I was leaning back against the stairs as I watched Celica pick up Hope for the night. The tiny doll cradled in her hands and completely still. No luck that night either. But that wasn't a surprise, it had only been a few nights of this. Only about four hours of looking total. And travelling between here and the search area cost some of that time. But it was the best way to avoid getting caught.

This was going to be a very slow process. But it was all we had if we wanted to stop something terrible from happening here.

Red. Death's Echo. The Wraith. The Echo Chamber.

It was giving me a headache.

I held in my sigh as Celica walked past. She was going to take Hope to Jarec and Russel up in the attic. It was our map storage and planning room now. We'd all figured it was the best place to keep it from being discovered.

Suddenly Celica stopped on the stairs, directly behind me from the sound of it.

"What the…" I heard her mumble.

I turned around to see what she was talking about to come face to face with Hope reaching towards me like a child wanting a cookie.

It didn't do that before. It always ignored me no matter the distance. It ignored everyone except Celica.

I took a step back while fighting the sinking feeling of dread in my stomach.

Hope stopped reaching for me after a several more steps.

"That was weird," Celica said.

I swallowed and tried to calm my quickly increasing heartbeat.

"Fethris, can you come here for a second?" I needed to at least try something else before jumping to any conclusions here. Don't panic until you have all the data.

"What's going on?" Fethris asked as he stepped out of the workroom.

"Can you stand by Celica for a second? I want to see something real quick." I could hear the panic in my voice, clear as spring water. I didn't want to say why. Not yet. Data, then panic.

Fethris, confused but trusting came over and stood where I pointed. Exactly where I'd been when Hope reached out to me.

Hope had no reaction to Fethris. He stared at it in complete stillness and silence for what felt like forever.

"What would it react to Serafina and not you? Weren't you both down there for the same amount of time?" Celica asked, catching on to why I'd asked Fethris over.

"Wait, it reacted to Serafina?" Fethris turned to me while he spoke. I could see a blend of emotions on his face before worry won out.

I could feel my breathing speed up.

"It did do something to you," Fethris stated. He didn't even sound smug, if anything he sounded scared.

What was it? Lingering effects? Maybe it was like a filter and I was just taking longer because of the curse? I was sure there had to be some kind of explanation that didn't mean I was somehow in even more danger. Or something.

There had to be an explanation.

My heart pounded loudly in my chest. With each beat a pulse of magma surged in my blood. My left arm was freezing, ice had crawled up from the curse to nearly my shoulder. Painful pinpricks covered every inch of cold skin.

Breathe Serafina.

I gripped the curse tightly, it might have been painful if I could feel anything beyond the cold.

I needed to focus. To think. What did this mean?

That's when I heard a familiar hissing noise. One that I'd locked away with the worst of my nightmares. Terrible skittering noises I'd thought my mind erased for my sake.

Spiders. Large tarantula-like spiders crawling on the walls and floors. Blue and grey. I could feel a phantom pain in my right ankle. I followed them with my eyes to where they were crawling. They were all leading towards the door.

A girl was pounding on the door. Familiar voices drifted from beyond the stone.

"It's not opening!" she yelled.

I knew that voice. That was Red's voice. But this girl…

It couldn't be. This had to be a mistake. A prank from M.

"Stay put?! I'm locked in! Where am I going to go?" She continued in that same voice, the voice of a person I'd been talking to across timelines. And yet, I knew this girl. "This is not happening. This is not happening," she was muttering to herself as she kicked the door.

The spiders were getting closer. She couldn't keep standing there. She hadn't seen the spiders yet. She needed to move. She couldn't run from this, not really. But she could buy herself some time.

"You should start running," I said, an old instinct kicking in. One I hadn't used in two years. She was scared, but needed to focus on what was happening in the moment.

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She turned to face me. A face I'd seen in the mirror every day. For the first time clear even with the Echo Blue light coming off of her. The Iron Roses shirt, with its rusty metal and bright flowers. It was in my room at that moment.

If I wasn't my father's daughter I might not have seen the panic in those yellow-green eyes. But even without it, one would have to be blind to not see the heavy erratic breathing

"Who are you?!" she demanded. I wanted to turn that question to her. To hear her say what I already knew.

"You…you can see me," I said. I could hear it, the shock and confusion and worry in my voice. I could see that she could hear it too. We both needed to focus at this moment. I took a deep breath and looked away from her so I could think clearly. "Later," I told myself. Freak out later. Need to deal with what's right in front you Serafina. "Run," I told the girl while trying to emphasize how serious I was. "You need to run."

"Run? Run where? I'm locked in!" The distress was painful to hear. The memory of it flooding back like a pyroclastic wave.

I needed to reassure her, so I chose the truth. "The door will open. Eventually." Once the others on her side stopped panicking and focused on what needed to be done. "But you have more immediate problems." Like giant hungry spiders.

The spiders currently crawling towards her and hissing in a way that had haunted me ever since I was standing there in her place.

Then she was gone. My past self. The past me who spoke in Red's voice.

Me, a person who'd interacted directly with an Echo. She'd seen and heard me. We'd talked.

That only meant one thing.

I hadn't realized I'd let out a sob until I felt my knees hit the floor.

This was real. This was really happening.

I wasn't stupid. I knew that this could only mean one thing. Something that had been nearly staring me in the face since August.

Red wasn't some unknown future Dragon Tower student. She wasn't a trusted confidant I didn't truly know. She…

She was me. This entire time. Red had been my future self, sent back to the past somehow through…whatever the curse and chamber had done to me.

Celica and Fethris were talking. Probably just as freaked out as I was. I needed to get it together. They needed me to be calm. Come on Serafina, get up.

I placed my hands my hands flat on the wooden floor, the texture of the grain under my fingers wasn't as grounding as I needed it to be. I focused on the feeling anyway, pressing my hands deeper into it.

