Section 1: The Voice That Devours
The ground beneath her trembled, not with the violence of collapse, but with a rhythm—like breathing.
Aymelle stepped through the stone arch into the hollowed chamber, walls slick with a dark sheen, as though weeping tar. Echoes whispered around her, incoherent and broken. Some carried fragments of prayer. Others... screams.
Her breath caught. This was not merely a prison. This was the place where voices came to die.
The Voice-Eater. She had seen the name scrawled into ancient stone at the threshold, carved in a language her tears strangely understood. It called itself not by title, but by truth: "One who silences the cry."
A pulse beat in her ears, not her own.
As she moved forward, the air grew thicker. Threads of sound—not heard but felt—dragged across her skin like ghostly fingers. Her memories fluttered: Elwin's voice, laughing beneath the monastery bell. The chant of orphans. Her own song, quiet and trembling.
And then, silence.
Total.
She screamed—but no sound escaped. Her lips moved, throat strained, but only emptiness answered.
Her knees buckled. A terrible pressure clenched around her heart, as if something ancient had turned its attention toward her.
"You are not made to sing," a voice formed in her mind—not spoken, but imposed. "You are shaped to cry."
The tears welled instantly—not from fear, but from violation. Her very voice had been taken, consumed. But within her grief, something stirred.
Not rage.
Refusal.
The silver light of her tears ignited in her palms, and when they struck the ground, they shattered the silence like breaking glass.
The Voice-Eater shrieked. A soundless scream, yet one that reverberated through bone and soul.
From the darkness ahead, it emerged—not a beast, not a man, but a shape of mouths and echoing eyes.
Aymelle rose to meet it, her lips silent, her tears glowing like runes.
If voice could be devoured—then tears, she realized, could speak back.
Section 2: Whisperbound
The wind atop the cliff was thin, a hush drawn across a broken world.
Elwin stood beside a weathered stone altar, its surface marked with forgotten sigils. Below, the remains of an ancient bell tower clawed out of the ridge like fractured ribs. Wushan was now a distant shimmer in the mist.
He had followed the trail through the ash woods, past the scar of a collapsed bridge, to what the locals whispered about only as "The Listening Hill." They said the dead still spoke here. That the air carried the breath of things that should not breathe.
He wasn't alone.
She appeared when the sun touched the spire—a woman garbed in strands of violet silk and threadbare memory. Her eyes were blindfolded, but her presence was unmistakable: ancient, bound, and listening.
"You carry a name like a broken bell," she said. Her voice was not sound, but a vibration that settled behind his thoughts. "You search for the one who cries. The one who was taken."
Elwin's hand drifted toward his sword. "Who are you?"
"I am the Whisperbound," she replied, her head tilting slightly. "When the old voices were drowned, I remained. Not to speak—but to remember."
She turned toward the altar and laid her hand upon it. Faint echoes bloomed in the air: overlapping whispers of names, grief, promises unfulfilled.
"Your Aymelle is not the only one who heard the call of the deep," she continued. "There are others—children of silence, twisted by the hunger of the Crying Remains. Some remember who they were. Others only weep."
Elwin stepped closer. "Is she alive?"
"Yes," the Whisperbound answered, without hesitation. "But she walks where the voice-devourer waits. Where the soul unravels, thread by thread."
A chill swept through him.
She gestured toward the far path—a narrow, stone-cut staircase descending into the canyon's shadow. "Go. But know this: only those who carry a voice not for speaking, but for remembering, may pass."
He frowned. "I don't understand."
She smiled gently. "You will. When her tears call you—not to rescue, but to remember who you were before you lost her—then, the gate will open."
And just like that, she was gone.
Only the wind remained, whispering the same name again and again.
"Aymelle…"
Section 3: Voice-Eater
The descent had no end.
Aymelle's footsteps echoed down the obsidian steps, each one swallowed by the oppressive hush that clung to the air. The deeper she went, the less color the world held, as if sorrow was draining light itself from the stone.
She heard it before she saw it.
A low, wet gurgle of weeping—not human, but familiar. Not sorrowful, but hungry.
She stepped into a chamber carved from ancient grief, its walls layered in remnants of sound: fractured hymns, fractured prayers, fractured names. Floating in its center, veiled by roiling mist, was something pulsing and vast.
A thing with no face, only a maw where a voice should be. Its form rippled, assembled from the screams of those who had wandered too far. Aymelle felt her knees weaken.
> "You were never meant to sing," it whispered—not aloud, but inside her mind, each syllable dragging across her bones. "Your voice… is not yours. Give it back."
A wave of force struck her, flinging her against the wall. Her breath shattered. Her tears, uncontrollable, streamed down.
"Why…" she gasped. "Why me?"
> "Because you remember."
The creature lunged.
In that instant, time bent. Not backward. Not forward. Inward.
Memories burst within her: the chapel bells, Elwin's laughter, her mother's song on a rainy night. A swirl of forgotten touches and words unspoken. The tears spilling from her eyes glowed, not with light—but with resonance.
A single drop struck the ground.
And the Voice-Eater screamed.
The force of it reeled back, shrieking in pain—not from injury, but from memory. The sound of her life—her truth—was unbearable to the thing built from silence.
Aymelle rose slowly. Her hand trembled, glowing faintly with streaks of blue etched like veins of song. Something inside her had shifted. A name returned to her—not her own, but the one she had tried to forget:
> "Elwin."
She stepped forward.
"You don't get to have my voice," she whispered.
And she sang.
It wasn't beautiful—it was raw. It was rage, it was mourning, it was love.
And it cut.
The Voice-Eater recoiled, shrinking into the mist as her voice filled the chamber like light through broken stained glass. Each note banished another fragment of the darkness, until only silence—and her sobbing breath—remained.
She collapsed to her knees.
Not defeated.
Awake.
Section IV: Path of Petrified Echoes
The wind had teeth.
Elwin tightened his cloak as the jagged ridges of the Path of Petrified Echoes unfolded before him. What was once a riverbed was now a graveyard of voices, where the cries of those lost to the "Crying Remains" had turned to stone.
He stepped carefully, for every boulder held a shape—a twisted face mid-scream, a hand reaching, mouths forever open in silent pleading. The wind rushing through them created a haunting chorus of unspoken final words.
But he had learned not to flinch.
Not anymore.
He pressed onward, guided by fragments of whispers left behind by a wandering monk who claimed to have seen a girl with silver hair and eyes like weeping stars cross this path days ago.
Aymelle.
He paused by a jagged rock formation where moss grew like ivy over a curled, half-formed figure. Something shimmered faintly beneath it. Gently, he brushed it aside.
A pendant.
Worn and simple. But inside was a fragment of torn parchment—soaked through, half-burned, but unmistakably written in her hand.
> "Don't follow me, Elwin. This place eats memory. If you lose who you are, turn back."
He stood still for a long time, the pendant warm in his grip. The wind howled, as if challenging his right to stand there.
But then he smiled—a sad, stubborn thing.
"No," he said aloud. "I didn't come this far to turn back."
He closed his fist around the pendant, its chain slipping into his palm like a binding vow. Every cry fossilized around him, every echo that tried to steal his thoughts—none of it could drown out what burned at his core.
Not rage. Not sorrow.
But a promise.
He climbed higher into the narrowing canyon, where the light grew dim and the air thinned with grief. And in the shadow of the next ridge, something moved—a figure wrapped in black, watching from the edge.
Elwin reached for his blade, but the figure didn't approach. It simply raised its hand… and pointed further into the darkness.
Where the path ended.
And the Trial of the Hollowed began.