The Echo Dialogues
A stillness followed the voice. Not silence, exactly. Something more deliberate.
It was the kind of quiet you could only find in a library long after closing, or deep in a forest that remembered what came before the roads. It was the quiet that waits. The kind that holds its breath.
Dæmon did not speak. Not at first. He kept his hand against the shape—the braided wood and ivy that formed the star. The texture had vanished beneath something deeper: it felt less like a surface and more like a truth he wasn’t ready to hold. Only warmth. A presence. A hum beneath the world.
"You... remember me?"
"No. I am the remembering."
Dæmon swallowed. The voice was inside the wall, but it also folded inside him. Not possession. Not echo. Something stranger. Something older.
"Why do you look like me?"
"Because I am you. Or rather, what remains. The part that could not sleep. The part that held the thread."
The courtyard darkened at the edges. Not nightfall. Not shadow. A slow erosion of certainty.
"Are you the one who brought me here?"
"You brought yourself. I only made the path visible."
"What are you?"
A pause.
"A memory. A warning. A spell. I was born an egregore. Became a servitor. A face shaped from different parts of the One—fused together into something like a persona. A nesting doll that knows what it is, and that it belongs to something greater than itself."
Dæmon felt the pressure behind his eyes begin to build. Not pain—a sense of something approaching. A truth wrapped in too many layers.
"Why now?"
"Bold of you to assume we’ve never shown you before. The difficulty isn’t in receiving the answer—it’s in remembering that you asked the question. Dreams don’t always make good messengers."
He opened his mouth, but no question came. Not yet. Only breath.
"What do you want from me?"
The star on the wall pulsed faintly. Once. Twice.
"I want you to remember."
Dæmon flinched.
"I can't remember without knowing what I'm remembering."
"It's a paradox, I admit. The path to knowledge must begin before you know where it leads. Similarly, you don’t recover forgotten meaning like a thing you lost—you reveal it like a pattern in mist."
A pause stretched long enough that Dæmon almost thought the voice was gone.
Then, gently:
"Would you like to see?"
The ivy around the star began to shimmer.
He hesitated.
And stepped forward.
