Echoes Of The Seven

Long Ago

Translated from Ra’lan

Pravala retched, letting the sour fluid pour out from her lips and onto the wooden floorboards. She didn’t want to look up. She couldn’t. Not while he was still there. But she had to. She had to look. To check. To pray that she had just been imagining things.

When her gaze torturously raised, dead eyes were staring back at her. Glassy and lifeless, Hadrix’s pale blue irises were pointed in her direction. He was sprawled out on the floor, the staff he always had with him lying beside his outstretched hand, just inches away from the growing smear of red underneath his form. The front of his white shirt was splattered in crimson soaking through, while the black-iron scimitar impaled through his sternum slowly crumbled into dust that fell upon his body, sprinkled his freckled face, and mixed into his dark brown hair.

Pravala felt another retch of vomit coming up, forcing herself to look away from the beloved corpse before she hurled again. Unfortunately, that only caused her to lay eyes upon the back of another figure’s head; long, dark brown hair draped over the bottom of the stairs leading to the second floor of the house. Pravala couldn’t see her face right now, but she could still clearly remember the horrifying image of what it looked like moments ago. Anger. Confusion. Love. Hurt. Now, that girl was facedown on the bottom steps, leaving a pool of red spreading past the last stair.

Pravala coughed, another hurl of bile expelling from her lips while tears rolled down her cheeks. Smoke was slowly filling the room while curtains in the kitchen crackled in a blaze. That didn’t matter. None of it mattered. All Pravala could do was crawl over on hands and knees, crawling through the blood until she could rest one hand on Hadrix’s cheek. Then her other hand on the other cheek- cradling his head in her palms.

“No, no please! Please, why?! No!”

Pravala earned no response from the man she was crouching over. There was no movement in his eyes. No twitch of his lip like he always did when he was about to crack a joke. Pravala looked for it- begged for it. She needed to see something, but that something wasn’t there. It pained her to let his head drop back to the floor, but Pravala scooched on her knees towards the stairs and rolled the figure over.

Winona’s throat was opened up horizontally, all the way across and down until the same wound carved through the girl’s shoulder. Her brown eyes were just as dull as Hadrix’s. Pravala held her hands over the opening in Winona’s throat anyway.

“Please, please don’t do this! Don’t do this! Why? Why’d you make me do this?!”

Pravala released the wound and instead opted to slump down beside the stairs, pulling Winona into her lap and holding tight. Her hands were trembling as they cradled Winona’s head, and tears were falling down onto the dead woman’s cheeks beneath her.

“I didn’t want this! I just wanted to help! I knew I could help! Why couldn’t you understand? This wasn’t how it was supposed to go! It’s not- it’s…”

Pravala choked on her words, gently rocking with the body in her lap while the blaze from Hadrix’s fire spread through the house quickly. All she could do was shift herself, dragging Winona off the steps and closer to Hadrix before pulling his head, too, into her lap. With both of them looking up at her, Pravala’s chest felt like it was going to burst. She sniffled.

“WHY?!” She screamed. “Why’d you have to do this?! You should have just left! You should have left, please! You could have… you should have left-...”

Pravala’s throat closed up in tears, and any words thereafter became nothing more than sobs. One hand wrapped tight around either of the bodies, holding them as close as Pravala could possibly manage. Eyes stung from the smoke filling the house despite the front door being blasted off the hinges, and the entire living room was ablaze just a dozen feet away. Still, Pravala gently rocked back and forth. It was many moments before she found her voice again. She looked down at the two bodies looking up at her.

“Do you-” sniffle. “Do you remember when Mother would sing to us? Every night while she tucked us into bed?”

Pravala wiped her face with one hand, but it did less than nothing to help. “Both of you hated it, because I’d hum in my sleep and wake you up. Do you remember that?”

Once again, Pravala received no response from either of her older siblings. With eyes burning from tears and smoke, Pravala coughed ash from her lungs and curled down to hold both Hadrix and Winona in a tight hug. Then, she let a single, faltering note creep through her throat. It was met by another, and another after that. A gentle hum interspaced through chokes and sobs. Pravala had long since forgotten what the words to the lullaby were, but the melody still clung like moss on a stone. Simple swells, ups and downs, a sincere, quiet song in the foyer of the burning house.

