Melody Resonance's Arc

Chapter 1 of 9

Melody Resonance knelt in the ash where their forest used to sing. The pines still stood. The birds still opened their beaks. But no sound came out, not from the wrens, not from the wind in the needles, not from Melody's own throat when they tried to hum. A year ago a deaf tyrant had ridden through with jars on his belt and taken every echo the forest owned. Melody had sworn to steal them back. They had sworn it loud, before the theft, and the forest had heard them. Now no one could hear anything at all. The problem was simple and it had stopped them cold. Melody did not know where the tyrant kept the jars. He was said to hoard them somewhere underground, past a border no map marked. Without a direction, there was nothing to plan and nothing to steal. Melody walked to the clock tower at the edge of the silent wood. Mr. Echo lived at the top, among gears that did not tick. He opened the door before Melody knocked. He always did. "I need to find him," Melody said. "The one who took the sound." Mr. Echo studied their face. "You track a thief by what he steals," he said. He went to a shelf and lifted down a device with two thin antennae and a dial covered in runes. "This measures sound going missing. Three years I have followed silences with it. Yours is the loudest." He set it in Melody's hands. "But it only points. It does not carry far enough. You will need a voice to push it." Melody thought of the drum beneath the hill, and the rabbit girl who had helped them wake the warren-god a week before. They still had the jar she had given them after, a glass one sealed with runes, holding the last true note the forest had made before it went quiet. They took the jar from their coat and set it beside the device on the tower floor. When Mr. Echo cracked the seal, the note poured out and the antennae bent toward the west like reeds in a current. The dial spun once and stopped. It kept pointing after the note faded. They followed the pointer through the dead trees until the ground broke open into a mouth of stone. A cave stood there, black inside, wide enough to swallow a wagon. Above the entrance someone had carved a small mushroom-shaped hut into the rock, a fairy mark, a warning for those who could still read them. The dial pressed hard toward the dark. Melody lowered the device. Their hands shook. They had a direction now, and a door, and no way back from knowing. Somewhere down that throat of stone the tyrant kept every sound their home had ever made. Tomorrow they would have to go in.