The city of Vaelith's Hollow was never silent, not truly. Its alleys breathed with whispers of secrets, and the cobblestones hummed with the footsteps of the restless. But tonight, the sound was different. A scream had slipped through the cracks of the city, sharp and jagged, lingering longer than a human voice should.
Eryndor Thal had been awake for hours, sitting in a cluttered apartment that smelled of old paper, dust, and something… darker. A candle flickered on the desk, throwing twisted shadows across the room. His fingers hovered over a stack of brittle parchments, scrawled with symbols he could no longer fully understand. He had thought he was alone. Until the scream came.
At first, he froze. Old habits die hard, and one was that fear was a puzzle to be analyzed. The scream was a riddle. Its pitch wasn't human. It twisted upward, then cracked into a low growl that seemed to come from inside his skull.
Eryndor rose, heart thudding. The smell hit him first—like iron and rot. He grimaced. The city's marketplace should have been silent now, not alive with the stench of something… wrong. He grabbed a dagger from the desk, more for comfort than defense, and stepped into the night.
The streets of Vaelith's Hollow were empty—too empty. Windows were shuttered, doors bolted, but the scream had left a residue, a tingle on the skin that whispered of danger. Eryndor moved cautiously, his scholar's mind cataloging every shadow, every flicker of movement. That's when he saw it.
A figure, hunched, impossibly tall, with limbs that bent wrong, crawling along the wall of a building as though gravity had forgotten it existed. Its face was obscured, but glowing red eyes burned through the dark. The scream emanated from it, repeated in distorted echoes of agony.
Eryndor's mouth went dry. He knew, without knowing how, that this was an echo. One of the fragments the old texts had warned about, born when the Veil—the fragile separation between their world and the hidden terrors beyond—began to crack.
Before he could think, the echo lunged, moving faster than his mind could track. Eryndor slashed with the dagger, but it passed through the creature as if he had swung at smoke. A chill ran down his spine. Physical attacks did nothing.
"Stop!" a voice hissed from the shadows.
A girl stepped out, silent and fluid, shadows crawling from her fingertips like living ink. She moved between Eryndor and the echo, hands raised. The creature shrieked, and the shadows wrapped around it, constricting, flattening it against the cobblestones.
The girl's eyes were sharp, dangerous, and for a moment, Eryndor thought he saw recognition—or was it contempt? "You don't know what you're doing," she said, her voice low but commanding. "It's not just a thing to fight—it's… thinking. Feeling."
"Then what do you do?" Eryndor asked, awe and fear tangled in his tone.
She tilted her head, studying him. "I bend them. I make them obey… for now." She pulled the shadows back into her hands, and the echo dissolved into nothing but a whisper of smoke.
Eryndor's mind reeled. "Who… are you?"
"Kaelis." She didn't offer more. Her eyes darted to the rooftops. "We don't have time. More are coming."
The wind changed suddenly, carrying with it a chorus of muffled screams. Eryndor felt the hairs on his arms rise. The cracks in the Veil were widening. Tonight, Vaelith's Hollow was bleeding.
"Why are they here?" Eryndor asked, his voice trembling. "Why now?"
Kaelis glanced at him, expression grim. "Because someone wants them to. Someone is tearing the Veil, and we're in the middle of it. If we don't stop it…" Her words hung in the air, unfinished, as a sound—a thousand tiny screams in unison—erupted from the darkness beyond the street.
And then the first wave struck.
Eryndor barely had time to grab her arm before an echo—a twisted, skeletal version of a child's memory—skittered toward them. It screamed his name, a sound he couldn't recognize, yet felt deep in his chest. The air itself seemed to shiver. Kaelis flicked her wrist, and the shadows surged, meeting the creature mid-leap. The clash of force and smoke sent sparks into the night, illuminating the city in flickering, ghostly light.
"Why me?" Eryndor gasped, ducking a fragment of the echo that had broken free. "Why am I here?"
Kaelis didn't answer. Her face was set, tense, eyes calculating. She didn't just fight—they chose which echoes to bend, which to destroy. And every choice left a mark, not just on the echo, but on her. Eryndor noticed it in the briefest of ways: a shiver of exhaustion, a flicker of pain when she redirected the shadows.
"Follow me," she snapped, turning down a narrow alley that twisted like a coil. "You're too slow to survive alone. And besides," she added, voice softening almost imperceptibly, "I need someone who can think. Someone who can read the signs before it's too late."
Eryndor's mind raced. He didn't understand most of what he had just seen, but he knew this: his life had just ended. And another—far darker—was beginning.
The alley opened onto a hidden square, and the city's usual hum was replaced by silence, thick and oppressive. In the center, an enormous crack ran through the cobblestones, glowing faintly with an unnatural light. A low, resonant pulse vibrated from it, like the heartbeat of a creature just awakening.
Kaelis stepped closer, hands brushing the shadows against the fissure. She froze, sensing something deeper within the Veil, something waiting, hungry.
Eryndor felt it too. A pressure in his mind, a whisper of memory he didn't own, clawing its way to the surface. He staggered, choking back a scream.
And then the voice came, clear as the candle flame back in his apartment.
"Eryndor Thal… we've been waiting."