Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Before I write out everything that happened over the past couple days, I should explain why it took me so long to post this.

  I’ve been going back and forth about whether I even wanted to write this update, and there are two main reasons for that. The first is purely practical: a shit ton of stuff happened over the past three days and it’s gonna take me a while to type it all out because I’m doing this one-handed.

  My left arm is currently useless after I got slashed to ribbons. It’s all bound up and wrapped in gauze and all that jazz. Our group linked up with a wandering caravan not too far from the Valley of Echoes. A cleric is traveling with them and she’s pretty good at healing and she offered to take a look at me.

  Well..she says that she’s good at healing. I don’t know anything about magic or medical care in this world, and Cole keeps insisting that back at the academy in The MIZ they’ve got healers who could fix me up in minutes.

  Whenever he says that I wanna snap at him that we’re not back at The MIZ because he wanted to prove his dissertation and got me all messed up…but whatever.

  All I’m trying to say is that typing with only my right hand is pretty slow going. Every paragraph is taking a lot more effort than I’m used to. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to wait to post here. I was hoping to be a little more healed up and able to use my left arm.

  The second reason is that I know what’s gonna happen once I post this message. I can already hear a bunch of people (Venerated and Binary) complaining about this post.

  Why didn’t you do this?

  Why would you make that decision?

  How are you still so bad at combat?

  Why didn’t you cast that one extremely specific spell that was briefly meta during patch 3.2 of Emberveil.

  I don’t know if there even is a 3.2 patch for Emberveil or what would constitute a meta spell, but I do know that you’re all gonna Monday-morning quarterback me to hell and beyond. Yea…it’s gonna be annoying as shit and I’m already dreading it.

  The few of you who aren’t gonna complain about all my decisions are still gonna pester me with a ton of questions, namely why I didn’t do what Null suggested and use this forum as a way to crowdsource help for any dangerous situation I stumble into.

  Let me address that criticism before it’s even posed. There is a major flaw in Null’s advice about e using the Tech Slate to get out of shitty situations. It’s a flaw that none of us thought about. And that is timing.

  I can’t really stop in the middle of a fight, pull out my tech slate, log onto the forum, pose a question, and then wait around for an answer. I already tried doing that back with the Jackal Runner ambush and it didn’t work out well for me. In fact, I seem to remember you all dragging my decision to turn to you when it happened.

  Things move fast out here. By the time I pose a question and you all give me a reply, the situation could have already changed. If I just decide to blindly follow advice that might have made sense five minutes ago, it could lead to horrible consequences. Maybe something changed in the intervening period, and if I do what you all tell me I could get myself killed.

  And that’s not counting the fact that if I ask this forum a question, I know that I’m going to get five different answers from four different people. I can’t be weighing the pros and cons of my actions in the middle of dangerous situations.

  This entire expedition has been a shitshow and it proved to me that we’ve all gotta come up with better logistics when I ask for help. Everything happened so fast and so close together over these past few days that I didn’t have time to post here. There wasn’t a clean pause in the action where I could update you all and have you give me advice.

  And if I had posted, there’s not much you all could have done anyway.

  The way I see it, this forum is most useful either before I find myself in these dangerous situations, or after it all ends and you can dissect my actions when I’m safe. Maybe there’s a middle ground somewhere. If I get stuck in a long, drawn-out situation, I can use you all as a sounding board for what I should do. But that’s a big maybe.

  I don’t know. All of you can have a think about it and come up with answers. In the meanwhile, you’re all just gonna have to wait patiently for the recap and then tear my ideas apart afterwards.

  Now, with all that out of the way, let’s talk about the Valley of Echoes.

  First, I’d like to personally thank everyone who went on about how the Valley was “beginner friendly.” That was soooo helpful. There weren’t any dangers at all. Absolutely stellar advice, guys. Ten out of ten. No notes.

  Is it /s or \s that lets you all know I’m being exceedingly sarcastic?

