Dawn hummed through Auralis like an instrument testing its strings.
Every spire, terrace, and rail pulsed in slow harmony, the kind of rhythm that pretended everything was fine.
Jax woke to the faint shimmer of his conduit lines glowing beneath his skin. The Comma mark pulsed once, then quieted — polite, obedient, pretending not to exist. He sat up, rolling his shoulders until the Aether veins in the dorm wall responded, adjusting the room's light temperature to match his body frequency.
"Too awake to rest," he muttered, pulling on his jacket.
The dorm's halls were silent. He passed by floating shelves displaying older students' accolades — glass-like medals engraved with rhythmic glyphs, each humming its owner's unique beat. His reflection wavered in the glass. For a second, the reflection blinked out of rhythm.
He didn't stop walking.
---
1 — Auralis at Dawn
The academy was older than every calendar it had outlived.
Two hundred million years of construction layered into one breathing monument. Most called it "the first civilization that never died."
Auralis called itself a school.
The structure rose from ocean mist like carved resonance — half cathedral, half engine. Living architecture, bonded through Aetherflow, repaired itself when broken and learned from whoever fixed it. Bridges whispered when crossed too often. Floors remembered who fell on them.
The oldest towers, buried under layers of new steel and light, were fossilized echoes of what the world used to be before the Orders built law into rhythm.
Jax liked the early hour — before the Choirs started tuning the city. He could feel the real pulse beneath the scheduled ones. The one that didn't care about time or students.
He leaned against a rail overlooking the garden terraces.
From here, the sky shimmered with floating dorm islands drifting along gravitational songlines. Birds with metallic plumage rode those same currents. Somewhere below, the Aether Sea reflected Auralis like a mirror that refused to agree completely.
He had just started to enjoy the silence when Aroha's voice broke it.
"You're early. Either insomnia or guilt."
He turned. She approached from the lift platform, still in instructor black, hair tied up, carrying two pulse canisters and her tuner strapped to her hip.
"Training?" he asked.
"Always. Rhythm waits for no one. Especially for insomniacs."
He smirked. "You checked my dorm feed again."
"I don't need to. You breathe too loud when you're thinking."
---
2 — Dual Resonance Training
The terrace reconfigured as she keyed in the training mode.
Panels unfolded into a moving ring, circling the edge of the tower. Symbols ignited beneath their feet — the same glyphs used in resonance discipline tests.
"Today," Aroha said, "we're layering multi-directional control. Flow and Null you've done. Now I want you to keep those stable while letting your senses open."
He frowned. "You're making me multitask with my nervous system."
"Exactly."
She tossed him a new resonance band — black instead of silver. It hummed in three tones, one too low for comfort.
"What's this one tuned to?"
"Reflection layer," she said. "The part of the rhythm that looks back at you."
He slipped it on. The hum sank into his skin.
Aroha raised her tuner, eyes scanning the data. "Breathe. Let the Flow build in your core, Null in your limbs. Let the third band decide how much of you the world hears."
He obeyed. Energy shimmered up his spine, into his chest, curling through his fingertips like heat trying to speak.
The terrace lights dimmed as he balanced both signatures.
Then came the third tone.
It wasn't sound; it was presence.
The band on his wrist vibrated in countermeasure — not attacking, not resisting, simply observing. A reflection tone — a living mirror of his rhythm, one beat delayed.
The effect was disorienting.
For every pulse of Flow and Null, there was a faint echo — a whisper of who he'd been one second ago. The air around him shimmered, like the world wasn't sure which version of him it wanted to believe in.
Aroha circled him slowly. "Feel that? That's memory delay. The academy uses it to archive Aether signatures. It's harmless — unless something else answers."
"Answers?"
"Your rhythm's broadcast across Auralis right now," she said. "Every student's is, to maintain sync. But if something else hums back—"
She didn't finish. She didn't need to.
The terrace's glyphs flickered once. The reflection hum doubled — two echoes now, one polite, one impatient.
Aroha's tuner spiked. "Jax, cut sync—now."
He slammed Null into the band. The echo vanished, leaving static air and an aftertaste of metal.
Aroha's jaw tightened. "That's the third unsanctioned echo this week. All under Hypernatural frequencies."
"You think it's us?" he asked.
"I think something old is learning the sound of us," she said. "And it's getting better at singing back."
---
3 — Kara's Theory
By midday, the training terrace had cooled, but his mind hadn't. Jax found Kara in the archive halls, sitting cross-legged between two walls of transparent data prisms.
The light from the prisms painted her skin in oscillating colors — each representing stored resonance waves from past generations.
"You ever think about how much this place remembers?" she asked, not looking up. "Every echo that's ever happened — trapped in glass. All those students, all those mistakes."
"I try not to," Jax said, sliding down to sit beside her. "You'd go insane listening."
She smiled. "Maybe I already did."
On the table beside her sat a device — half mirror, half instrument. Its surface rippled like water whenever she spoke.
"What's that?"
"Echo reader. I borrowed it from the Choir labs."
She caught his look and corrected herself. "Stole. Temporarily."
He leaned in. The reflection in the device shifted a fraction out of sync with his movements — delayed by half a second.
"I think," she said, tapping it, "the resonance beneath Auralis isn't interference. It's a feedback loop. Every time we train or broadcast rhythm, the city hears it, copies it, and sends it back to test us."
Jax frowned. "Then it's learning faster than we are."
"Exactly. The more we balance, the closer it gets to perfect imitation."
"Sounds like evolution."
"Or rehearsal," she said softly.
He looked at her. "You think it's conscious?"
"I think consciousness is just rhythm that refuses to stop."
Her reflection in the prism walls flickered once, showing her with her eyes closed — except she hadn't blinked.
"Okay," Jax muttered. "That's unsettling."
