A cruel jest, the concept of 'infinite regression.' Storytellers painted it as a gilded key, unlocking any tragedy, a hero's inevitable triumph over an endless parade of misfortune. Protagonists, they insisted, would simply learn, adapt, and eventually shatter the cycle. How utterly naive. How deeply, profoundly false. Over a thousand loops, the world had crumbled around Kaelen. This iteration, the one where everything splintered into dust and silence, marked his 1183rd witness. He understood the truth: some destinies were not bent, but broken. No matter how many times he tried, no matter the sacrifice, the Cycle of Thorns consumed Aerthos. This was no tale of victory, no grand saga of a world saved. Only the desolate echo of someone who, burdened with infinite memory, had utterly failed. First, one must grasp the brittle nature of the mind. Even the most iron-willed soul, subjected to endless cycles of death and rebirth, would fracture. A crack, imperceptible at first, would spread beneath the polished surface of sanity. A prime example, Kaelen reflected, was Rhys, his improbable companion. “Archivist Elara, my direct ancestor, was a renowned sage,” Rhys would often proclaim, a gruff pride in his voice. Kaelen had certainly heard the name, a melancholic philosopher whose prophecies of Aerthos's cyclical doom were legendary. But Rhys, unlike his esteemed forebear, was no philosopher. “Are those runes you’re inscribing merely for show, boy? Keep your blade sharp, not your quill dull.” Rhys, despite his nearing sixty cycles of age, maintained a formidable physique. He was more familiar with the weight of a war-axe than philosophical ideals, always emphasizing the brutal utility of practice. “Every muscle, every glyph learned, it all vanishes with each reset, Rhys,” Kaelen had countered, weary even then. “Muscle memory is a habit. Habits persist,” Rhys had said, tapping a finger to his temple. In those early cycles, Kaelen, still new to Aon's Burden and barely ten regressions deep, found Rhys’s pragmatism hard to grasp. They were opposites in almost every conceivable way. Their origins, their methods, their outlooks—there was not a single common thread. Yet, they were bound by one grim reality. “Curse the Void. This run is tainted again.” Rhys and Kaelen were both regressors. In this dying world, the impossible had happened: not one, but two individuals were cursed with the temporal reset. Most legends spoke of a singular chosen one; Aerthos, it seemed, enjoyed defying expectations. “Void-spawn. It cannot be killed.” “What now?” Kaelen asked, the question a familiar ache. “I’ll buy time. You escape, struggle until the final pulse. Perhaps in the next iteration, you’ll glimpse a new path?” “Always the impossible tasks for me…” “Boy! Mind your tongue! Where are your manners, whelp?” Rhys, born in the distant, sun-baked plains of the Aerthos’s eastern reach, had somehow picked up the refined curses of Valerius City’s elite. A strange affectation, but typical of Rhys. Kaelen had first encountered Rhys on his sixth regression. Rhys then spoke only in the guttural dialects of his homeland. However, upon realizing Kaelen shared his affliction, he threw himself into deciphering ancient Aerthan scripts and mastering common tongues. By the seventh and eighth cycles, Rhys’s fluency improved dramatically. By the tenth, his grasp of linguistics surpassed Kaelen’s. Rhys could recite archaic sagas in polished Valerian, not just his native tongue. “Your dedication is… something, Rhys.” “Dedication, you fool? It’s habit! You refused to learn my dialect, so I adapted. A man who supposedly retains all knowledge, yet neglects foundational understanding? As Elara said, ‘He who gathers wisdom but fails to apply it is adrift.’ How can you be so idle, younger as you are? Tsk, truly…” He had perhaps learned a little too well. Thanks to Rhys’s aggressive self-education, which included absorbing the stoicism of Aerthos’s elder cultures, their communication became seamless. Two regressors, two supposed 'cheat keys' to destiny. It was a bizarre pairing. Sometimes Kaelen sacrificed, sometimes Rhys did, and together, they carved their fleeting marks on the cycles. “We did it! By the Silent Stars, we actually did it!” They had finally overcome the Chitinous Maw, a monstrosity that had ended ten previous runs. After incinerating its hateful, segmented head, Rhys tossed aside his axe and rushed Kaelen, a wild laugh erupting from his chest. “Ah! Thank you! It was all thanks to you! I could not have reached this far alone!” Rhys crowed, like a child. For cycles, from the sixth to the tenth, they had been allies, yet a sliver of suspicion had always lingered between them. Trust was a luxury in a world perpetually on the brink of collapse. Both Kaelen and Rhys had seen too much to easily give it. But as this grizzled Elder Guardian embraced him, his eyes shining with unadulterated triumph, Kaelen felt the last vestiges of that mutual wariness dissipate. Into Rhys’s storm-grey eyes, Kaelen gazed. The reflection mirrored his own