into the same pile. Mix them up until there is no meaningful separation left between them.

"The information technically still exists. Every word is still there. Every sentence. Every memory. Nothing has truly vanished. But the structure is gone. The things that made those books what they were has been destroyed. One strip contains half a sentence from a soldier's diary. Another contains part of a love letter. Another contains the ending of a story written centuries ago. Everything becomes tangled together.

Even if you spend the rest of your life sorting through that pile, how do you know where one book ends and another begins. For that matter, sentences can repeat. So how do you know a sentence you put in the soldier's diary isn't from a child's homework?" He sat there across from me and I could understand that he was listening and understanding but… understanding isn't the same thing as accepting.

"That's what happens inside an Eater," I continued.

"That's what they'll teach you. They aren't simple predators consuming the weight of others. They break down the boundaries between those strips. Memories overlap and emotions bleed together.

"When I started studying echoes, I was working with fragments that had remained attached to something. A watch remembers the person who carried it. A journal remembers the person who wrote in it. A home remembers the people who lived inside it. Those fragments degrade over time, but they are still associated with the weight of what came before. There is still a chain of continuity. The Eaters don't preserve the continuity. They destroy it." His eyes narrowed.

"But they don't destroy the information." There it was. There was the flaw in the argument that he'd been carrying for years. I could see the calculations happening behind his eyes as he worked through the implications. All the warnings I was giving seemed to become another piece of evidence supporting his obsession.

"The problem is that you're treating information and identity as the same thing but they aren't. If I take a memory from you and preserve it somewhere, that doesn't mean I've preserved you. If I record your voice, you favorite stories, your fears, your hopes, and every detail of life, that still isn't the same thing as preserving the person those things belong to. You can try. And you can get very close." I thought of my own project, of trying to preserve myself through the House.

I thought about what that was going to lead to but snapped out of my thoughts before I could go too far down that road.

"More than that though, I'm assuming you're trying to preserve certain thoughts and certain memories from different objects. You can but…it's not the same thing." He stared at me with his jaw tightening.

"You've collected objects, haven't you? Things that belonged to them." He didn't respond but that was answer enough. I imagined him carrying those relics across decades. A toy that had belonged to a daughter or a necklace that was worn by his wife. Maybe a journal or a lock of hair or a small treasure that had been transformed into something sacred through all the grief he held.

"Those objects don't contain just their weight anymore. They contain yours too. Every year that you've carried them, they've changed. Every memory you've associated with them and every act of mourning and every failed attempt to bring them back and every hope, disappointment, and fear. It all accumulated in those objects." I leaned forward and tried to lock eyes with him.

"Even if you could study the Eaters and even if you could separate the fragments of weight perfectly, which I don't believe you can, what exactly would you be reconstructing? Your wife as she was? Your daughters as they were? Or the people you've spent years imagining them to be?" He went silent and I saw his eyes sweep through the House. I… I didn't know at the time what he was doing. I thought I was getting through to him. I thought I was turning him away from his pain and obsession.

I just needed to drive home the point.

"You wouldn't be pulling out clean threads. You'd be pulling at a knot. You'd be grabbing their memories tangled up with your memories, their emotions tangled up with your grief, their identities tangled up with your obsession. Whatever emerged from that process might resemble them, but resemblance isn't the same thing as restoration." He lowered his gaze and neither of us spoke for a while. Then he surprised me with a quiet, "I know."

The words hung in the air and I studied him and realized he wasn't rejecting anything I'd told him. He understood the flaws and the contradictions and the warnings. They were probably things he'd already come to understand over the years. He knew that the people who'd be coming back would be incomplete and unstable. He looked up at me and there was a certainty in his eyes and I flinched back involuntarily.

"Even a fragment would be more than I have now though." There was the obsession again. There was the grief and the depression that I recognized in myself.

"Even a pale imitation is more than I have right now. If there's even a chance, then I have to try." I was looking at myself from centuries earlier, standing over another failed experiment and convincing myself that one more attempt would be different. One more year. One more theory. One more sacrifice. Around me, the memory began to come apart. The edges of the room darkened and the warm light faded and cracks started appearing in the walls. I caught glimpses of burn marks on the walls and rubble filled corridors.

I knew that whatever was letting me see this memory was weakening and the story was reaching its end. I saw Corva and the Witch standing there. She was looking at him with recognition and understanding. She'd spent centuries building a philosophy around the refusal of letting go. She'd buried herself inside a House that would remember her.