"Sorry," she said. "Been happening since the Vault spike. Every reflection's a half-beat off."
She handed him a small chip. "These are the last five undercity readings. Notice anything?"
He slotted it into the table's receiver. Graphs unfolded — rising and falling lines, perfectly rhythmic, until the final one flattened.
"No decay curve," he said. "Just… pause."
"Right. It stops like something waiting for permission."
He stared at the data, the pause symbol lingering on screen like an open mouth. "Permission for what?"
"To start again," she said.
---
4 — The Forbidden Floor
Aroha summoned them both after dusk.
They met at the base of the north elevator — one of the original structures of Auralis, older than any recorded Order.
"Field drill?" Kara asked, glancing at the sealed hatch.
"Inspection," Aroha said. "Council wants a depth reading. The undercity vaults haven't been entered since the Nullquake era."
Jax remembered the term from the archives: an event centuries ago when entire lower chambers inverted, gravity folding itself like bad paper. No one had explained how it stopped.
The elevator descended in silence. Past training levels. Past residential rings. Past the Pulse Forges.
At -91, the air changed.
No longer warm with Aether — cold, metallic, almost dry.
The door opened to a corridor lit by threads of pale energy woven into the stone. The walls were smoother than modern architecture — too smooth. Jax touched the surface. It vibrated faintly, like a string under pressure.
"Not academy-built," he said.
"No," Aroha agreed. "Older. The first builders."
They walked in silence, their footsteps echoing in perfect time — until Kara's second footfall didn't return.
She stopped. "Did you hear that?"
"What?"
"The echo missed a beat."
They turned their heads in sync. The corridor stretched behind them, clean, symmetrical, harmless. Yet sound refused to exist there now — like the world had decided to mute itself.
Aroha took out her tuner. The display showed two signals — one theirs, one inverted beneath it.
"Reverse frequency," she muttered. "It's copying our movement."
Jax frowned. "Can we stop it?"
"Stopping might be exactly what it wants."
They reached the far end — a door marked with a single glyph: ∴
Jax's pulse matched it instinctively. The Comma mark warmed under his collarbone.
Kara stepped back. "That's—"
"I know," he said.
The glyph pulsed once — pause, pulse, pause.
Aroha raised her hand. "No one touch it."
But Jax already was. His palm hovered a centimeter away. The air between skin and symbol shimmered. He felt something breathe in.
A low tone filled the hall.
Not like the Vault's — this one felt closer. Less mechanical, more like a voice with lungs.
The light under their feet turned amber. The walls pulsed once, like a single massive heartbeat through the entire structure.
Then silence.
The glyph went dark.
Aroha exhaled. "Everyone out. Now."
They didn't argue. The elevator rose in absolute quiet. None of them spoke until they were halfway back to the surface.
Then Kara said softly, "It wasn't copying us this time. It was waiting."
---
5 — The Name That Was Erased
The following morning, classes continued like nothing had happened. Students filled the halls. The academy sang its usual notes. But the undercurrent — that steady hum under every surface — felt heavier. Slower.
Aroha spent most of the morning in council meetings, leaving Jax and Kara to "pretend to behave."
They didn't.
Instead, they snuck into the upper archives — a level reserved for instructors and council historians. Jax used Null to silence the entry wards. Kara, of course, whistled softly through the tune of "rule-breaking harmony."
Rows upon rows of crystalline tomes lined the chamber, each encoded with Aether signatures from long-dead archivists.
"Help me find records from before the Orders," Kara said, scanning her hand over the nearest slab. "Anything about resonance architecture."
Jax traced a finger over an older record — its surface scarred but intact. The data projection flickered to life.
> Archive Log: Auralis Genesis Phase
Year: Unclassified.
Function: Preservation of the Hypernatural inheritance.
Note: Primary rhythm engine discovered under deep ocean shelf. Entity within referred to as Echoryn. All personnel forbidden contact.
The word pulsed on the screen.
Echoryn. Not a system. A name.
Kara read over his shoulder. "That's it. The thing beneath."
He scrolled further.
> Addendum: Entity exhibits mimicry of all known frequencies. Believed to predate Aetherflow. Purpose unknown.
—End of Access.
The record snapped shut.
Kara stepped back. "It's learning through us. The whole academy's a cage around that thing."
"Or an interface," Jax said quietly. "We might be the ones it uses to practice."
She stared at him. "You mean we're part of its training?"
He didn't answer. The Comma mark on his chest pulsed once — not warm this time, but cold.
---
6 — Nightfall Decision
By night, Auralis glittered again — as though pretending could make normalcy real.
Jax sat alone on the balcony outside the dorms. The Aether Sea reflected constellations like bruises. The hum of the city rolled beneath him in perfect symmetry. Too perfect.
He looked at his hands. The rhythm inside him felt… responsive. When he breathed, the city exhaled. When he blinked, lights on the lower terraces dimmed by a fraction, as if syncing unintentionally.
He wasn't sure anymore if he was tuning Auralis — or if Auralis was tuning him.
Kara joined him, wrapping her coat tight. "Aroha's grounded us for two days. Said we need to rest."
"Rest," he echoed. "Right."
"You're not sleeping either."
"Not when the city's awake."
They sat together for a while, saying nothing. The silence wasn't empty; it was watching.
Kara finally asked, "If you could hear it… if it spoke back… what would you ask?"
Jax thought for a long moment.
"I'd ask what it remembers," he said.
"And what if it remembers you?"
He
didn't answer.
Because somewhere deep beneath the spires, under layers of metal, crystal, and bone, something ancient stirred again — a rhythm not of light or flow, but of patience.
The first mimic.
The one that taught the world to listen by listening too well.
---
END OF CHAPTER 5 — THE ECHO BENEATH