A Path-Echo is a translucent figure of ordinary size that flickers like a candle flame, coloured where the present road is grey: a drover’s red scarf, the blue of an old uniform, a pilgrim’s ochre cloak, all bright at first and fading as the replay runs. The road under it shows as it was in its time, paved and busy, while the real road beside it is cracked and overgrown. Each casts a faint second shadow beside the traveller’s own.

They walk with the walk they had: a soldier marches in step to a drum nobody hears, a merchant haggles with another Echo, a child runs ahead and runs back, an old man stops at the same milestone and sits. Their sound is a layered murmur of voices, boots, and wheels; their smell is that of their age, woodsmoke from a fire that burned out centuries ago, a courtier’s perfume, wet horse. Walking through one feels like walking through cold mist, and passing one feels like the brush of a shoulder.

They exist only on the path that made them and cannot leave it. A busy old road holds thousands, layered one over another; a forgotten pilgrim route a few hundred. They fade unless a living observer feeds them, so the most walked stretches hold the brightest, and a road nobody travels slowly empties.

Path-Echoes are repetitive and predictable. They ignore the living unless provoked and treat them, if at all, as noise in their routine. They grow stronger with the traveller’s own feelings: a frightened traveller calls up the frightened dead, a peaceful one the content. A battle that replays is the worst of it, a whole field of Echoes charging through the living.

An Echo has enough mass to push: a violent one can knock a traveller off their feet or injure them. Strong ones can attach to a traveller, follow them off the road, and haunt them on the Material Plane. Objects left on the path take on the imprint of the past and can become powerful artefacts.

Travellers see the past at first hand on a Ghost Step, and some find there the Echo of someone they lost and say goodbye. Pilgrims who follow Umbra walk such roads on purpose, so that the dead are not forgotten. The deeper danger is quiet: a visitor who watches too long begins to mimic the walkers, forgets they are alive, and in the end fades into the road as a new Echo for those who come later. The road’s own keepers, remnant beings or constructs, warn travellers off a battle about to replay.

Country people near a Ghost Step call the Echoes "the road’s walkers" and set out water at the milestones for them, believing the dead are thirsty; the Echoes never drink. Some believe that following an Echo to its end will lead to its grave or its treasure, and a few such stories are true, since an Echo of a last journey ends where its walker died. Families who walk the road to find their own dead are told to remember their own name, and to say it aloud at every milestone.