"I'm not going to help her," she said, and I saw a flinch in Corva. But…it was weird. There was a part of me that expected anger and disappointment and some final attempt to convince her. But he simply nodded.

"I didn't think you would." For a moment neither of them moved. Then Corva slipped a hand into his jacket. I wanted to scream out to the Witch and warn her. I knew what Corva was capable of. He was dangerous. He'd killed Pell. He'd stabbed me and tried to take my body. He pulled out a small object that was wrapped in a dark cloth. It fit comfortably in his hand and, before the Witch could ask what it was, he struck something against it.

A spark flashed and the bundle ignited and he tossed it casually towards the wall. The first spread instantly and crawled across the wood. They raced across the wall and I could see pain explode in the Witch. I felt that same pain. It was a ghost of it. I wasn't her anymore but I could still feel something from her. I could still feel connected to the House. I staggered back like I'd just been burned.

The House reacted and moisture condensed in the air and stone groaned and the fire shrank as the Witch forced the House to smother it. Then she looked up and Corva stood in front of her, just watching. His face had a look of certainty on it. His eyes drifted away from the Witch and moved across the foyer, studying the walls, the staircase, the paintings, and the exposed beams overhead. He wasn't looking at the architecture though.

"You embedded yourself into it." His gaze continued wandering through the room and I could see the connections forming behind his eyes. Every room contained my memories. Every hallway contained my thoughts. Every wing of the House became repositories for my emotions and dreams and pieces of identity that I no longer kept within my own body. No. Wait. I wasn't the Witch anymore. I was me and I was standing off to the side.

The memory was crumbling and I was myself again but still thinking of me as the Blooming Witch and it was… disconcerting to say the least.

"That means destroying the House hurts you." The room felt colder and neither one of us spoke for several seconds because we both understood what he'd just said. Trying to fight me directly was going to be difficult for him. NO. Trying to fight the WITCH was going to be difficult for him. She was ancient and powerful and more than most people could threaten head-on. But that wasn't what he was planning to do. He was going to threaten the House. The memory became a blur after that.

All the events stopped arriving in a neat sequence and instead came as flashes separated by stretches of confusion and panic. Corva moved through the House like a force of nature. He burned and smashed and crippled and every act of destruction ripped away another piece of the Witch. A collection of preserved memories vanished in a fire. A hidden archive collapsed beneath falling stone and entire chains of association disappeared from her thoughts.

Emotions detached themselves and memories lost context and pieces of her history simply ceased to exist. Hallways began losing their purpose and rooms forgot what they were supposed to hold and entire sections of the House became conceptually hollow. Libraries stopped understanding that they were libraries and Doors opened into spaces that didn't remember why they'd been created. The distributed self that the Witch had spent centuries constructing started coming apart. She fought back and bloodied him but…

she couldn't kill him. Every moment she spent attacking Corva was a moment not spent preserving the House. Every ounce of strength directed towards violence was strength that wasn't being used to reinforce a structure. He understood that. Whether he planned for it or had simply recognized it as events folded, I don't know. What I do know is that he was willing to destroy the House and the Witch wasn't. Memories blurred again and I was barely getting semblances of them.

I knew that the Witch had decided she'd already lost. The House wasn't going to survive and every attack Corva sent out increased the damage. She started thinking about what could still be saved. The Witch moved through hidden passages and sealed chambers. She hid research notes and journals and fragments of knowledge. Everything she knew about weight and identity and echoes disappeared. All she'd learned from her failures was scattered. She hid all the stuff that Corva had come searching for.

Some was sealed away physically and others were fragmented and distributed through the House so thoroughly that reconstructing them would require years of work. She couldn't stop Corva from pursuing his obsession, but she could make sure he didn't gain easy access to everything she knew. The House kept collapsing around her while she worked. Entire sections vanished into fire and ruin and still she worked. There was one final project left. One final act of preservation.

She gathered what remained of her strength and began constructing an echo. It wasn't her family. It was of herself. Or at least, as much of herself as she could still save. Too much damage had already been done so it wasn't perfect, but still, she shaped the echo into something that would remain in the House and wait. When it was finished, she placed the echo in the room where she'd spent centuries writing journals and cataloging artifacts and searching for answers she wasn't sure even existed.

Then she gave that echo a single purpose: wait for someone to arrive and wake when they do and make sure the story isn't lost.