  I will say that the Valley did have some benefits, but it is definitely not some chill little peaceful zone where I could go to grind out skills and walk out stronger. It’s a dangerous shithole filled with things that want to kill me. Kinda like Gary, Indiana.

  My last update was all about Cole giving a lecture about the history of this place. So we can start there. The next morning our little expedition packed up and ventured into the Valley itself.

  The valley didn’t seem all that different from the surrounding Deadlands. The place was covered with gray dust and there was sparse vegetation and everything was in the same state of decay. But right at the outer edge of the valley, things started to feel a little off.

  The first sign that everything was screwed up was the sound. In hindsight, it was pretty obvious that our group would be dealing with a whole bunch of sound based shit. That was the whole motif of this expedition, right? The Soundtrap. The Valley of Echoes. Resonance Engines that weaponized vibrations.

  Heading into the valley, we all almost immediately started noticing strange distortions. Cole called it the lingering aftermath of the Eight Day Thunder. The best way I can describe the feeling that hit us was that it was like walking into a massive, invisible collision. The air felt thick, and I don’t mean it in that poetic, writerly way that people say “the air was thick with tension.”

  Is that a simile? Or an analogy? A metaphor? Honestly, I don’t think I ever really learned the difference. Malaproprism? Is that a thing? Whatever. Someone in the forum can correct me.

  Back to the air feeling thick. I mean that exactly as I wrote it. The air literally felt thick. It pushed back against us as we traveled deeper into the Valley. We crossed some unseen boundary at the edge of the valley and it didn’t like that.

  I could feel a humming in my bones. Sound became muffled and warped, like everything had been wrapped in layers of thick cloth. Our voices didn’t travel right. They lost shape. I tried asking Cole and Corva what was going on, figuring that at least one of them would have experience with this sort of thing or some kind of academic answer about what was going on. But when I asked my question, my voice came out all dull and blunted. It was like the air was swallowing my words and weakening them the further they traveled from my mouth.

  We headed deeper into the valley and things got so much weirder. For a stretch, the valley flipped and made everything go all wonky and we were assaulted with sound. Every noise we made was way too loud. I’d take a step and it would sound like a thunderclap. Wren accidentally kicked a rock and the thing detonated with noise. The echo of it ripped through the valley and it physically hurt my ears.

  We stopped talking after that. Corva pulled out some hand signals and was able to communicate with Pell and Wren that way. I don’t know how they were able to understand each other, but they did. Cole and I couldn’t talk like that, so we both started writing things down. He had his giant ass book and I had my journal that I’d made out in the Glens, and we’d both write down any messages we had. Except…even that was too loud.

  The sound of pencil scratching on paper was absolutely horrific. It sounded like ripping fabric right next to my head. No. It sounded more like two pieces of styrofoam rubbing up against each other and making that squeaky noise that causes goosebumps to break out. I ended up wrapping some cloth around my ears just to try and dull the sound but that only barely helped.

  Our trip through the valley kept having us hit these weird pockets or bubbles of noise. We’d be traveling along and at first everything was loud and overwhelming, then we’d pass into a bubble and it was like someone had thrown a blanket over the world. All the sound just vanished.

  We hit this one pocket and I tried opening my mouth to say something and immediately stopped because there was an echo to my voice. I’d speak and then, a second later my voice would come out. Have you ever tried having a conversation on a phone and there’s something wrong with the signal and you hear your own voice echoing back at you a half a second afterwards? It throws you for a loop and your brain ends up trying to listen to your own voice and you wind up talking all stilted and janky. That’s what that pocket felt like.

  When we stepped foot in one of these bubbles, we’d all slow down and get caught up in the fact that no noise was escaping us or everything had gotten incredibly loud or we were half-a-second behind the sound coming from our group.. There was this one time I remember looking over at Pell who was at the front of the group and he was yelling or trying to call out because he was freaked that his voice had been taken from him. We all just looked at each other, checking to see if anyone had any idea of what was happening.