Through her mind’s eye, Pravala could see the sky darkening from a thousand different perspectives all at once. The sun was still shining, but it was like a veil being pulled over the atmosphere. The streets of Llyne fell into shadow. Pravala could feel the world get colder. That only meant one thing.

Nyx was coming.

Pravala didn’t care. She didn’t want to care. It didn’t matter that the Grihmoira, the personal attack dog of the Conclave, was coming after her. The only two things that mattered to her were lying dead in her lap after forcing Pravala to make an impossible choice. No, the Grihmoira didn’t matter- not even as Pravala started to lose feeling in her fingers from blood refusing to flow properly in the presence of Nyx.

Even when the cloaked woman with the deep, cobalt-blue blade stepped through the open front door, Pravala continued to sing her siblings to sleep.

The ancient, super-powered Echo that enslaved Bailey and Elmas and was about as trustworthy as a rusted lock was now kneeling on the floor in front of her sobbing. Blood leaked from Pravala’s wrists where the skin had been torn open by anxious scratching. Shallow breaths were heaving through her lungs, and the woman’s nose was even leaking snot. She wasn’t just crying- she was bawling.

Eris could only hold her own bleeding wrists from where Pravala’s nails had carved through when Eris yanked her hands away. A lot of thoughts were going through her head. This could have been some kind of weird, elaborate act. The rest of her shut that idea down. This didn’t feel like an act. This was… visceral. Oddly enough, this felt more real than anything Pravala had done these last two weeks.

Like everything else had been the act, and that mask had finally slipped to show her true face.

Eris slowly backed away, grabbing a rag off the nearby workbench and holding it over her wounds. They weren’t serious by any means- just surface-level scratches, but enough to sting and bleed into the cloth. The Summoner continued to cry. She was fully hunched over, hands on the floor, dripping tears and spit and ugly-crying snot beneath her while shuddering in a way that was almost violent.

Against her will, Eris’s mind flashed between the present and an old memory. Pravala, kneeling on the floor sobbing. Jaxie, sitting beside a homemade cake splattered on the floor practically wailing through tears. The same kind of reaction- like the most important thing in the world was on the verge of crumbling away. Eris swallowed deeply and let out a shaky breath.

“Stand up.”

Pravala’s face snapped towards Eris’s, eyes red, cheeks wet and chin dripping. It was an ugly sight, especially for such a beautiful woman. Eris ignored it.

“I said stand up.”

All Eris saw were the woman’s eyes narrowing. The next instant, the space she had been kneeling was filled with smoke and the wind was knocked out of Eris’s lungs from a sharp impact to her back. When her eyes blinked back open from the shock, Eris’s face was pressed against the cold stone floor of the workshop and Pravala was kneeling on the Artificer’s back. Eris moved to lift her head. “H-hey, what-”

A hand gripped a fistful of hair right at the root and yanked Eris’s head upwards, craning her neck and cutting her off. More terrifying, however, was the other hand with a summoned black-metal blade holding a razor’s edge against Eris’s throat. Pravala growled.

“I won’t let everything I’ve done be for nothing. I won’t.”

Eris opted to stay quiet. Mostly because she couldn’t find her voice when a knife was barely breaking open the first layer of skin on her windpipe. She kept deathly still, feeling Pravala shudder on top of her.

“Everything I did was to fight a greater evil. If I don’t get that chance, it means all of it meant nothing. I’m not the evil, and I won’t die like it. I’m getting out of this prison. I’ll tear the Hollow to pieces, and then I’ll kill Akkaru’um myself. I’ll save everyone, and then it’ll be worth it.”

Eris gulped, but that movement alone made her neck press up against the impossibly-sharp blade enough to draw blood. When she spoke, it was scared, soft, cautious, and slow.

“If you kill me, you’ll never get out of here.”

Pravala froze. The knife eased about a single millimeter from Eris’s throat, but she gratefully took that open space to keep talking.

“You did terrible things so that you could be strong enough to do good that no other Echo could possibly accomplish, right? Without me, you’ll be stuck in the Obelisk forever and everything you’ve done will only make you the villain. You’ll never be the hero, and you’ll only be the monster that made the world worse.”

Pravala tensed her fingers further in Eris’s hair, damned near tearing the roots right out of the scalp and pressing the blade back against the redhead’s neck. It wasn’t resting on the surface, either. It was digging a millimeter into the flesh to draw a red line that started to bleed.

But now Eris figured it out. A hammer strike right on the nail.

