The Echo Mortician

The dead are the only honest witnesses in Oakhaven. But every truth they surrender hollows out the last living self taking it. Asher Flint works death. In a city that runs on elegant paperwork, he is the lowest hand in the machine—a mortician who sews, tags, and files the bodies nobody wants examined too closely. Asher carries a curse. By touching a corpse, he inherits the dead person's strongest skill—and pays for it by reliving their final, agonizing moment of death in full. He believed he could keep paying. He believed he could stay himself. He was wrong. When a decorated officer arrives too clean and too polished, Asher reads the body. What floods into him is a soldier's panic, a phantom head count, and the certainty that someone was still breathing when the route changed. Now he is hunted by the people who sent the body, trapped inside a system designed to digest inconvenient truth, and losing himself to the growing crowd of dead disciplines living inside his muscles. The Echoes are not tools. They are parasites. And the more he uses them, the less of Asher Flint comes back. The dead are piling up. So is everything they left inside him. ⚠️ Dark institutional thriller. Graphic violence, psychological horror, bureaucratic dread. No stat sheets. No harems. No clean victories. Updates 3x/week.