The child's body was still warm when he found her, and that was the cruelest part. Not that she was dead, but that he was relieved.
Ardyn Noir stood in the rubble of what had once been a baker's shop, hands trembling at his sides, staring at the small form curled beneath a collapsed beam. She couldn't have been more than seven. Her dress was the color of faded lavender, torn at the hem, and one shoe was missing. The other dangled from her foot, scuffed and small. Too small. He thought of how children's shoes always looked too small, as if childhood itself was something meant to be outgrown quickly, before the world noticed.
He didn't want to look at her face. But he had to. Because he needed to know if she still had one.
The Hushed had been here. He could tell by the way the air tasted, sweet and wrong, like fruit left too long in the sun. It was the aftertaste of something holy turned rotten, the residue of prayers that had curdled in the throat of a god who'd stopped listening. The walls of the shop were stained with it, dark watermarks that spread like bruises across plaster and brick. The floor was littered with bread so old it had fossilized into shapes that looked almost deliberate.
A loaf in the shape of a hand, fingers splayed.
Another that resembled a mouth, open and screaming.
Ardyn stepped closer. His footsteps made no sound. Nothing made sound anymore, not in Veyra's Hollow, not since the silence had learned to eat. Even his breathing had become a kind of violence, an intrusion into a world that had decided it preferred the quiet. He had learned to breathe shallowly, to move like a ghost through the ruins of a city that had once sung with ten thousand voices.
Now it sang with none.
Now it waited.
The child's eyes were closed. That was something. That was mercy. Her skin was pale, almost translucent in the grey light that filtered through the broken roof, and her hair was the color of wheat before harvest, tangled with dust and small fragments of plaster. One hand was stretched out toward something he couldn't see, fingers slightly curled, as if she'd been reaching for help in those final moments. The other hand was pressed against her chest, clutching something.
A doll. Crudely made, stuffed with straw, its button eyes hanging loose by threads. The kind of toy a poor child might treasure, might whisper secrets to in the dark.
He wondered if she'd named it.
He wondered if she'd been whispering to it when the Hushed came.
He wondered if it mattered.
It didn't. Not anymore. Not to her.
But it mattered to him because he could hear it. Even now, even with her body cooling and her blood settling into the lowest parts of her small frame, he could hear the echo of her. It hung in the air above her corpse like smoke, like heat shimmer, visible only to him because he was cursed with the last gift any man should want.
The ability to hear what remained when everything else was gone.
Her echo was singing.
It was a lullaby, soft and meandering, the kind a mother might sing to soothe a frightened child to sleep. Except this child had no mother. Ardyn could tell that much from the echo's timbre, from the way it wavered between notes as if the girl had been trying to remember something she'd only heard once, long ago, before the world broke. The melody was simple. Four notes, repeating. A loop of sound that should have been comforting but instead felt like a knife dragged slowly across glass.
He listened.
He always listened.
That was his punishment, his penance, his purpose. To be the last witness to the dying of the light.
The echo circled her body three times, as all echoes did, and then it began to fade. Not quickly. Nothing died quickly anymore, not in the Hushed, not when even death itself had learned to drag its feet. The sound thinned like watercolor in rain, and Ardyn felt the familiar panic rising in his chest, the desperate clawing need that had become as much a part of him as his heartbeat.
He was hungry.
God, he was so hungry.
He hadn't eaten in three days, hadn't found a body fresh enough to still hold its echo, and his own body was starting to respond to the deprivation in ways that terrified him. His left hand was transparent. Not invisible, not yet, but close. He could see through the skin to the bones beneath, could see the faint pulse of whatever passed for blood in him now.
It didn't hurt.
That was the worst part. It should have hurt, this slow dissolution of self, but instead it felt like relief. Like letting go. Like giving up.
He couldn't give up. Not yet. Not while there was still a chance, however slim, however foolish, that he might hear her voice again.
Lysithe.
The name came to him unbidden, as it always did, a whisper in the back of his mind that might have been memory or might have been madness. He couldn't tell anymore. Couldn't tell where his thoughts ended and the voices of the dead began. But the name was there, always there, a constant ache just behind his eyes.
The child's echo was almost gone now. In another minute it would dissipate completely, would be absorbed by the silence that pressed against the world like a hand over a mouth. And then there would be nothing. No proof she'd ever existed. No record of her brief, brutal life.
Just another absence in a world lousy with them.
Ardyn knelt beside her body. His knees cracked, a sound so loud in the stillness that he flinched. The echo paused in its circling, as if aware of him for the first time, and for a moment he thought it might flee. Some echoes did, when they sensed what he was. What he'd become.
