Classification: Echo Breach Protocol Sigma-7
Subject: Agent Cass Marrow
Status: [MISSING IN FIELD]
Directive: Recover Source Memory. Contain Entity E-0 (Codename: Hollow-Root). Collapse Render Layer.
OPERATION: DESCENDER
The Echo Well was one of seven.
Agent Cass Marrow stood at the lip of Well_03-Delta, cold mist rising from the mouth like breath.
Her mission was clear:
“Descend into the Render.
Locate the rogue echo manifesting as David Holloway.
Destroy it.”
They said it like it was that easy. Like the Echo Realm was just terrain.
Not something alive.
BREACHPOINT
The drop was surgical.
Tethered memory spines. Reality anchors. Echo disruptors embedded in her spine.
For five seconds, it felt like falling through a slideshow of her worst days.
The sixth second, she landed—in a place that wasn’t.
Red sky like bruised cartilage.
Buildings made of regrets.
Gravity moved sideways if you weren’t looking.
And in the distance—The Hollow Man. Watching.
CONTACT
The first contact was hostile.
Cass fired the mnemonic harpoon at an echo-beast stitched from laughter and bone.
It screamed in her own voice.
“You cried in fifth grade when Dad missed the play—remember?”
She crushed it with a memory anchor:
Her first kiss. Her best friend’s smile. A birthday party untouched by trauma.
Weaponized nostalgia.
The thing burst like a shattered music box.
DAVID
She found him in a cathedral of teeth.
David Holloway.
But he was wrong now—too tall, mouth spiraling open into a tunnel of screams.
“I REMEMBER TOO MUCH,” he moaned. “I’M ALL OF THEM NOW.”
Echoes of children climbed him like ants.
Cass aimed her weapon.
But he whispered her mother’s name.
And Cass hesitated.
Just long enough for the world to scream.
REALITY COLLAPSE
She’s cut off. Tether severed. Body in stasis topside, brain free-falling through hell.
Now she’s hunted.
David’s voice now fills the sky.
“You came to silence me.
But you brought more memory.
So much more to feed on.”
The realm warps around her emotions.
When she’s angry, it rains knives.
When she’s afraid, the walls bleed her childhood bedroom wallpaper.
COUNTERSTRIKE
Cass stops running.
She changes tactics.
Builds a memory bomb—a loop of griefless recollection, raw and clean:
Her dog as a puppy.
Her favorite book, dog-eared.
That one time she danced in the kitchen.
She detonates it.
It blasts silence through the echo chorus.
David reels.
The children scatter.
She walks through the storm of unspoken names.
BLACK BOX
At the center: a throne of hands.
And sitting on it—not David anymore.
But Aria.
Fully grown. Cold eyes.
“Daddy brought me back wrong,” she says.
“But the realm raised me right.”
“We don’t want to haunt memories anymore.
We want to be real.”
She offers Cass a trade:
“Your name… for your freedom.”
Cass doesn’t answer.
She leaps. Blade out. Screaming her own damn name loud enough to shake the sky.
FINAL TRANSMISSION
We lost Cass.
But something changed.
Echo activity dropped by 70%. The well went dark.
And from the recording pulled from her suit, one last log:
“Tell my sister… I remembered.
I remembered it all.
And it didn’t break me.”
“They’re not echoes anymore.”
“They’re becoming.”
RESONANT // BLACK
The Echo War has begun.
And we’re not ready.