  Then, about thirty seconds later, as we were leaving the bubble, the valley decided it was done being quiet. All the sound that we’d been making inside that bubble, every footstep and shout and breath and scuff of stone and Pell carrying on like a fucking asshole, it all came screaming back at us. All at the same time.

  The sound was like a physical wall that smashed into us. It was a violently amplified boom that slammed into my chest and knocked the air out of my lungs. I fell to my knees and my ears were ringing and my vision was swimming. Wren was sprawled out on the ground. Pell was clutching his head. Corva was braced against a rock.

  When I was finally able to hear again, I heard Wren mutter under his breath that “the place hates us.” Nobody disagreed with him.

  The Valley hit Pell the worst. He was supposed to be our group’s scout. His job was to head out and get a read on the terrain and find a way to guide us through it. But how do you guide someone through a creepy ass valley where sound doesn’t act normal? The entire place was crisscrossed with invisible boundaries that punished you when you crossed them, and none of us had any idea what was happening.

  Corva seemed to notice that Pell…wasn’t at his best. He pulled him back and told him not to range too far ahead. Instead, our group tightened up and we walked within arm’s reach of each other.

  The deeper into the valley we walked, the more the landscape changed. There were rock formations around us and I was lost in a thought. All the rock formations were sharp and jagged, like broken teeth pushing out of the ground. But a random ass science lesson from elementary school popped in my head and made me think about how erosion slowly shaped rock over centuries.

  Wind and water flowed through a rocky outcropping and eventually wore it away. But the rock around us wasn’t like that. If Cole’s research about the Eight Day Thunder was right, and those two Resonance Engines had really torn through this valley in a single day, then the formations weren’t old at all. They’d all been sculpted violently in the span of a single afternoon.

  That thought left me once Cole stopped walking. He pulled out his book and started scratching some stuff down in it, then he pointed out to an empty stretch of ground about two hundred yards away. He turned the notebook around for all of us to see.

  The Concordant front lines were here in the early days of the battle.

  The rest of us just stared at him. I mean, we understood the words that he wrote but not why they mattered. None of us were historians. None of us were going to be giddy about finding the site of a lost battlefield. We were muscle and protection and a pack mule and an extra set of eyes while he did his research. So why was he bringing us into what felt like an academic thought exercise.

  He saw our looks of bemusement and then sighed and that sound seemed to push against us. He gave us an apologetic look before scratching in his notebook again.

  If that was the frontline…where is the town?

  That did it. That got our attention. According to Cole’s massive lecture last night, se Froun Traf should have been right where we were standing. There should have been walls and buildings. There should have been streets and houses or any sort of footprint that was left behind by a functioning town.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  We all started looking around the valley again, this time with that context in mind. But there was nothing.

  There weren’t any collapsed structures or foundations peeking through the dirt. We didn’t spot streets that were barely visible on the ground. Everything was just rock and dust and an oppressive stillness that we’d been walking through since entering the valley.

  We all spread out carefully and started poking around for anything that might mark where the town had once stood. I was crouched near a low ridge when I noticed Pell off to the side. I caught sight of him just as his foot scraped against something solid beneath the earth.

  Click. Ping.

  My stomach dropped. I’d heard that sound before. I’d heard it in almost every single war movie I’d ever seen.

  Landmine.

  My brain tried arguing with me, telling me that it didn’t make any sort of sense. When Cole was telling us about the history of the battle, he said that the Vash and Concordant had just barely figured out how to make rifles. So how the hell did they know how to make a landmine?

  That thought didn’t get very far before I was jolted with fear.

  Ping.

  Ping.

  Ping.

  It was a looping echo that bounced around unnaturally in the valley. We all froze in place, afraid to even breathe wrong as we stared over at Pell just standing there with a look of shock on his face.

  Well…almost all of us froze in place. Corva didn’t. He lunged forward and grabbed Pell by the collar and threw him sideways. They hit the ground hard and rolled, scrambling to put as much distance between themselves and the loud pinging echoing through the valley.

