"Some doors open not to places, but to ideas. And the most dangerous ideas are the ones that believe themselves real."
—Fragment from the Echo Codex, transcribed by the Dreaming Priesthood
The floating structure had no visible entrance.
No stairs.
No bridge.
Just a massive, obsidian island suspended in the sky—casting no shadow, ignoring all laws of gravity, pulsing with a low, harmonic hum that resonated somewhere just beneath the skin.
Amine stood at the edge of a shattered cliff, staring up at it.
"We're not meant to climb it," he said.
Mira frowned. "Then how do we enter?"
"We don't." He turned to her. "It enters us."
She didn't answer. But the look in her eyes said she understood.
Thanor growled low, his flames dimming. He'd felt it too—something ancient stirring not in the earth, but in the mind.
The Gate was not a place.
It was an invitation.
They made camp beneath a jagged stone arch, sheltering from the wind that had begun to scream across the ridge. Amine didn't sleep—not truly. As soon as his eyes closed, he slipped sideways into a world of shifting lights and voices without mouths.
The dream was lucid.
Too lucid.
He stood on a bridge made of memory, surrounded by shadowed figures whispering names he didn't recognize—and yet somehow knew.
One stepped forward.
Its face was not a face.
Just a mirrored surface.
He saw himself.
But older.
Wiser.
Broken.
"This is not the first world you have walked," the reflection said.
"It will not be the last."
Amine swallowed. "Then what is this?"
"This is the world that remembers you."
He woke with a gasp, Mira's hand on his shoulder.
"You were speaking in another language," she said.
"What did I say?"
"I don't know. It made my ears bleed."
He looked down. She wasn't lying—thin streaks of crimson had dried along her neck.
"I saw myself," he said. "In a place between thoughts."
Mira wrapped her cloak tighter around herself.
"Amine… I think the Gate is alive."
Later that day, the sky opened.
Not like a crack, not like a tear.
But like an eye.
Wide, golden, staring down at the land below.
Amine instinctively shielded his face—but the light didn't burn.
It spoke.
Not with words.
With images.
Visions poured through the eye and into their minds: wars not yet fought, cities not yet built, and dragons crying not from rage, but from mourning.
A chorus of voices whispered in unison:
"We built the Gate to remember."
"But now it dreams."
"And in its dreaming, it forgets."
Amine fell to his knees.
His thoughts were not his own.
He saw children learning to speak by carving sigils into the air.
He saw mages hurling stars like stones.
He saw dragons being born from the mouths of gods.
And he saw the Gate—closed, open, fractured—again and again.
A circle within a circle.
Always watching.
Always forgetting.
Then darkness.
And a single phrase:
"Do not let it sleep."
When he awoke again, the world had changed.
The platform that had floated above them was gone.
In its place was a city.
Not a ruined one.
A living one.
Bustling, vast, untouched by decay. Lanterns swayed in windless air. Towers rose like bones wrapped in glass.
And people—people—moved through the streets, laughing, talking, arguing.
But none of them cast shadows.
"Is this real?" Mira whispered.
"No," Amine said. "It's memory. The Gate's memory."
"And we're inside it?"
He nodded slowly. "I think so."
They walked through the city like ghosts.
No one noticed them. Not even the children, who ran laughing past illusionary fountains of light.
At the center of it all, at the city's heart, stood a garden.
Inside it: a table.
And at that table, a single figure sat—hooded, cloaked, face hidden.
Waiting.
Amine approached.
The figure looked up.
It had his face.
Older. Worn. Scarred by flame and time.
"You made it," said the echo.
"Who are you?" Amine asked.
"I'm what you become if you choose to remember everything."
The table shimmered. Shapes appeared across it—nine circles, nine gates, each inscribed with different runes.
"One gate to each memory," the echo said. "But they're closing, one by one."
"Why?"
"Because the dragons are not invaders. They're symptoms."
Amine reeled. "What?"
"They come from the Gate's dreaming. They are what it forgets. And we—mages—are its immune system. Its attempt to remember."
Silence followed.
Mira stepped forward, eyes wide.
"You're saying… the war isn't between dragons and humans."
"No," said the echo. "It's between memory and forgetting. Creation and decay. Truth and denial."
Amine felt sick.
"All of this—our lives—are just part of a machine trying to keep itself awake?"
"No. You are more than that. But you were born from it. And it is dying."
Amine shook his head. "Then why me?"
The echo smiled sadly.
"Because only those who've been erased truly understand the value of remembrance."
The sky began to fracture again.
The city trembled.
The dream was ending.
"Go," said the echo. "Find the next gate. And do not let it close."
Amine reached out.
"Wait—what's your name?"
The echo paused.
And for the first time, it looked afraid.
"I don't remember."
Then the world shattered into light.
They awoke on the cliffs again.
The sky was dark.
The floating city was gone.
But something had changed.
Mira looked at him.
"Did we just… remember something that never happened?"
"No," Amine said.
"We remembered something that was forgotten."
Thanor's flames surged brighter, and a new symbol shimmered on the ground before them:
A single eye.
Open.
Watching.
Waiting.