The Path of Echoes

In the high canyons of Vareth, where the wind carved hymns into the stone, there existed a village that did not speak.

They were not mute. They had mouths, tongues, and throats like anyone else—but words were forbidden, lost long ago in an ancient silence that had stretched across centuries. They communicated in the rhythm of drums, the dance of fingers, and the haunting tones of flutes carved from old bones. Sound itself was sacred in Vareth, but language—spoken language—was a sin.

It was said that the gods once lived among them, giants of stone and smoke who sang the world into existence. Their songs had shaped rivers, hollowed mountains, and brought stars low enough to hold in trembling hands. But when men tried to imitate the divine music with their own voices, they spoke lies. Lies turned into war, and war turned into ruin. And so the gods took their songs and vanished, leaving behind only echoes.

The elders taught that only echoes were pure.

Seiran, a girl with wind-tangled hair and eyes too curious for her own good, didn’t believe silence was enough. She had questions—too many—and she hated that the only answers she got came in patterns of sand or the tap of knuckles on wood. There was no warmth in it, no story. Only instruction, and warning, and ritual.

She used to dream of voices. Her mother’s especially—her real voice, not the soft whistle she used now or the subtle vibration of her flute. In Seiran's dreams, her mother sang lullabies that wrapped around her like warmth in winter, and Seiran would wake with tears dried on her cheeks, the sound vanishing like smoke in morning light.

On her sixteenth birthday, the Age of Walking, Seiran was permitted to climb the Echoing Path—the pilgrimage every Vareth-born made once in their lives. It wound through the high canyons and ended at the Mouth of the Sky, a natural amphitheater where the air vibrated with whispers from ages past. There, the people believed, the echoes of the gods still lingered, waiting to guide those pure enough to hear.

But Seiran didn’t want echoes. She wanted truth.

She left before dawn, her pack light, her flute strapped to her back. The canyon walls rose around her like guardians as she walked. Sometimes, she clapped her hands or hummed into the cliffs just to hear what came back. Most of it was nonsense—broken syllables and twisted notes. But every so often, something strange would return: a word half-formed, a phrase like memory.

On the third night, she lit a fire beneath an overhang, her legs sore and lungs raw from the thin air. She should have meditated, as tradition demanded, but instead she whispered. Just a word: “Mother.” It slipped from her like a secret, and for the first time, the canyon answered not with noise—but with silence. A deep, unnatural silence, as if the whole world had paused to listen.

Then the wind stirred.

“Why do you seek what was lost?”

The voice was neither man nor woman, not loud nor soft, but it rang in her bones like thunder. Seiran shot to her feet, heart pounding.

“Who are you?” she asked aloud.

“You already know.”

The shadows of the fire danced against the stone, and in the flicker of flame, a shape emerged from the rock—tall, robed in stone-skin, with hollow eyes that held constellations.

“You are one of them,” she whispered.

“I am one of many,” the echo-being replied. “We are the song that once was. You are the silence that remains.”

“Then why—why did you leave?”

The being tilted its head. “We did not leave. You stopped listening. You replaced truth with noise.”

Seiran swallowed, struggling to keep her voice steady. “But silence doesn’t heal. It only hides. We’ve forgotten so much because we’re afraid to speak. How can we be better if we can’t even ask why?”

For a long moment, there was only the wind.

Then, the echo-being reached toward her and touched her chest. “If you would speak, speak not to command. Speak not to deceive. Speak only to remember. Only to heal.”

With that, the being crumbled into dust, and the canyon trembled.

The next morning, Seiran descended the Echoing Path. When she returned to Vareth, her people watched in silence as she stood at the center of the village and opened her mouth.

And she sang.

It was not perfect. It cracked and trembled. It was raw and human. But it was filled with memory—of warmth, of longing, of stories that had waited too long in stillness.

Some wept. Some turned away.

But a child stepped forward and sang back.

And that was enough.

For the echoes, at last, had found a voice again.