  About two seconds later, the mine detonated. It popped up out of the ground first, and then it exploded. Dirt and rock sprayed into the air and the shockwave slammed into me hard enough to knock me on my ass.

  But the explosion was wrong. It was…muted. Blunted. It felt like the valley had swallowed half of it. I expected a larger blast and a louder explosion, but instead the thing had been dampened as if it all happened miles away from me.

  When the dust settled, I saw that Corva and Pell had made it clear from the blast. They got to their feet and brushed the dirt off their clothes. Pell’s face had gone pale white as he stared over at the spot where he’d been standing just moments earlier.

  Cole slowly pulled out his notebook and wrote again.

  There were rumors that the Vash and Concordant mined the pass after the battle. The goal was to prevent either side from advancing freely through the region and invading their territory.

  Corva stared at the book for a long time before glancing up to Corva. He didn’t bother with hand signals this time. He whispered to Cole and it came out like a shout.

  “You know, that would’ve been incredibly useful information to have before one of us stepped on a mine.”

  Now, I’m not a fan of being blown up by ancient mines. But if you squinted hard enough, you could call the landmine a net positive. Sure, we’d almost been blown to bits, but once we were reasonably sure there weren’t any more buried surprises waiting to kill us, we carefully picked our way over to the blast site. The explosion had torn open a chunk of the packed earth and peeled back layers of dirt. Underneath all that was a basement.

  We were standing at the edge of where se Fround Traf should have been. The entire town had collapsed inward after the Eight Day Thunder and had been completely buried by time. It had been crushed by the vibrations caused by the Resonance Engines and then swallowed by the shifting ground and forgotten. If the mine hadn’t tried to kill us, we wouldn’t have ever found the town. Instead, we would have just walked all over it without thinking to dig.

  Over the next two or three hours, Cole put us all to work uncovering the town. He found some stick somewhere and used it to draw directly on the dirt all around us. He sketched out the rough shape of the town and had us uncover as much as we could. Cole walked around the place and marked out where the front gates would’ve been, traced the main streets, and guessed at the secondary roads that branched off from them. He pointed out where the barracks likely stood and where the granaries would have been placed.

  I was put to work clearing out debris and copying his dirt drawings into his notebook. Corva helped too. He’d wandered through enough small towns to recognize the patterns of them and provided Cole with the most optimal layout. He’d look over at Cole’s dirt drawings and say whether it was a street or if a spot was a little too wide to be a house and was instead a public building.

  Slowly, piece by piece, the shape of se Froun Traf emerged around us. Cole drew on the dirt, I transcribed his scribbles into a notebook, and Corva supervised everything.

  After about three hours of work, Cole stopped and stared down at the map I’d drawn for him. Then he nodded to himself and called us all together. According to his estimates, we were standing right on top of where the mayor’s house should have been.

  We all dug away at the stone and dirt and it didn’t take long for us to make our way into the basement of the mayor’s house. The place was much more reinforced than any of the other underground entrances we’d found. The mayor’s house had long since been ground to dust, but the basement underneath had survived the worst of the violence that had torn through the valley. We cleared enough of the rubble to open a path forward and then got ready for a bit of spelunking.

  That was when Pell stepped back from the group. He took one look at the dark underground entrance, shook his head, and whispered “nope. Not going in there.”

  None of us tried arguing with him. The landmine he’d tripped had obviously rattled him more than he was letting on. And honestly? I couldn’t blame him for stepping back. I didn’t exactly want to head into the basement either.

  Corva told him to stay topside and keep watch so Pell walked away from the entrance and planted himself in a spot where he could have a clear view of the valley and still keep an eye on us.

  Inside the basement the air was stale and dry and obviously hadn’t been disturbed in decades. Parts of the basement had collapsed entirely and everything was pitch black. Cole pulled out a slip of paper from his bag and muttered something under his breath and the thing flared to life, giving us a bit of light to navigate by.