I counted my breaths.

One, in. Two, out.

I opened my eyes and stood on my feet. The thoughts of people needing me kept me grounded in the moment. The here and now. Not the future I'd gotten glimpses of over the past few months.

I clenched my fists tightly, my nails digging into my palms. I kept them short, but the tension in my hands and wrists made up the difference.

One more deep breath. One more moment to feel the chaos in my mind before putting a lid on it. I could let myself feel all this later. One thing at a time.

I opened my eyes, my throat was a little sore and I needed a minute to swallow down the terror clogging my throat.

Celica and Fethris were arguing. Their voices finally coming into focus.

"And you didn't take her to the healer?"

"She insisted she was fine, and nothing else happened after so I believed her."

"She's Serafina, she's practically the queen of underplaying anything wrong."

"Guys," I tried. My voice wasn't quite there yet so I swallowed again and cleared my throat. I doubted they noticed.

"What was I supposed to do? Drag her across the school against her will?"

"Maybe!"

"Guys," I tried again, louder.

"Because she definitely would have told us about anything going on if I used force."

"Well doing nothing clearly didn't work out well."

"Guys!" I yelled. I didn't yell at them often, but it was probably needed here.

They both stopped. Freezing there like I'd stopped time itself. Celica and Fethris turned to me in near perfect unison.

It was something. "Look. It's not Fethris' fault. There was no way we could have known something like…this could happen. Yelling at each other won't fix anything."

The attic's hatch opened up, I couldn't see Jarec but I could hear his voice clear enough.

"Is everything okay down there?" He called down.

"Not…really," I admitted. The exact thoughts were still in too much chaos. I needed more time to think and sort them out fully. "Tomorrow before we leave for breakfast, emergency Tower meeting," I told him instead.

"What do you mean tomorrow?" Celica demanded.

It was probably unfair of me to ask them all to wait, but I needed to think and I couldn't do that. Not with them in earshot. I need to soothe the chaotic storm in my mind and heart before I could do anything else.

"I…need to process, I think. I'll actually be able to talk properly about it then. And you both need to cool down a little. So tomorrow. When we can all have a real discussion about what just happened." Everything was scattered, but the most coherent thought I had was that I needed time. Time to think and process and look back on all my interactions with Red and figure out what it meant. For me and for them.

It would be far more efficient for me to do that alone. I couldn't reassure them and sort through my thoughts. Not at the same time.

Celica looked furious about it. Fethris just looked even more worried.

It wasn't great, or even good, but the best I had was heading up the stairs.

"I'm…I'm sorry," I told them. I wasn't sure what exactly I was apologizing for, but I did mean it. Then I retreated inside my room and practically slammed the door.

I leaned against it as I slid down to the floor.

Another sob left my throat against my will. Breathing was painful, like I was inhaling shards of ice with every heave. It was like an earthquake in my chest.

I couldn't force myself to my feet again, if I'd wanted to. I couldn't think, I could barely breathe. Boiling lava in my veins, shards in my lungs, needles on my left arm.

I don't know how long I sat there, just trying to get my body back under my control. I didn't feel better after, not exactly, but everything came into something that resembled clarity.

The curse. A spell that fed off of my own mana. Had a history of retaliation against me and others that tried to poke at it.

The Echo Chamber. A place full of magic stronger and older than most places.

Death's Echo. A knife enchanted by the same person primarily responsible for the enchantments of Dragon Tower. Jantres the Feared. It turns victims into wraiths, undead creatures easy to take control of.

Dragon Tower. Inhabited by the ghost of Malcarg the tyrant, who has some level of control over most of the building and the Echoes.

The Echoes. A unique characteristic of Dragon Tower. Hologram like recordings of past events within the tower walls.

Red. A projection from the future. Like the Echoes but in reverse.

How did it all piece together?

Spells and enchantments made by the same person can cause reactions and interactions. Hope sensed Celica's copy. Death's Echo allowed wraiths in the walls of the school.

There had been curse green on my hand after the excursion into the Echo Chamber. Clear evidence it reacted to something down there. Did it perceive something there as a threat? Did M try to say something? Did the concentrations of magic make the curse react?

Did the enchantment in the Echo Chamber try and defend itself from the curse?

Was that even possible?

Did the curse attack first, or was it the Chamber? Did it matter?

And if I was stuck between the two, what did that mean for me?

I had no idea. And from the way everyone spoke about the curse there was probably no way to fully know. I looked down at the mark of the curse and watched it flex with the clenching and unclenching of my fist. An affliction given to me like some twisted kind of present from a man more distant to me than the ancestor from two thousand years ago. Would Merrripen even know anything about this?

Red. She might know. Red was me this entire time. What had that future version of myself been trying to tell me? She'd tried to reveal herself to me, only to fail. Had she been trying to tell me the truth this whole time?

What else had she been trying to tell me?

I needed to think more about all of this.

In that moment, I needed to figure out what this change meant. What Red's true identity meant for our current plans.

We still needed to find Death's Echo. Whatever else we did about this, that still had to happen. We couldn't do anything until we knew who had it and what they wanted.

Thus, the plan with Hope had to continue. So really, did it really matter?

If it changed nothing about our current circumstances, how much did it matter?

My breathing was steadying even as my thoughts were still in chaos.

The stakes had barely changed. We knew a life was on the line here. That was why we were doing all of this and being so careful. Instead of someone else, the risk was on me.

And maybe we could still change this fate somehow. It was my fate, I should still have a say in it. I couldn't do nothing. And I wasn't going to let people I didn't know make choices for me. If anything, it might be better this way. We weren't making life and death choices for someone else. I knew how I felt about what we were doing.

Of course I was terrified, but my fear couldn't win.

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