The Doctrine of Echo (The Veinless Rebels)

“The mountain never forgets.”

The Veinless — a secret abolitionist sect — believe neither release nor consumption occurs.

To them, each shard carries the full consciousness of a dwarf ancestor, forever trapped and fragmented.

The quieting, they say, is not silence but shock.

A soul, severed from the mountain’s chorus, falls mute — alone, aware, terrified.

The Veinless claim to have heard these isolated minds in the hum of cooling furnaces and the static of scrying mirrors.

They seek to reunite the scattered fragments by returning all mined mirrorstone to the deep veins, in a ritual called “The Rejoining.”

This act is illegal; transporting mirrorstone back into the mines without permission is punishable by hanging.

The Veinless are closest:

mirrorstone doesn’t destroy or free souls — it splits them infinitely. Every reflection, every mirror, is a living echo. The world is haunted by fragments of memory; even mirrors in Harlequin Vale sometimes blink back.

If souls are fragmented:

world itself becomes unstable — reflections take on lives of their own; ghostly doubles wander Canava.