  Most of what was in the basement was completely useless. The entire area was all sealed doors and collapsed hallways and rooms filled with nothing but dust. We did eventually find something useful. Three somethings to be exact.

  The first thing was a compass. Corva found it. It was old and heavy and nothing like any compass that I’d ever seen. It was about the size of a paperback book and it had a massive red arrow in the middle of it and no markings around the edge.

  The moment that Cole got his hands on it he started grinning like an idiot. He called it an Agnen compass and explained that it had been built by some ancient academic group that was obsessed with mapping out magical phenomena and studying how magical essence interacted with the mundane world. Apparently, the compass pointed towards areas of high magical density.

  Honestly, I couldn’t really say how useful the thing was. I mean, when we found the compass the arrow was spinning like crazy and I couldn’t help but think “here we are in the middle of a valley where sound doesn’t work properly. Do we really need a compass to tell us that this place is magically messed up?” But Cole was thrilled so…whatever.

  The second item we found was a gauntlet and it looked like it was part of a set. It was cracked along the knuckles and forearm, and the…back of the palm? I don’t know what you call it. Not the palm but the opposite site. The roof of the hand? Fuck it. There were runes that were etched there but they were all so faded that they were barely legible. The whole thing was definitely magical and definitely important but we couldn’t figure out what it did.

  I’m a complete idiot. The back of the hand. For some reason I couldn’t think of the words and…I’ve gone too far and I don’t wanna delete everything so I’m just gonna leave the last part of that paragraph in there. Completely ignore it though.

  Anyway, neither Cole nor Corva could figure out the runes on the gauntlet. The thing didn’t have an activation trigger or any obvious start button. The gauntlet probably had been powerful and important back in the day, especially since it was locked away in the mayor’s basement. But now it was just an old broken gauntlet. Cole still had me store it in my dimensional space.

  The third object was both more valuable and also completely useless to us. It was a crystal about the size of my fist and was perfectly intact despite everything around it being ruined. It was cold to the touch and faintly luminous. The best way I can describe it is that it looked like a stone that had been left out in the sun all day and somehow absorbed all that light. Like…it stored the light. It was holding onto a brightness that should have faded a long time ago.

  Cole didn’t know what it was. He hadn’t seen anything like it in the academy or in any of his research that he’d been obsessing over for the past few years. That alone made it important and probably our best find of the day.

  We bagged all the artifacts and made our way out of the basement. When we got topside, we found Pell exactly where we left him and headed back out into the Valley.

  About an hour later, with se Froun Traf at our backs and the rest of the Valley of Echoes stretched out in front of us, everything changed once again.

  By then, we were used to the idea of the sound bubbles that littered the valley floor. There were loud zones and quiet zones and spots where noise got swallowed and thrown back at us. None of it felt normal, especially not to me who wasn’t used to living in a magical world. But it was predictable. It seemed like there were some sort of rules that the valley followed. A type of framework that we could learn about and use it to navigate.

  Then we came across a new type of sound bubble and it was completely different from the others. We didn’t even know we’d stepped into it at first. Nothing snapped and popped or hummed at us. Sound just changed.

  At first, everything seemed normal. Or…at least as normal as things were in that valley. I could hear my shoots crunching over rocks. I could hear my breathing and the sound of my heart hammering in my chest. It was loud enough that I was halfway convinced that everyone else in the group could hear it too. But I also started noticing other sounds.

  They were layered together. It was like multiple recordings were playing and each of them had been stacked on top of each other.

  Oh man, I just figured out the best way to describe this. Bear with me.

  When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Aqua Teen Hunger Force. A buddy’s older brother had all the DVDs and he lent them out to me. There was this one season of the show where the DVD menu gave you two playback options: Play None or Play All.

  For those of you who were lucky enough to have grown up streaming instead of digging through bargain bins for your viewing entertainment, let me explain how DVDs worked. You’d get a DVD and put it in your computer or playstation or whatever and a menu would pop up. You could choose a bunch of different options on the menu. You could either navigate to a specific episode and watch that, or you could click Play All and your DVD starts at episode one and just rolls through the whole season. Easy, right?

