"Some echoes are not remnants of the past—
they are warnings from a future that should not exist."

In the fog-wreathed city of Duskwatch, where arcane machines run on broken souls and gods have long been buried in silence, something stirs beneath the cobbled streets.

Constructs—artificial beings built to serve—are beginning to dream. Of voices they’ve never heard. Of deaths they never died. Of a god whose name has been erased from every holy text. These echoes should not exist... and yet, they are spreading.

Three fates entwine in the coming unraveling:

A masked Inquisitor torn between duty and the unbearable truth he uncovers,

A runaway Construct haunted by visions of a child and a life that never was,

And a street prophet whose madness might be prophecy—or possession.

As a forbidden Path reawakens, and whispers of the Hollow God return to the mouths of madmen, the Order of Chains tightens its grip on the city. But the past is breaking through, one echo at a time—and when the last veil falls, the world may not survive what it remembers.

Arcane paths. Fractured time. A dead god’s echo.
When the soul remembers what the mind has forgotten, truth becomes treason.

"The first sign of a fracture is not a sound.It's the absence of one."— LectureFragment, Guild of Echoes (Redacted)


The city of Duskwatch never truly slept.It shivered.


Steam coiled from rusted vents, curling like iron-breathed specters across rooftops. Gaslamps flickered in unnatural rhythms—one, pause, two, pause, three—as though the city were speaking in some forgotten code. In the fog-thickened silence of the seventh hour, only two kinds of people moved: the sanctioned, and the damned.


Inspector Caldus Marr walked the boundary between both.


The silver sigil of the Ashen Crown—a broken sun, jagged and grim—gleamed faintly on his coat. Even so, the street parted for him like blood from a blade. His boots echoed off slick cobblestones as he stepped over the corpse of a beggar, frozen sometime before dawn. One eye still open. Lips parted mid-syllable, as if trying to speak a name he no longer remembered.


The alley narrowed as he reached 73 Marrow Spine—a condemned ward in the Coil District. No one lived here. Not legally.


He pressed two fingers to the lock plate, whispered a detection rite through grit teeth. The glyph stitched into his glove flared once—then pulsed a cold red.


Resonance confirmed.Echo instability: 71%.Warning: Time bleed exceeds standard threshold.


"These readings don't belong here," he muttered. "This ward was marked clean."


The smell hit first—metal, old blood, and the acrid sting of burned ink. Ritual. Failed or unfinished. A circle had been carved into the floorboards, its grooves packed with what looked like powdered bone. At the center slumped a Construct, half-melted and half-conscious. Its limbs twitched in small, insect-like spasms. Its eyes glowed—not with light, but with memory.


Caldus crouched beside it, careful not to touch the glyphs. He leaned in. A sigil on the Construct's neck flickered weakly.


Subject ID: UnregisteredPath: UnknownEcho Signature: Origin—Nonlinear


Then it spoke—with a voice that was not mechanical, not human, and not singular.


The Construct raised its head.And in its eyes, he saw not his reflection——but his death.


Outside, the lamps blinked:One, pause.Two, pause.But on the third...


Chapter 2 - Chapter 1 — The Echo That Was Not There