Welcome to my challenge articles. If you're here, kindly fuck off unless I told you to come here. This will be wiped at the end of every challenge, with incomplete stuff just getting moved to another sandbox page or scrapped if its bad.

The loneliest place in the universe is oft the most crowded...

Herik Btah Thanatic Guided Meditation

"Glass Echoes" refers to a colloquial term for a rare spiritual encounter of the Rrataradh variety. It is an incredibly dangerous thing, to be caught up in an instance of that, and incredibly dangerous. The completion of the echo, by its very nature, requires the death of the recognizant. A half-formed thing that must yet appear whole; whence does the difference emerge?
As a child, I once thought that ghosts were whole things. Blue like Galaxios' fastest raging around Pereptia, and themselves caught in that enraged whirling, but whole nonetheless. I thought all spirits must have stories to tell. I thought, on some level, that they were people too.
Their hearts are filled with the tar of the dark core of the sun. What else is used for substrate is known, or more precisely is no longer known. Hidden, concealed, forgotten, lost, eroded. What so is swept under the sands becomes used for them. Each and every life snuffed out and buried and headstone turned to rubble... all substrate. All internalized. The alchemists say the first step to any great transmutative work is to boil and putrefy the reagents. Does one not see how, in the tar-mind of Haerox, this false imagination contains only reality? The whole of the black seventh world is us, what is lost, what cannot be found. All echoes boiled together.
Glass is typically transparent, open. But no glassblower would be undefeated by the challenge of producing a hundred panes that could be seen through all together. Each time, there are impurities... information is warped, lost. The echoes of what was are drunk by the liquid void, distilled into its onyx-nacre potential. Archaeologists, historians, records always exist. The marks ripple out. There is always something missing, something that cannot be truly hidden or weathered away.
Or some would say.
What is constituted as forgotten? Certainly the slumbering gods of dead faiths would be around the Gateways if allowed to disappear. Why not? Why is it not so? Why is a person's mind not preserved?
Were you to sift art made of three colors of sand through a sieve, the result would be fuzzy, no? The time it takes for it all to pass distorts it, allows patterns to be made incomplete and filled with whatever other particulates have precipitated by that point. Glass Echoes are these things, these incompletes. Enough to be recognized by those whose memories have not faded―those who keep the remaining part of the spirit's legacy tethered to the living world. How much is really forgotten all at once? How quickly is it pooled into a new spirit by Rrataradn, by our deceptively calm sun? Writers and poets, the like of my own kin, are to die and remain without half our minds! All unwritten fragments is what we may retain.
Then why not every peasant who amounted to nothing? Why not the hermits returning in full, filled in only for the few merchants who had recalled their home?
Maddening to think about, the wine-dark skies of billions of lost souls. It is possible that they simply have not been remade, or that impact must be significant to be retained... or that the realm itself unstructures them for parts. The amalgams made unknowable, foreign, truly new in a way that children are new people by imitation of their peers, those are the Rrataradh we are familiar with. They are Echoes still, but mere dust containing plausibly hundreds of peoples' forgotten affect.
A Glass Echo is not always known as one. They are the mighty to return from the putrefaction and sieve swiftly and intact, augmented and re-completed only for what is still remembered about them. What has not been hidden. They are falsely led, with the same malformed willpower Haerox instills into all her dark brood, to seek out and destroy that which recalls their living memory. It will not be returned to them. It will be utilized in new spirits that need those areas filled out.
This second death is a cruel and merciless one. The body and mind may go out all at once, but the legacy... that which is left behind fades over agonizing centuries. Imagine one's birth being strained over such esoteric parts, such lengths of time.
Though that is arguably how one's living self and memory forms. The legacy lives and dies much too quick for the substrate upon which it relies.
Regardless, there is a definitive amount of data collected about these... echoes. As fundamentally they determine a minimum turnaround time between first-death and the manifestation of some part of their lost information, this can be a yardstick for how quickly one would need to be forgotten entirely―or intentionally excised from history―to manifest in full as a spirit. This is purely hypothetical, supported only by cursory third-hand anecdotes of a coherent deity manifesting in the realm following an ethnic cleansing of its patron culture.
Three years. The earliest a Glass Echo has been sighted after one's death was three years. A man of few words and excellent impact, returned in some part to slaughter those who recalled that vulnerability and reclaim the missing parts. Futile, as discussed above, and easily dispelled with faith-based arts, as all of these reminder-spirits are.
If one were to cover up, erase documentation, murder all acquaintances, forget, kill themselves, over a deceased person, or to do that erasure for themselves pre-mortem, the whole of their legacy may yet manifest in that second death right after the first. Two years at most for post-mortem acts of this. All at once, one may slip through the sieve, be resilient against the solar influence, the urges.
Potentially, the spirit could be a person. A continuance. A new life unbound from mortal lifespans.
Do not do this for me, reader. If you have read this recently following my death, do not attempt to revitalize me through this dark spirit science. For all else, take away this alone:
No spirit from our sun is free of its taint. Her jealousy and outrage make them monsters in their own right. Do not let the glass deceive you into thinking it is invisible. Into believing it is not there. No matter how close the echo, the price of a free Rrataradh is a crime worthy of a third death.
—Hvalabarath the Ink-Stained, A Musing on Deaths

It hangs like an open wound for eternity, a nervous instability just on the shoulder of pain, a hollowness, a sparsity in the flesh like thousands of filleted cuts too thin for the eye to see. Like you're made of sponge, the cold wind rushing through your chest and guts as through the needles of a fir on a ghastly winter evening. Some romanticize it, some fear it, some hide from it in food and spirits and dancing and lust. Run from it, no matter how quickly, and its claws will still sink into your essence. It was born within you the second you allowed joy to be at home there.