  Except on this specific season of ATHF, Play All didn’t mean that. You clicked it and suddenly every single episode of that season started playing at the same time. Twenty tiny windows popped up, all running simultaneously, all with different dialogue and music and sound effects overlapping each other. It was complete chaos. You couldn’t follow anything.

  That’s what the bubble was like.

  I could hear my own footsteps. My breathing. My heartbeat. I could hear Wren and Pell moving nearby. I could hear Cole scribbling furiously in his notebook. And I could hear birds. A whole chorus of them all tweeting cheerful and bright and happy. It was like the perfect spring morning.

  I slowed and looked up, trying to figure out where the birds were. And I couldn’t spot them. They weren’t there. Hell, there wasn’t anywhere for birds to even be. There weren’t any trees or nests or bushes. Nothing was flying through the sky. The valley was as dead and empty as it had been the entire time we’d been there.

  Yet I could definitely hear birds. I could also hear the wind. I heard it whisper and curl through the rocks and sigh as it passed us.

  That was one layer of sound in the bubble. Another one was underneath it and it was incredibly faint when I first started listening to it. It was faint enough that I first thought I was just imagining it.

  I could hear the faint clang of metal on metal. Something heavy was striking something else over and over and over again. Then I heard voices. Shouted commands, but they were layered so tightly that I couldn’t make out the words. Then came the screaming. Angry screams. Pain-filled screams. Screams that were just screams shouted out so that the world knew that person was still alive and breathing. The screams were everywhere.

  We all stopped as the sound assaulted us. I looked around, trying to find out where the screams were coming from, but it was everywhere. It was all around us. And the worst part was that the sound reacted to us.

  When I focused on the chirping of the birds, that grew louder and clearer. I could pick out individual bird calls, almost like the valley was rewarding me for paying attention. Then Wren stumbled on a rock and fell to the ground and sucked in a breath, and that’s when the sounds of the battle spiked. The screaming swelled until it felt like it was right behind us.

  I tried to calm myself and just breathe and keep my eyes on the distance. I tried forcing my attention on the birds and my own heartbeat and the ground in front of me. Corva noticed that the sound was reacting to us at the same time I did.

  He raised a hand and threw out a string of hand signals that I didn’t really understand. Then he grabbed Cole’s notebook and wrote it out plainly.

  No talking. No reacting. No paying attention.

  He pointed at his eyes and then made a small walking motion with his hands. We all understood that. Don’t listen to the noise. Don’t engage with it. Don’t acknowledge it. Just keep moving and get the hell out of that bubble.

  Getting out of the bubble was a strange and uncomfortable experience. That’s kinda saying a lot since the whole valley has really increased my perspective on weird shit that happens to me.

  There wasn’t a clean moment where we crossed an invisible boundary and everything snapped back to normal. The layers of sound just sort of thinned out. The birds faded first, and then the wind. The distant screams started to dull until I could barely hear them anymore. My own footsteps slowly went back to sounding like footsteps instead of a single note in a cacophony of sound.

  We finally stepped clear, or at least thought we did, but then the sound hit us again. All the birds and screams and wind and footsteps and everything rushed over us one final time before the entire valley fell silent. We’d just been assaulted by noise and then it was like any other place in the Deadlands. Still dead and creepy, but no longer an area being bombarded by sound.

  We didn’t stop immediately. Corva kept us moving for another few minutes just to be sure that we weren’t still inside that bubble. Eventually, we found a shallow dip between two ridges in the valley where sound was behaving…slightly normal. Everything was still muted, almost like someone had turned down the volume on the world, but I could live with that.