It was a small miracle in of itself that her mask had taken two weeks to slip. The facade of a villain- the one who could live with her trauma. The confident, regal woman who firmly ensured and stated that Echoes had to perform evil in order to do good. Pravala hadn’t just been telling it to Eris,- she’d been telling it to herself. Reminding herself that everything she did would eventually be worth it, despite this random Artificer who refused to accept that ideal. Then, the moment that Eris said everything Pravala did was for nothing, all the walls crumbled down.

Eris finally understood that Pravala wasn’t evil- not by any means. She was a woman who did horrible things in an attempt to do the good that no other Echo was willing to try for. However, before she could even have a chance to make all those awful acts worth it, she was locked away in a magical prison and left to rot.

Stuck with nothing but the memories of the horrendous acts she committed for the greater good, and absolutely no way to perform that greater good. No way of knowing if anything she did was worth it. No way of helping to fix the problems she caused, and no way to aid in her one and only goal of saving the world from total annihilation- something she was willing to sacrifice her own morality for.

This was a woman driven to madness by the desperate, feral need to ensure that she wasn’t going to end up as the villain. A need that festered for over four hundred years. Eris couldn’t imagine that anyone could live for that long and still stay sane- and that would be a normal person, back in the real world, with nothing hanging over their heads. An Echo, stuck in a prison with the grief and regrets of doing such horrendous things with no way to make them worth it?

“You can’t get out of here without me,” Eris said calmly. “I can free us, and then we can fight the Hollow together. You can show the world that you aren’t the monster, but only if we escape the Obelisk first. Helping me make all this stuff to get stronger is your first step to proving that you’re doing the right thing.”

The room was still for a number of seconds. One. Two. Three. On the fourth, the blade pressing into Eris’s throat crumbled into dust and smoke and the painful grip in her hair released to let her head drop back to the floor. The weight shifted off her back, and Eris let out a few shaky breaths before rolling over and looking up at Pravala. The woman was standing, looking down at Eris, and looked awful. Eyes were red and puffy from crying. Cheeks were stained with tears. The back of one hand was used to wipe away the spit and mucus gathered around her lips from her ugly crying, but it only served to smear her mouth with red from her bleeding wrists.

This woman was dangerous- even more so than Eris thought. At least before, when Eris thought she was just wicked, there was composure there. Refinement. Pravala was a wolf, and Eris was a sheep invading her territory. As long as Eris played by the wolf’s rules, then she wouldn’t get mauled. Now though, everything was turned on its head.

Pravala wasn’t a wolf commanding a sheep- she was a feral cat in a cage. A cornered animal that was a coin flip away from lashing out at anything and everything, no matter whether it was trying to harm her or help her. Someone like that couldn’t help against the Hollow. It didn’t matter how powerful the weapon was- if you couldn’t control where it was aimed, everyone loses. Especially when that weapon is in full choice of when it attacks. If Pravala were to do anything to Jaxie…

Eris swallowed deeply- neck stinging and growing warm from the trickles of blood. She already had her plan set for a while, but this erased any lingering doubts or apprehensions in her mind.

Victim or perpetrator, villain or hero, it didn’t matter. Pravala was too dangerous- too unpredictable. Just the fact that the woman was so ready to slit Eris’s throat a moment ago proved that even if she wanted nothing more than to find vindication for her actions, she was volatile beyond measure. Four hundred years of regret and despair all condensed into a single spark ready to erupt into a firestorm with the slightest shift of the breeze.

Pravala extended a hand downwards towards Eris. The Artificer accepted it carefully and stood. In the moment of silence, Eris walked back towards the workbench, grabbed a long strip of cloth and gently tied it around her neck while adjusting so it semi-bandaged the thin cut on her throat. She then did the same to her wrists, wrapping the fabric so it was snug and secure.

“Let’s keep going,” Eris said. “We craft for the rest of the day, then get back to work tomorrow on making stuff for the escape when I’m stronger.”

Pravala’s hand slowly and shakily came to rest back on Eris’s shoulder to reapply the now-familiar sense of power from a skill being supercharged. Meanwhile, Eris could make a silent promise in her mind.

After she killed her in here, Eris would bring Pravala’s body back. Then, she’d bury her somewhere with a great view of the sky. After four hundred years in an endless underground prison, the woman deserved to have her headstone get to look at the sunset.