The quill grew leaden in Elias’s fingers. The rhythmic scrape of ink across vellum, the hypnotic flow of forbidden verses spilling from his hand, was the only anchor in the suffocating silence. "But the Mirror hunted them, cold and keen, With whispers sharp as frost..." The words blurred, the lamp flame shrinking to a fragile amber teardrop swimming in a sea of ink and shadow. Exhaustion, deeper than the roots of mountains, dragged at his mind. His head dipped, forehead brushing the cool surface of the desk beside the open book. The brittle scent of old paper filled his nostrils, mingling with the tang of ink. Just a moment’s rest. Just to close his eyes against the weight pressing down from the fractured moon and upwards from the silenced earth. The silence wasn’t listening anymore. It enveloped him. Pulled him under.

He plummeted.

Not through air, but through layers of cold, crushing density. Stone swallowed him, pressing in from all sides, stealing his breath. He wasn't falling; he was sinking into the living earth. Silence reigned here, absolute and ancient, yet beneath it pulsed a slow, monstrous rhythm. Thu-doom. Thu-doom. Like the heartbeat of the world slowed to a glacial crawl, felt rather than heard, vibrating through the marrow of his bones.

The oppressive darkness relented, replaced by the dim, spectral glow of a vast cavern. Immense pillars of obsidian-black basalt soared upwards, vanishing into an unseen ceiling lost in fathomless shadow. They weren't natural formations. They felt... placed. Deliberate. Like the ribs of some colossal, petrified beast. Etched into their slick surfaces, thin veins of a cold, blue-white light pulsed with the same sluggish rhythm that permeated the air. It cast writhing, ghostly reflections on the cavern floor, slick with mineral-laden moisture.

The air was thick, tasting of damp rock and millennia of stillness. It pressed on Elias’s lungs, making each inhalation a struggle. The sheer weight of the place, the impossible antiquity of it, filled him with a primordial dread. This wasn't a place men could tread. This was the realm of deep time and deeper secrets.

His gaze, drawn unwillingly, snagged on the far end of the cavern. It wasn't empty. Shrouded in the profound gloom, barely delineated by the faintest pulses of the mineral light, lay a colossal form. It was more suggestion than substance: a titanic, segmented shape, layered and folded like stone plates piled upon one another, disappearing into the darkness. It radiated an aura of profound dormancy, yet the very structure of the cavern seemed shaped around it, defined by its presence. The source of the Thu-doom. Thu-doom. An anchor pinning the world deep within itself. It felt... important. Terribly, irrevocably important. The heart of everything hidden.

Instinctively, seeking reassurance, Elias turned towards the nearest polished basalt pillar. He expected to see the pale, strained face of the Elias Corven he had become. Instead, the cold stone showed him David Hartwell.

It was him. His own face from another life, older than the Elias body, etched with the familiar lines brought by late nights grading papers and the quiet anxieties of a mundane existence. Hazel eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses looked back, filled not with the fear Elias felt now, but with a profound weariness – the fatigue of a life abruptly cut short, of a history abandoned. His own mouth moved in the reflection, forming words. But no sound came out. Just silent shapes that Elias, with a jolt of agonizing recognition, knew were names. Marcus Rodriguez... Grandma Ellie... Names from a life Lyrrae could never touch.

A searing bolt of grief, sharper and more desolate than any physical pain he’d known as Elias, ripped through him. It wasn't just the loss of his life; it was the utter severing. The faces, the places, the simple weight of his own identity, washed away on a tide of divine theft. He reached out, a desperate sob catching in his throat, his hand straining towards the reflection, towards the ghost of himself he could never reclaim. His fingers touched the frigid, wet stone.

The image fractured. Shattered into a thousand shimmering shards that dissolved like smoke. The cavern, the oppressive heartbeat, the immense shadowy form – everything collapsed inwards with a sudden, silent roar.

Elias jolted upright in his chair, a strangled gasp tearing from his lungs. Sweat plastered his nightshirt to his chilled skin, his heart hammering against his ribs like a frantic prisoner. The lamp on the desk had guttered out. Weak predawn light painted the room in shades of cold grey. The book. Panic sliced through the dream's haze. The open Book of Broken Echoes lay exposed before him, pages askew, his freshly transcribed heresy gleaming wet on vellum. The phrase "names—and the Song—as lost" seemed to pulse in the gloom. In one jerky motion, he slammed the cover shut, scattering dust motes. He wheeled toward the loose floorboard, shoved the book into its dark cradle, and jammed the plank back into place with trembling fingers. Only then did the phantom sensation of David’s face, weary and fading, frost his soul again. That desperate, soundless call...

There is no going back. The thought wasn’t new, but the dream had carved it onto his bones. David was ash. Only Elias Corven remained. The boy who bled into the margins. The vessel for secrets heavy enough to crush mountains.

He pushed back from the desk, the chair scraping harshly on the stone floor. The dream’s chill clung to him. He needed to wash away the sweat, the phantom touch of deep earth, the lingering ghost of his own face. He crossed to the washstand to wash the ink from his hands. A familliar sight, he thought. The cold water in the porcelain basin biting as he plunged his hands in, splashing it over his face. It didn’t cleanse the feeling of displacement, the raw ache of stolen identity, but it grounded him in the physical. He dressed hastily in clean but simple attire, the fabric rough against his sensitized skin.

The corridor outside was silent, thick with the hush before dawn’s obligations. He took a deep, steadying breath, trying to force David’s face from his mind, to bury the echoes of that subterranean heartbeat. He needed to be Elias Corven, the dutiful son, the devout recovered boy. For now. He grasped the cool bronze handle of his chamber door and pulled it open.

Sister Liora stood in the corridor, her hand raised, fingers poised to knock. Her serene face showed no surprise at his abrupt appearance, only that unnerving stillness. Her grey eyes, sharp as flint in the dim light, met his directly. He saw the faint, tell-tale tightening around her lids, the slight dilation of her pupils as she scanned his face – still damp, pale, undoubtedly shadowed by a sleepless night haunted by unspeakable things.

Her question cut through the tense silence, precise and utterly devastating: "Who’s David?"