The world had narrowed to the woman's wintery eyes and the distant, pulsing flaw in the sky. The gentle hum of the Echo in Kaelen's soul was now a frantic, off-key thrumming, a lute string about to snap.
"A warning?" Kaelen's voice was a dry rasp. He tore his gaze from the sky to look at Lyra. "What are you talking about? What's a Warden? What is happening?"
Lyra's expression remained an unreadable mask, but a flicker of impatience—or was it pity?—crossed her features. "There is no time for a child's primer. The Tithe-collector's escort is not what it seems. They are Umbral Acolytes, and they are here for you."
The words landed like physical blows. Umbral. Acolytes. They were words from old wives' tales, stories Borin told to scare children into obedience—stories of cults that worshipped the silence between stars. For him?
"For me? Why? I'm nobody. I'm a tavern-keeper's son." The protest was automatic, born of a lifetime of being told exactly that.
"You are a Resonant," Lyra stated, as if it were the most obvious fact in the world. "A lodestone in the flow of Aether. To them, you are either a key or a threat. Now, we move." She didn't wait for his agreement. She turned and strode towards the dark line of the Whisperwood.
Panic and disbelief warred within Kaelen. This was madness. A strange woman, talk of ancient magic, cultists in the King's colors… and that crack. He looked back towards Oakhaven. From this hill, he could see the main road, a ribbon of dust winding into the valley. A cloud of that dust was approaching, kicked up by a column of riders. Too many for a simple Tithe collection.
The Echo gave another painful twist, a sensation like a hook caught in his ribs, pulling him toward the forest. Towards Lyra.
Cursing under his breath, he abandoned his count and ran after her. He crashed through the treeline, the cool shade swallowing him whole. The light dimmed, and the sounds of the valley—the sheep, the distant village—muffled into nothingness. Inside the Whisperwood, the air was still and heavy.
He found her waiting for him a dozen paces in, standing beside a giant, gnarled oak whose roots looked like petrified serpents.
"They will be at the village within minutes," she said, her voice low. "They will ask about a boy with strange dreams. Borin will lie for you. He is a good man. But they have a Sniffer with them."
"A what?"
"A Cognition-user. Weak, but enough to sense the residue of the Resonance on you, on the things you've touched. They will know you were there, and they will know which way we went." She placed a hand on the rough bark of the great oak. "We cannot outrun horses on the open road. Our path is through here."
"The Whisperwood? No one goes deep in here. It's… not right." The stories about the wood were even older than those of the Umbral cults. People who went in too deep often didn't come out, and those who did were never quite the same, their thoughts slow, their memories full of gaps.
"The wood is saturated with Aether," Lyra explained, her fingers tracing a pattern on the bark. "It confuses the senses, muddies tracks. It is our best chance." She looked at him, truly looked at him, assessing his fear, his confusion, his trembling hands. "Can you still hear it? The Echo?"
He nodded, unable to speak.
"Good. Listen to it now. Not the fear, not the dissonance. Listen to its base tone. The hum beneath the scream. Let it guide your feet. The forest will try to lead you in circles. The Echo will not. Trust it."
It was the most insane thing anyone had ever said to him. Trust the phantom sound that had haunted his sleep? But as he stood there, paralyzed with indecision, he heard Borin's voice in his head. "The world is heavy enough without you trying to carry its echoes, son." He had been wrong. The echoes were the only thing that might save him now.
He closed his eyes, forcing his breathing to slow. He let the frantic, terrified part of his mind recede, focusing on the core vibration that had been his lifelong companion. Beneath the new, jarring static, it was still there—a deep, unwavering C-sharp, the foundational note of a fallen city. He opened his eyes.
The forest looked different. Not in its physical form, but in its… texture. The air seemed to shimmer in places, and a faint, silver light clung to the moss on the north side of the trees. It was a path, invisible to the eye, but clear as day to his soul.
"I see it," he whispered, astonished.
A ghost of a smile touched Lyra's lips. "Then lead, Resonant. I will guard our rear."
They moved. Lyra was a specter of silence, her boots making no sound on the thick carpet of leaves. Kaelen was louder, but he focused on the silver trail, letting the hum pull him forward, deeper into the ancient wood. Time lost its meaning. The light through the canopy didn't change, holding a perpetual, twilight gloom.
After what felt like an hour, Lyra held up a clenched fist. He froze. She tilted her head, listening.
