Echoes

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Why today of all days?

Julius ran, stone pillars rising out of the ground on both sides. If he stopped running, he would die. A thorn bush caught his forearm on the way past. He barely registered it.

Behind him, something scraped its claws over rock. Not even hurrying.

KRRRRRRRRRSHHH.

A pillar cracked and came apart.

The drake was silver brown, its scales throwing back every bit of light that hit them. A scar ran across both of its eyes, leaving it blind, though you'd never guess it from how it moved. Its claws went through stone without slowing down. Logs, boulders, whatever he threw between them, it didn't matter.

He wasn't going to outrun it. All he could do was buy time.

He ducked behind a fallen log, then an old tree with cuts scored into the bark, pressing himself flat against it. It didn't matter. The thing couldn't see, but it could hear him, smell the heat coming off his skin. His own heartbeat was giving him away, and there wasn't a thing he could do about it.

It's going to find me.

He was shaking so badly he could hear his own breath rattling. Noticing it didn't help.

"Calm down." His voice came out wrong, thin and cracked. "Calm down. Think."

An axe sat on a stump a few feet off. He was almost sure it hadn't been there a second ago. Some part of him even flagged it as strange, but there wasn't time to wonder about it. He lunged.

CRACK.

The tree above him split down the middle. Splinters came down where his head had just been.

He rolled clear, came up holding the axe, and the drake was already on him. Not chasing now, just there, close enough that its head filled his whole vision. It dropped its skull level with his face and screamed.

SKRRRREEEEEEEE!

Something in him just stopped working.

It wasn't fear. Fear, at least, had kept his legs moving this far. This was something else, something that shut his body down instead. He couldn't lift the axe. Couldn't step back. He just stood there while the thing pulled its head back to finish him off properly.

So this is how it happens.

He'd never really pictured his own death, not seriously, but if he had, he probably would've assumed there'd be someone around who knew his name. Not this. Not alone out here. The last thing that came to him, and he had no idea why, wasn't his tribe or the elders. Just a warm, half formed memory from somewhere way back, gone again before he could hold on to it.

His hand, still frozen around the axe, brushed against the silver carving on the handle.

THUMM.

That hadn't come from outside him.

...THUMMMM...

It was under his ribs somewhere. A second pulse, running underneath his own.

TTTHHUUUMMM.

Blue light spilled out from under his fingers and up his arm. Then everything went white, and when it cleared, the ground under him wasn't the ground anymore.

Stone floor instead of dirt. Cold instead of the plateau's heat. He was looking down an arm that wasn't his, thicker, wrapped in a leather vambrace he'd never owned, right as another axe swung in toward where his head was.

That's not my arm.

CLANG.

He blocked it anyway. Didn't even think about it. The movement was just there, already loaded and ready to go, like his body had done this a hundred times before he ever showed up.

Then the scene shifted again. A cave, torches burning along the walls. An Earth Drake reared up in front of him, and some thought that wasn't quite his surfaced anyway. This is someone's memory. Someone who carried this axe before I was even born. Dead now. Teach me anyway. His body, or the body, whoever's it actually was, dropped low on its own, found the gap in the drake's scales, and put the blade through it in one motion. The thing split apart and dropped.

The memory cut off like someone had shut a door on it.

He was back. The real drake, jaws inches from his face, and his arms were already moving through the same steps he'd just watched. Same drop. Same angle. None of it his own. He slid under the jaws, close enough to feel the heat coming off them. A claw swiped where his skull had been a half-second earlier and hit nothing. And there he could see it now, clear as anything. The gap between the scales. He jumped higher than he should've been able to.

SHRRRAAAK!

The axe hit the gap. Then again. It kept finding the same spot, over and over, while his muscles struggled to keep pace with movements that weren't his to begin with. The light along the handle flickered once and went out.

The drake screamed as it died. It was the last thing he really heard before his legs gave out. Then his arms.

He was unconscious before he even hit the ground.

Something rhythmic pulled him back up out of the dark.

CLANG.

His eyes twitched.

CLANG.

Everything hurt. He opened his eyes to a wooden ceiling and just lay there for a while, waiting for the room to stop spinning, piecing together what had happened. Memories that weren't his.

An Echo.

Even in his own head, the word felt unfamiliar, like something he'd only just learned to say.

He tried to sit up. The pain jolted him back down.

The room was lit by the glow of a forge. Wooden walls, dark with years of smoke. Tools on every hook, half-finished weapons and armor leaning against the walls. Through the window: a town he didn't recognize, trees bigger than any building, stone pillars poking up between rooftops, the sound of people and carts and, somewhere close, a river.

CLANG.

A big man stood at the forge, arms covered in old scars. Behind him, leaning against the wall, was a set of armor made from silver-brown drake scale. The same silver-brown.

Julius felt his stomach drop.

The man put down his hammer and turned around.

"So." He looked Julius over. "Where'd you get that axe?"

Julius's mouth had gone dry. "Found it. On a stump."

"A stump." The blacksmith said it flat, like he was giving the lie a chance to fall apart on its own. "I watched you fight that thing from right here. Boys who find axes on stumps don't move like that when it counts."

He saw me.

"I-I don't know what you're talking about."

Nobody said anything for a second. That silence did more than an accusation would have.

"That wasn't a normal drake, kid. And you took it apart with a weapon you found."

Julius looked down at his hands, at the dried blood along his arms, and figured he was too tired to think it through properly. The man already suspected something anyway. Might as well.

"When I touched the carving on the handle," he said, "I saw something. A man in iron armor, fighting with this exact axe. And I wasn't just watching. I was inside it. Inside him."

The blacksmith's hands stopped moving.

"What else?"

"He killed a drake too. Went straight for the gap in the scales, like he'd done it before. A lot."

Something shifted in the man's expression. Not surprise. More like he already knew. He walked over and grabbed the axe tight, like he needed to check it was still real.

"This was my father's axe." He straightened his back. "And the man you're describing..."

His grip tightened.

"Has been dead for more than twenty years."

The cold in Julius's stomach spread down his back. He could still feel it, faint but there, under his ribs. A second heartbeat, settling back into wherever it had come from.

What is this thing, and how many dead men is it going to make me carry?