Echo EZTHAMIC's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

The flood rose past Echo's knees, and the broken engine still smoked above him. He had come to this place to end the false god whose light kept him erased, buried in the cathedral's shadow. Now the engine's collapse had drowned the stairs behind him. Black water filled the vault's lower levels. He was trapped below, with no clear path back up toward the ribbed stone above. He held the iron lantern high. Red crystal fragments floated inside it, glowing with old warmth. Their light showed a tunnel half-swallowed by the rising flood. Echo pushed toward it. His red eyes burned against the dark. The cracks across his pale skin glowed as he waded, armor dragging in the current. Something moved along the wall. A small pale creature crawled from a crack in the stone. Long limbs. A sealed mouth. Huge black ears that turned toward every splash. The Silence Keeper. Echo froze. He remembered the warnings about this cathedral's hunters. This one tracked sound, not sight. Echo stilled his breath. The water lapped loud against his chest. The creature's ears swiveled toward the noise. It skittered closer, limbs clicking on wet stone. Echo could not stay silent and still while the flood kept climbing. He had to choose. He spotted a bronze chest wedged on a high ledge above the water. Glass cylinders lined its front. Faded scrolls sat inside them. One slot gaped empty. A plate read ECHO. The sight stopped him cold. His own name, waiting in a box of forgotten voices. Then he understood. The creature chased loud sound. He needed a louder sound somewhere else. Echo tore a crystal fragment from the lantern and hurled it down the drowned corridor. It cracked against stone and shattered, ringing sharp through the chamber. The Silence Keeper spun and chased the noise. It vanished into the far dark. Echo climbed to the ledge and grabbed the chest's edge. The ledge opened into a narrow dry shaft rising upward. A way out. Above, a huge black bell hung in the shaft, veined with glowing red cracks. It had not rung in centuries. As Echo pulled himself up, his shoulder struck the metal. The bell swung. It rang. The sound rolled through the whole cathedral. But the voice inside it was not a bell's. It was his own. "Don't open the Reliquary," it said. Echo's hands went cold on the stone. He had never spoken those words. Yet the voice was his. Far below, the water calmed. Far above, something stirred in the ribbed dark, drawn by the ringing. Echo had escaped the flood. He stood dripping in the shaft, staring up at the bell that had stolen his voice. Somewhere above waited a Reliquary he had just been warned against. And now every hunting thing in the cathedral knew exactly where he was.