But this one was young.
Naive.
Still clinging to the shape of the world as it had been.
It resumed its song, and Ardyn closed his eyes.
He was not
Had been. Once. A good man. Maybe. Does it matter what you were if no one's left to remember?
He'd built cathedrals of sound, had architected prayer into something beautiful, had believed with the fervor of the truly faithful that beauty might be enough to wake a sleeping god. But the god hadn't been sleeping. The god had been dying. Or perhaps the god had simply grown bored, had tired of the endless susurrus of human need, and had decided that silence was preferable to the cacophony of ten billion hearts all breaking at once.
It didn't matter.
The result was the same.
He almost left. His feet turned toward the door. Three steps. Four. He could feel the hunger gnawing, but he could also feel something else something older, quieter, something that whispered this is still a choice.
He took a fifth step.
Then he heard it. The echo's lullaby, so soft, so unbearably sad.
He turned back.
He opened his mouth.
The echo drifted closer.
Fragile.
Trembling.
It knew.
The echo came apart in his mouth like sugar, like ash, like the memory of sweetness curdled into something that tasted of copper and salt. It writhed. For a moment just a moment it fought. He felt it clawing at the back of his throat, tiny hands made of sound, pulling at the soft tissue, trying to climb back out. He swallowed harder. Forced it down. Felt it settle, still twitching, into the hollow where his soul used to be.
And then he was her.
He was the child in the lavender dress with one shoe missing, clutching a straw doll in the dark, singing to herself because there was no one left to sing to her. He felt her fear, sharp and bright as broken glass. He felt her hunger, days old, gnawing at her belly like an animal. He felt the moment the Hushed found her, the way the air had turned thick and wrong, the way her voice had fled her throat like a bird startled into flight.
And then he felt nothing.
Just the echo dissolving into his blood, into his bones, feeding whatever it was that kept him tethered to this world when every sane instinct screamed at him to let go.
When he opened his eyes, his left hand was solid again. The transparency had receded, pushed back by the stolen life now burning in his veins. He looked at his fingers, flexed them, watched the skin move over tendon and bone.
Real.
Whole.
Alive.
His stomach heaved. He pressed a hand to his mouth, tasting bile and something sweeter, darker. The echo wasn't finished dissolving. He could still feel it moving inside him, small and frightened, trying to find a way out.
I'm sorry, he wanted to say. I'm so sorry.
But there was no one left to apologize to.
He wept. The tears came hot and fast, and they made a sound as they fell, a soft pattering against the dusty floor that was almost musical. Almost like rain. He pressed his palms against his eyes, trying to stifle the noise, terrified that someone might hear, that the Hushed might hear, that whatever god still lingered in the spaces between atoms might hear and judge him and find him wanting.
But there was no one left to hear.
There was only him.
Him and the body of a child and the ghost of a lullaby still echoing faintly in the cavity of his chest.
He didn't know how long he knelt there. Time had a way of slipping in the Hushed, of folding in on itself like paper. Minutes could stretch into hours, or collapse into seconds, and there was no way to tell which was which. The light never changed.
The grey was eternal.
When he finally stood, his legs were stiff and his back ached. He looked down at the child one last time. Her face was peaceful now, or perhaps it had always been peaceful and he'd simply been too focused on his own need to notice. He wanted to close her eyes properly, to fold her hands over her chest, to give her some semblance of dignity.
But he couldn't touch her.
Not now.
Not after what he'd done.
He turned to leave, picking his way through the rubble, when he heard it.
A voice. Not an echo. Not a memory. A voice, clear and present and impossible, speaking his name.
Ardyn.
He froze. His heart, which had been beating slow and steady, suddenly kicked into a frantic rhythm that sent blood rushing to his head. He turned slowly, afraid of what he might see, more afraid of what he might not see.
The shop was empty. The child's body lay where it had fallen. The bread fossils scattered across the floor. The silence pressed close, thick as wool, muffling everything.
But the voice came again, softer this time, almost tender.
Ardyn. You've been looking for me.
He knew that voice. God help him, he knew it. Had known it once, in another life, in a world where voices were gifts and not weapons. Had known it intimately, had heard it laugh and cry and whisper his name in the dark.
Had heard it say goodbye.
"Lysithe," he whispered.
The name escaped his lips before he could stop it, and the moment it did, the air changed. The grey light deepened, took on a quality that was almost liquid, and shadows began to move in ways that shadows shouldn't. They stretched and contracted, reaching for him with fingers made of absence, and he stumbled backward, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
From the darkness at the back of the shop, something emerged.
