The path to the library was not marked on any map.
It had no name only a song.
Apo Ulan had given it to them in a whisper, a melody meant to stir the moss spirits along the path. Iliya had repeated it in his mind since they left Lindong: a low, winding tune like breath in a cave.
By the fourth day, the mountains gave way to forest not the wild kind, but the kind that felt… curated. Not pruned, but watched.
The trees grew in spirals. The wind moved in rhythm. Even the birdsong followed a pattern that seemed too perfect.
Salimbay walked a step ahead, hand never far from her blade. But her shoulders were tense not from danger, but thought.
Iliya had barely spoken since their escape from the cultists.
Each step echoed louder in his mind than in the world. He had thought the mark on his chest was an accident, a survival. But now?
"The vessel walks. The seal shakes."
He couldn't forget that voice not its sound, but the feeling it gave: as if something old and patient had noticed him, and would never stop watching again.
He found himself tracing the spiral mark when no one looked.
What did it mean to be a vessel? For memory? For power? For Dalom?
He didn't want power. He didn't want a legacy. He had wanted to live a quiet life by the water, repairing nets, singing to rice spirits, burning herbs on sacred days.
But fate had no patience for the quiet-hearted.
Salimbay said nothing, but her mind burned.
Every time she saw Iliya flinch at a vision, every time he held his breath at an unknown glyph, she was reminded of the girls she had trained with the ones who never walked away when the Diwata began to twist.
She had left them. And even now, part of her wondered if she was doing it again following Iliya only out of guilt, out of need to atone.
But Iliya was not a Diwata. Not a warleader.
He was just… someone trying not to break under the weight of something older than any of them.
And maybe that was why she stayed.
The forest broke at midday, revealing a wide clearing encircled by trees so old their trunks were the size of houses. Between them, woven like bridges, were suspended walkways of root and reed, lanterns glowing softly in daylight.
At the center was a colossal tree, its bark black as charcoal, its branches like arms cradling the sky.
Laylay-an, the library.
It was not a building, but a living thing roots shaped into chambers, bark etched with knowledge, each leaf said to remember a name spoken beneath it.
A woman stood at the threshold, her skin a deep umber, her hair braided with bones from birds and fish alike. She held a staff of twisted root and reed-paper, bound with ink threads.
"Welcome," she said. "I am Kalwa, keeper of breath-ink."
Her eyes lingered on Iliya's chest — the mark visible now beneath his tattered shirt.
"The Deep stirs. You are late, but not too late."
Inside, the light shifted. No torches. Just a constant, warm bioluminescence from vines that climbed the inner walls, pulsing in rhythm with breath and touch.
Shelves were made of woven reed and bark, scrolls resting in pouches stitched with feathers. The air was thick with the scent of ink, wet soil, and smoked memories a sacred ritual in which knowledge was infused into wood dust, then burned during reading to relive it.
Salimbay glanced at a passing monk a child, no older than ten, with eyes glazed in silver and a trail of ink running from mouth to collarbone.
"They're memory vessels," Kalwa said. "Chosen to house forgotten names, sealed stories."
Iliya ran a hand along one of the bark-scrolls. It whispered to his palm not words, but sorrow.
"Do you… ever forget anything here?" he asked.
Kalwa smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes.
"We forget only what chooses to be forgotten. And that is the most dangerous kind of knowledge."
---
They were led to a chamber carved into the root's heart. There, a basin of black sap shimmered, surrounded by glyphs etched in gold ash. Kalwa dipped a reed brush and painted across the floor — a spiral, similar to Iliya's, but older. Broken.
"This was the first seal," she said. "The bond between the Diwata and the earth. When it broke, three fragments remained."
She turned to Iliya.
"The Echo relics are not things. They are truths made tangible. And truth, in the wrong hands, does not free it devours."
Salimbay crossed her arms. "The cult wants them to open Dalom."
"Of course," Kalwa said. "Because Dalom is not a place. It is memory unbound. Hunger unshaped. Power without pact."
Iliya swallowed. "And I… carry one of the keys."
Kalwa nodded.
"Not a key. A wound. A reminder. That you were seen by what still waits below."
They were given hammocks woven from spirit thread, suspended between branches that sang lullabies too old to name. The wind whispered through the leaves, reciting names long forgotten.
But sleep did not come.
Iliya lay with eyes open, watching the canopy sway.
He whispered into the dark:
"I didn't ask for this."
A pause. Then Salimbay's voice from the next hammock:
"Neither did I."
He turned his head toward her, though he couldn't see her through the veil of leaves.
"Do you regret walking with me?"
"No," she said. "But I regret leaving the ones I walked with before."
"You think this ends the same way?"
Silence. Then:
"I think if we don't keep walking, someone else will finish it. And not kindly."
Just before dawn, Iliya was awakened by the sensation of something crawling across his skin.
He looked down the ink glyphs from the scroll chamber had lifted from the bark and coiled around his wrist like vines.
He heard a voice.
"One seal sleeps in stone. Another weeps beneath salt.
The third walks broken, seeking, whole in hunger."
He gasped.
Salimbay jolted upright, hand already on her blade.
"Another vision?"
He nodded. "A message."
"From who?"
"I think… from the Echo itself."
The next morning, Kalwa handed Iliya a bark-scroll wrapped in red fiber.
"This will guide you to the first fragment's resting place — if it still rests."
She looked at both of them.
"Many will chase you. Some will claim to protect the Pact. Others will say they serve the old balance. But know this: none of them remember what the world truly was."
"Do you?" Iliya asked.
Kalwa smiled the way one smiles at a story too heavy to retell.
"We remember enough to be afraid."