Chapter 40 Echo For Eternity
Echo For Eternity
Hell turned out to be a colorless, featureless void, lacking even the god’s softest slithering jeers.
Which wasn’t so bad, save for the persistent sense of forgetting something incredibly important. He had to get up, there was a task to perform, a battle to fight.
But the dead were past such things, were they not? He was more than ready for some rest, yet a single nagging, inchoate reminder would not leave. Something tugged at him, gentle yet persistent, and strange echoes filtered into the emptiness.
“Shock, most likely. They try very hard.” A young male voice, just past breaking on the edge of adulthood, but with a strange resonance he almost, almost recognized.
Why?
The next word sent a thrill through him.
“Yeah.” Hoarse and cracked, as if it hurt to speak, yet familiar as his own breath. Someone he knew, a thin woman with haunted forest-glade eyes. “You’re sure? He’s just… I mean, I can’t even tell if he’s breathing.”
Her name might have lingered on the tip of his tongue, except he was bodiless. The dead needed neither hand nor voice, merely quiet moldering rest. Eventually even that would cease, for there was no city which did not plow under its corpses, no corner of wilderness lacking the enrichment of decay.
“Don’t worry. They’re pretty rugged, and besides, he’s sealed. I think he’s just resting.” The boy was at least gentle with his grieving… sister? Yes, that was it.
They both had to be lirai.
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. She was a Dreamer—one he had failed. Was that the punishment, hearing his own inadequacy echo for eternity? That could not be so, for if she was still alive, still speaking, there was nothing more to want.
Was this not hell, but its opposite? No, that place would never accept his kind. Most held that Sons were taken by the Mad God after their demise, for an eternity of torment. Nobody knew for certain, and yet…
“Are you sure?” So much worry, in such a small, slight parcel.
Now he could envision the highlights in her curls, glittering under smoke-tarnished sunshine; her eyes, wide and vivid instead of shuttered and apathetic, the way her lips curved downward for a moment just before she smiled, as if she couldn’t quite believe any happiness.
Now he heard other things as well—breathing, a subliminal hum of readiness, the unsound of live sorcery.
Fabric moving as weight shifted, the muffled thumping of two heartbeats nearby, others further away.
A murmur in that middle distance—a question delivered in an undertone, earning brief, direct answer.
Where on earth was he? In the frontier temple? But no, that was burned to a shell and there were no lirai so close to the battle line. They stayed in active temples with Flame-mouths, guarded in their towers as the treasures they were.
“He’ll be all right, Cass. The most important thing right now is your recovery. I’ve cleared that Elder, by the way; you did a wonderful job there.”
Elder? No, that could wait, because of the woman’s name.
Cass. Something he recognized after all; the single syllable burned through him, awareness tightening every muscle, nerve, artery, and vein of a body he had thought abandoned.
“Sure, I guess. I wasn’t really thinking, just working on instinct.
” An exhale, caught in the middle as if pained.
More movement, and a dozy spill of warm pleasure spread through his forgotten flesh, a touch upon his forehead.
Now he could smell stone and antiseptic, clean linen and a hint of perfume.
The mix was familiar as well, but of more import was the fact that he was sensing anything at all.
He was still alive, if only barely. And his lirai was nearby. Safe, it sounded like—but also hurting. That simply would not do; she had suffered enough.
“It’s a miracle you’re all three alive.” The youth was clearly consoling her; Dreamers knew best what their own kind required. “And with your help, maybe we can make contact with some of those hunters you talk about on the West Coast. We had no idea the normals were fighting back.”
“More like eighty percent casualties than fighting back, but we kept trying. There’s nothing else to do.”
“Spoken like a true lirai. Listen, you should have something to eat, and some more hydration for that throat of yours. It hurts to hear you talk. Let him rest, it’s the best thing now.”
He couldn’t beg—don’t leave, please, stay and speak, let me hear you—but at least he knew she was alive.
A twitch buried deep in recalcitrant meat nearly sent him back into the void.
He had been hurt badly before, of course, but not like this.
While he was trapped in semiconsciousness his lirai was alone, attempting to adjust to life among Sons.
Nigel. That was his name. He was a Father among the Sons of Ymre, and Cass needed him.
Yet he could not move. Deep silence returned, not even the sense of her breathing nearby, and he wondered if this might not be hell after all.