[h3]The Hunter's Dream[/h3]
“That is a complex and layered question, good Hunter,” the doll told Farren hesitantly. “The echoes are an expression of the dying will of those who fall, empowered and made eternal by the Old Blood in their veins. By their very nature they are bound in blood forever. You produce no such echoes when you fall, of course, for you cannot die... but echoes clinging to you are not part of you. If you are forcibly returned to the Dream without a proper conduit, the connection will fail and those echoes will be left behind. If there is someone nearby to inherit them, they will receive those echoes to feed their power; if there is no one, the echoes will simply linger in the location.
That much you seem to have gleaned already, good Hunter. As I said, the echoes are eternal... but they are not immutable, as you have already seen for yourselves. I make them part of you to grant you strength, and through the little ones you can manifest concepts of the Nightmare through the birdbath with them. Similarly, any echoes left behind are unlikely to retain their neutral state for long. Lingering echoes will bind not just to you, but to any creature with the Old Blood that happens to pass by... and any creature that have received your lost echoes might fall to something else, to leave them lingering elsewhere or pass them on to their killer. Even echoes that are not absorbed but left to linger do not remain immaterial for long, but will in an hour's time solidify as coldblood, which can be challenging to find.
So, good Hunter,” the doll told him solemnly, “you can technically always retrieve the echoes you lose... but in practice, tracking them down may quickly become impossible.”