  Our entire group collapsed. After a few minutes Corva started putting together lunch for us. He got a small fire going and I handed over the food supplies and watched him work. Pell sat a short distance away from us, staring at nothing. The man looked like a pale ghost. He was the one who was most affected out of all of us, which I was kinda proud of. I mean, I’m not trying to be a dick or anything but if you were to bet me which of the group would be most freaked out by sudden magical anomalies, my money would have been on the guy who’d been in this world for less than a month.

  Wren was handling it a little bit better. At least on the surface. I could tell the valley was getting to him too. His eyes kept flicking all around us, almost like he was expecting some crazy magical shit to happen at any time.

  Lunch helped a little. We ate our food in silence and for a minute everything felt normal. Once we were done eating, Corva and I started picking up and getting ready to move, and the sound hit us again.

  It came like a wave. It started somewhere in the distance. It was a low rumble that crested a far ridge in the valley and started rolling towards us. Once it reached us, the air was suddenly filled with noise. I heard shouting and charging and the metallic rattle of armor.

  We all froze in place, wondering what was gonna happen next. And that’s when we saw them.

  Figures crested the hill in front of us, banners snapping in a wind that wasn’t rushing through the valley. Soldiers charged downhill with weapons raised, yelling battle cries at an enemy who wasn’t there. For a half second I was reminded of Civil War reenactors, playing make believe.

  Then there were more of them. The other side of the battle surged into existence, just as real and just as furious. Steel met steel. Shields slammed together. Men screamed and fell and hacked at each other.

  Cole’s eyes were wide. Mine probably were too. I’d listened to enough of his lecture to know what this was. I recognized the colors on the banners. These were Vash and Concordant soldiers doing battle. But…it had happened so long ago. How were they here now?

  All of us were just lost in the moment. We stared out at the battle playing out in front of us, watching as soldiers killed and died. After a bit, my mind finally snapped to attention and drew my focus on the soldiers themselves.

  I’d seen their faint outline before. Not these soldiers. These soldiers were new. I’d never been in this valley before and I’d never seen ghostly soldiers attacking each other. But I had seen something similar to them.

  Echoes. These soldiers moved almost exactly the same way the echoes did back at the House of Seasons.

  They had the same slightly delayed reactions and the same looping motions. It was like they were stuck reenacting a moment instead of living it. I watched as a Concordant soldier raised his shield, got struck, staggered back…and then did it all again like someone had hit rewind and play. A Vash soldier charged in, thrust his sword, shouted something, and then rewound and did it all again.

  What’s more, none of the soldiers looked at the five men standing next to a dwindling fire, watching the battle. We were standing around thirty yards away, fully visible to everyone, and they all ignored us.

  The whole thing reminded me of the House of Seasons and the various echoes there. But the House was miles away. It was days of travel at a minimum. I didn’t even realize that I was speaking until the words were already out of my mouth.

  “They’re just like the other echoes.”

  Both Cole and Corva turned to me at the same time.

  “What?” Cole whispered, his notebook already out, ready to be scribbled in.

  I kept my focus on the fight. A Concordant standard-bearer went down and then rose again a moment later, his banner snapping back into place like nothing had happened.

  “I’ve seen this before,” I explained. “The way they move and how they ignore us. They’re not really here. They’re like…memories. Or recordings.”

  Corva’s brow furrowed. “Memories of what?”

  “Of people,” I said. “Of moments. It’s the same as what happened back at the House of Seasons.”

  Cole blinked at me and Corva turned fully towards me, entirely focused on what I’d just said.

  “The what?” Corva asked.

  “The House of Seasons. I ran into it…oh, about a week or two ago. It’s all full of echoes like this. People stuck replaying parts of their lives.”

  Cole cut me off, scribbling furiously in his notebook. “Zeke, you need to start from the beginning. What is this? What are these echoes? I haven’t ever heard of anything called a House of Seasons, and I’m pretty sure I would have if it was out here in the Deadlands.”

  I looked back at the battlefield. Steel rang and men shouted and blood soaked into the ground where it had soaked the ground a hundred years ago.

  “Uh…what? It’s…what?”