It holds itself open in the bitter old wounds of the stomach, itching under the scars from overzealous foes who believed they could show you a deeper fear than it. A reminder, perhaps, that it is your most incommunicable and yet intimately shared experience. That nothing will ever be more potent, that nothing could be lost more than already has been. And yet, you think to yourself, what remains is what is lost. Two seasons' worth. Time enough to shudder and pretend your body could settle on top of itself, suture lesions that were never there. Time enough to let it consume you, if the wretched thing didn't come with twists forged into its obsidian knives. Hanging on your shoulder, it keeps whispering just before its jaw closes on your throat:

"But what now will be forever gone? What left have you failed to do?"

A false sense of duty. You did your job, respected their orders, hell knows what else had to be done. It was an answer to it, you supposed. Running from the fog of piercing aches that cuts as subtly as broken untempered glass. No memory to hold, no reminders to reignite the ice spreading. None but you.

What strings of murders could be done without sparking more conversation, more information, more connection between yourself and them? What libraries burned would do good without the silencing of their authors? How long would such research take? The easy road, the legendarily rare power of a wish, was gone. Laughed out of the room by a collective billions strong hiding behind that mask. You'd done so much, compiled every history yourself just to destroy echoes of it. Destroy their presence.

As requested. As ordered. As begged for by a... you couldn't dare call them a friend. An incidental ally, more hopeless than anything, no light from behind the eyes.

"For what purpose?", you'd asked. You hadn't received any explanation, but there had to be a plan. It was such a ridiculous gambit with no perceived payoff. No reunion in the void, no possible redemption of the ideas you'd fought for. Gained those scars believing in, the ones bitter against the waning sun. Their words haunted you even through it all. No real answer, but an answer truer than any real one would have been.

"I'm scared of death."

Weren't you? Weren't they? As if years of literal warfare could armor your psyche in jade thick enough to turn your core to that stone, to make you truly impervious to fear. Fear that somehow failed to live up to the reality of the aftermath. Something wrong, hollow, missing, a pressure gone, a halfway freefall sensation. All so bland, so vague, so mild sounding, but all too vivid.

Tonight on the hilltops, the night-birds sang their song to announce the nesting. They came up from the frigid south this time of year. Curtains of ice fell in their summer homeland now, and the people braving the weather and the fell folk of the snows did away with ancient patterns like them. Abandoned by their presence, some would say. You struggled to sleep the past few nights, and tonight was no different. Nothing ever felt different.

Why? Why over someone so briefly traveled with? A surface-level preposterous request from a fallen hero before their final battle, reaching out to just the first person available. Why you? I've always known. The closest around, incidental. Always incidental. Always the same with you two.

The short brush rustled. Animal noises. Nothing to fear, for yourself anyway. The plague-ridden and the undead were only marginally different from any living beast when it came to disabling attacks. Rationalizing, the knives in your scars told you.

It was a deeper emptiness than the inkwell had foretold, but disregarding even that, it carried nothing of Truth within it. You had become quite apt at it, wandering the forgotten lands behind all shadows. Failures, microscopic but still present, fragmenting your self like the grief you'd never had a chance to appropriately feel. Mourner of only ideas and cut ties, you. To not see, but feel by the echoes of wrongness, of cut-and-glue patchwork monoglyphisms, under tar-like cave ceilings that pretended to be a sky, it was a reminder of what was left, and what would not be returned. It was too late.

Had it been natural, even this coherence would be impossible. But that tar stretched on behind your eyes, that spiritual sense of ritual and theme disoriented what was reclaimed. The lenience of the process was miraculous, evident in the simultaneous existence and knowledge of the one who cut you from the truly irrecoverable. Evident in the very thing that ruined you.

You lost sense of time rapidly without a moon or sun to rely on. Direction was easier to retain, if only for the infection in your very mind and soul. What was gone now would be gone forever, reclaimed by the ways of all things for worse fates. Would you still be present in them?

No. Clearly not.

But were you even present in yourself now? Converted now, enchained by the truth behind the mask you thought you rebelled against. The very thing your benefactor would deny knowing. Wouldn't know, you reminded yourself. Smoke and mirrors until the unforgivable crime of true birth, which had ultimately been the secondary trial you would have failed had the first one not ended the way it did.

Nobody with this coherence forgets the feeling of Death creeping in. How would one not hide it by dying? How, how, HOW? Anything to forget the void between exhalation and restless reclamation.

What happens to the concentrate of such memory?

The mountains―stalactites, if you wished―stretched on for a hundred thousand miles in each direction, as colorless as the fake sky above. Another one pooled in it. Three more days for the glass to settle. "Days", as if that had meaning. Night had no meaning either. No wonder the myths were falsehoods; without a sunset, how could the god of beyond the eventide know when to wander the earth?