Then he heard it too. Not with his ears, but through the Echo. A new presence, a foul, sucking silence that pushed against the natural hum of the forest. It was the absence of the Echo, a void that made his teeth ache.
"They're in the wood," Lyra murmured, her hand going to the hilt of the long blade on her back. "The Sniffer is using his gift. He creates a null-spot, a bubble of silence to find the 'noise' you make. It's crude. Like finding a light by looking for the shadow it casts."
The foul silence was getting closer. They were being hunted.
"What do we do?" Kaelen's heart was in his throat.
"We do not run," Lyra said, her voice dropping to a lethal whisper. "We remind them why the Wardens are feared." She pointed to a dense thicket of thorny bushes. "Get in there. Do not make a sound. No matter what you see or hear."
The command in her voice brooked no argument. Kaelen scrambled into the thicket, the thorns tearing at his tunic and skin. He curled into a ball, peering through a small gap in the foliage.
Lyra stood in the small clearing they had just left, but she was different. She wasn't just standing; she was rooted. A faint, visible shimmer of energy, like heat haze on a summer road, began to rise from her skin. She was Channeling. She drew two long, slender daggers from her boots, the metal seeming to drink the dim light.
The forest fell utterly silent. No bird calls, no insect chirps. The only sound was the slow, rhythmic cadence of his own breathing. Then, the crunch of footsteps.
Three figures emerged from the trees. They wore the polished mail and crimson cloaks of the King's Guard, but something was off. Their movements were too synchronized, too fluid. Their eyes, even from a distance, looked flat and dead. The man in the center held a hand outstretched, palm down, and the nauseating silence emanated from him. The Sniffer.
His eyes scanned the clearing and locked onto Lyra. He smiled, a thin, bloodless expression.
"The Warden," he hissed. "The Aegis thinks to hide its treasure in the thorns. Give us the boy, and your death will be swift."
Lyra didn't answer. She simply shifted her weight, the daggers in her hands held in a low, ready guard.
The two guards flanking the Sniffer drew their swords. With a shared, unnerving glance, they charged.
What happened next was not a fight; it was a symphony of violence conducted by Lyra. She didn't meet their charge; she flowed into it. As the first sword came down in a brutal chop, she sidestepped, her left-hand dagger redirecting the blade into the ground while her right hand flicked outward. There was a wet, tearing sound. The guard stumbled, clutching at his throat, a dark line appearing between his fingers.
The second guard was already swinging. Lyra dropped into a low spin, her leg sweeping his feet out from under him. He crashed to the forest floor, but before he could even cry out, she was on him, one dagger pinning his sword arm to the earth, the other finding a gap in his armor beneath his armpit. He convulsed once and was still.
It had taken less than five seconds.
The Sniffer's smile was gone, replaced by a look of pure hatred. The bubble of silence around him intensified, making Kaelen's head swim. "Umbral take you!" he spat, and he began to weave his hands in the air. Darkness coalesced between his fingers, forming a jagged shard of pure blackness that seemed to suck the light from the clearing.
Lyra was already moving. She didn't retreat. She pushed off the ground, and Aether-fueled speed carried her across the clearing in a blur. The Sniffer hurled the shard of darkness. Lyra twisted in mid-air, the void-missile slicing through the cloak at her shoulder but missing her flesh. She landed directly in front of him, her daggers a silver flash.
He had no time to scream. One dagger buried itself in his heart, the other opened his throat.
The oppressive silence shattered. The natural sounds of the forest rushed back in a wave, and the hum of the Echo in Kaelen's soul returned to its troubled, but steady, state. He watched, trembling, as Lyra calmly wiped her blades clean on the dead man's cloak.
She looked over at his hiding spot, her expression unreadable once more. "It is done. They will send more. Deeper ones. We need to keep moving."
Kaelen crawled out of the thicket, his legs weak. He stared at the three corpses, at the blood soaking into the leaf litter. The reality of his situation crashed down upon him. Borin, the tavern, Oakhaven… it was all gone. That life was over.
He was an outlaw, a target, a "Resonant." And the only thing standing between him and a swift, silent death was this deadly, enigmatic Warden.
Without a word, he turned his back on the dead and focused once more on the silver path only he could see. He began to walk, Lyra falling into step behind him, leaving the silence of the dead for the whispering secrets of the ancient wood.