Reconnecting 2

Everyone had always said she was too emotional. Always caught up in flights of fancy and longing for things she could never have. They thought that she was airheaded and vapid, shallow enough that all she cared for were looks and songs. That she spoke too much but said too little, at least until she’d made the mistake of covering for someone she’d thought was a friend. Then they hadn’t really thought of her.

First they had taken her body.

Then they’d taken her voice.

But they had never taken her mind.

She remembered it all, and some of the things they’d said had even been right. She had changed since then. Free and roaming, she became queen of a small portion of an abstract concept. Fed into by the belief of a world of people, she had grown. They still spoke of her to explain a truth of the world, and so she became that truth wherever she went. There were myriad of spirits like her, once, but only she had crystallized into the concept that shared her name.

She was Echo, and she would always remember.

Speeches and songs. Dramas and tragedies. Spells, histories, and myths. She had collected them, hoarded them, and even shared them. The words were not her own, but by letting others in she could sing again. That was worth sharing her collection. That was what had led her to the Initiative.

The family she’d found there was all she needed to finally be happy again.

She didn’t change much, anymore. She didn’t have to. What her foundling brother had called for would need her to, though. That scared her. It scared them all, but they had seen what had happened to their fellow Archivist.

The meeting had gone – poorly. She shuddered to think of what had happened to her sister during the months spent apart. She could no longer speak it, as nobody had given her the words, but she remembered the day they had lost the One-in-Reflections. The way the winged woman’s eyes had glazed over amidst a conversation about humidity. How the reflection had shriveled, shrinking back into the distance in mute silence. It left nothing behind but fragments of a voice, a shattered mirror, and an emptiness that Echo didn’t know how to fix.

It had been the same for the others. The pieces they’d saved hadn’t fit when she had finally returned, but they hadn’t known how bad it truly was until they had seen the One-in-Reflections’ Self in the dimension woven for their meetings.

Her throat had been ripped out. The piece returned to her was a mottled, discolored purple with the texture of shattered glass. One eye was gone, the socket itself missing, but light still shone through the skin where it should have sat. The other was a dull. One wing ended partway along its length, the same ethereal trails that made up Echo herself twisted and bent into an outline of what should have been there. Her fingers and limbs were broken at the most basic level, the repairs a patchwork that hurt Echo to look at. On one hand, the fingers were replaced by the legs of one of Webs’ shells. The damage continued across her body, each part sickening to see.

Echo couldn’t fathom how she had survived that long. A mauled body could be supplanted, but a torn Self was the death of a mind. She couldn’t blame her friend for taking the pieces of the rest of the family to save herself. Not even when she saw Web’s missing limb, or Light’s dimmed glow, or even the tones she could no longer reach.

The meeting that followed her return had been stressful. Even now, days later, Echo was still trying to forget it. They had agreed with Reflections on reintegrating. Just – slowly. Pieces had to be restored and repaired on all sides. While packages and information flowed again between them, full recovery had to be measured. It may not be possible without help from one as skilled as her late protector.

For now, the new Lady Blackleaf – inheritor to an immortal whose history not even the Initiative knew in full – had to learn. No other bloodline could repair the lasting scars that still marred Reflections’ form, but nor could a freshly initiated mage who Reflections couldn’t even properly guide or speak to with her damage.

The Archivists were not content to wait. An immortal of the Lord Blackleaf’s caliber did not pass peacefully, and an attack on him was an attack on the Initiative when it threatened his Archive.

Changes were to be made, and so Echo had gone to her old friend Flesh. The words whispered from his many mouths let her speak at will, almost as if her voice was hers again. She cared not about how he looked, and he cared not about her voice. He had plenty to go around. And as they spoke a thousand conversations at once, each more nonsensical than the last, she began to forget what had troubled her.

She didn’t forget the why, merely the pain. And so her songs – broken as they – wove together again in voices that had never been her own. She could only speak each word from each voice once, but she had heard many things in her time. Some of those things were powerful symbols and secrets, others resonated with emotion long past the speaker’s death. There was power, in these things. A call to arms on the eve of a battle, an oath of vengeance sworn over a dying father, or a secret whispered in a lover’s ear. The memories they stirred would have overwhelmed her alone, yet Flesh drowned them out as she sand louder in a chorus all her own.

When the last notes died in the still air of Flesh’s domain, there was another spell imprinted upon it. The work was not done, but their voices together would never tire.