relief. Yes, they were pilots whose vessels had crashed at the end of the age, but if not born of the same earth, they were comrades who had plunged with fragile parachutes towards the same landing zone. From that day, many things between them faded into irrelevance. Origin, generation, beliefs, allegiances—all lost their natural gravity. In that atmosphere where weight had vanished, they felt significantly lighter. “Honestly, this regression… it’s a heavy burden.” Rhys, in an abandoned tavern, pouring a bitter Nightshade brew, finally revealed the raw nerve of his weakness. They would meet in the hushed morning light, often with a thermos of spiced tea or a flask of potent spirits, to talk of trivialities that felt like anchoring weights in the current of endless time. “We awaken on the 17th of the Sixth Moon, do we not? But a minute after, my Elara dies.” Rhys explained the ritual of their return: 13:59 on the 17th of the Sixth Moon. That precise moment marked their regression. Yet, precisely at 14:00, a Void-tear would erupt in Valerius City, the capital, erasing everything south of the Great Aether River. That day, unlike Kaelen and Rhys, who were always safely starting in the distant Oakhaven Reach, Rhys’s wife had been attending a congress of scholars in Valerius City. “Just one minute. Always just one minute.” Rhys emptied his flask. “My Elara was in the Grand Lecture Hall, presiding over an event with several renowned mages.” “Even if you warned her… she could not escape.” It was a cataclysm that turned the capital into ash. Even if Rhys called immediately after regressing, shouting warnings, it was physically impossible for Elara to escape the instantaneous obliteration. “Calling is futile. She silences her datastone during important events. I must send a summons three times in succession for her to even glance at it.” “Then there’s no time. I merely manage to whisper ‘I love you,’ then a thrum from the sky, and the connection severs. Just ten seconds. That is all the time I hear her voice…” “Nothing else. Only Elara,” Rhys murmured, his voice a dry rasp. His true name, Emit Rhys. His old title, Elder Guardian. Kaelen began to understand the desperate pursuit of power that had consumed him. With each regression, Rhys’s consumption of Nightshade brew increased. By the ninth cycle, he’d dismiss it as watered spirits; by the nineteenth, he’d drain three flasks without a blink. “Even if I drink myself into oblivion, my liver resets. A victory, eh? Hehehe…” He said that, but Rhys’s complexion grew steadily paler, his eyes haunted. By then, they—Rhys—had endured approximately 120 years if all the regressed time was combined. Yet the time he had spent speaking with his wife amounted to barely 120 seconds. The journey of an old man crossing an arid desert, only for a fleeting sip of water, grew ever more grueling. “There must be someone with teleportation abilities. Somewhere.” At some point, Rhys’s singular goal began to shift. “A Teleporter. If I could just find them, then as soon as we reset, I could rush to Elara’s side.” “But… Rhys. Even if such an adept exists, could you truly meet them, gain their aid, and travel within a minute? It takes us half an hour just to link up after regression.” Rhys fell silent. Kaelen knew it was not a silence of agreement. Over a century of shared despair, his companion, who had striven to prevent destruction alongside him, was slowly consumed by increasingly desperate fantasies. He muttered incessantly. “Perhaps if I found resurrection magic, I could bring her back?” “If I could copy another’s Gift, snatch teleportation and a mind-link, I could solve any problem within that minute. Surely.” “It can be done. It must be done.” It was like a fortress of sand, collapsing grain by grain. The culmination of that collapse came in the 23rd regression. Kaelen began the cycle as usual, following their established route. After clearing the blighted ruins near his starting point in under thirty minutes, he moved towards their pre-arranged meeting place. It was a hidden vault they had secured in an earlier cycle. “Rhys? Old man, are you here?” No one occupied the underground training chamber. No signs suggested entry or departure. A cold dread, sharp and sudden, pierced Kaelen. He moved immediately. Kaelen’s starting point was the old Oakhaven Spire. Rhys’s, the ancient Sunken Citadel. He passed a crumbling shrine, half-devoured by monster activity, then entered the Sunken Citadel. Everyone had evacuated, leaving it deserted. Rhys lay dead on the rooftop terrace. From their starting locations, no creature or human possessed the power to fell Rhys. Not even Kaelen could have. The only one capable of such an act was Rhys himself. Rhys’s body was headless, but his torso remained otherwise intact. His left hand, still clutched in a death grip, held a polished datastone, its surface dark and still. The true cost of infinite memory, Kaelen thought, was not the struggle to forget, but the torment of remembering, endlessly, what could not be changed. ---

The Echo of a Whisper