Not walked. Not appeared. Emerged, as if the shadows themselves were giving birth to it, pushing it into the world through some membrane of unreality. It took the shape of a woman, tall and slender, wrapped in a dress that might have been grey or might have been the color of smoke, or might have been nothing at all. Her hair was long, falling past her shoulders in waves that moved without wind, and her face was turned away from him, angled toward the broken wall as if she were looking at something he couldn't see.
She was humming.
The same four-note melody the child had been singing.
The same lullaby.
Ardyn's throat closed. His hands, solid only moments ago, began to tremble. He wanted to speak, wanted to call out to her, wanted to demand answers or beg forgiveness or simply scream until his lungs gave out.
But no sound came.
The silence had found its way into him, had wrapped itself around his vocal cords like wire.
The woman stopped humming. For a long moment, she stood perfectly still, and Ardyn had the sudden, irrational thought that if he didn't move, if he didn't breathe, if he didn't exist too loudly, she might not notice him. Might turn and walk back into the shadows and leave him alone with his guilt and his hunger and his steadily fracturing mind.
But then she spoke, and her voice was everything he remembered and nothing like it at all.
You've been eating pieces of me for weeks, haven't you, Ardyn? Does it taste like love? Or does it taste like me?
He tried to respond. Tried to shake his head, to deny it, to explain. But the words wouldn't come. They stuck in his throat like stones, like shards of glass, like the echo of a child who would never grow old.
The woman turned.
And Ardyn saw her face.
Or rather, he saw where her face should have been. There was nothing there. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. Just a smooth expanse of skin stretched over the suggestion of features, like a mask that had forgotten what it was supposed to represent.
But somehow, impossibly, he knew she was looking at him.
Knew she was smiling.
You know my name, she said, and her voice came from everywhere and nowhere, from inside his head and outside the world. You've been swallowing it for weeks. Every echo you eat, every voice you steal they all had pieces of me. Fragments. Whispers. Did you think I wouldn't notice?
"I don't " His voice cracked. "I don't understand."
Don't you?
She took a step closer. Her feet made no sound against the floor, and Ardyn noticed with growing horror that her shadow didn't match her movements. It stood perfectly still, watching him.
I'm Lysithe, she said softly. And you killed me.
The shop spun. The walls bent inward. The floor tilted beneath his feet. Ardyn reached out blindly, trying to find something solid to hold onto, but his hands passed through air, through shadow, through the memory of support. He fell to his knees, and the impact sent a shock of pain up his thighs that felt almost welcome.
Pain meant he was still real.
Pain meant he hadn't been swallowed yet.
"No," he managed to whisper. The word came out broken, mangled, barely recognizable as language. "No, I didn't. I wouldn't. I loved you."
The figure that might have been Lysithe tilted her head, a gesture so familiar it made his chest ache.
I know, she said, and there was something in her voice that might have been tenderness or might have been pity. That's why it hurt so much.
"What did I do?" The words tore out of him, raw and desperate. "Tell me what I did."
She was silent for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely a whisper.
You tried to save me. You heard the Hushed coming, heard the silence creeping closer, and you thought you thought if you could just keep my voice inside you, I'd never truly die. So you swallowed it. Piece by piece. Echo by echo. You consumed me, Ardyn. And you've been trying to put me back together ever since.
He stared at her, his mind reeling, trying to process what she was saying. Trying to remember. But there was nothing there. Just gaps. Absences. Holes in his memory where something vital should have been.
"I don't remember," he said. "I don't remember any of it."
Of course you don't. Her voice was gentle now, almost sad. Every time you eat an echo, you lose a little more of yourself. That's the price. That's always been the price.
"Then how do I know you're real?" The question came out harsher than he intended. "How do I know you're not just another echo? Another voice I stole?"
She laughed. It was a sound like breaking glass, like wind through empty rooms, like prayers spoken backward.
You don't.
And then she was gone. Not fading, not dissolving, just gone, as if she'd never been there at all. The shadows receded. The light returned to its usual grey. The shop was empty again, save for the body of a child and the man kneeling in the dust, staring at the space where something impossible had just spoken his name.
Ardyn stayed there for a long time. Long enough for his knees to go numb. Long enough for the ache in his chest to spread to his arms, his legs, his fingertips. Long enough for the first terrible understanding to take root in his mind, small and vicious as a seed.
He had eaten her.
Piece by piece, echo by echo, he had been consuming the woman he loved.
And somewhere, beneath the hunger and the horror and the howling grief, he heard it.
A voice calling his name.
Not the child's.
Not God's.
Not even Lysithe's.
His own.