The Echo Shore
Revised Word Count: ~695
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The river stayed gentle for weeks.
Birds returned to the canopy. Frogs sang again beneath the reeds. The tidepool by the bend filled with moonlight each night, as if the stars were dipping their toes back into the world.
But Maya couldn’t sleep.
Not from fear. Not from dreams.
From a strange, hollow stillness.
Something was gone. But something else was not.
The tides had ended. But sound… still traveled.
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It began on the twelfth night.
A faint clicking beneath the water’s surface.
At first, Maya thought it was crabs or drifting coral. But the sound was too precise. Too timed. It echoed like language, not movement.
She sat near the riverbank, wrapped in her stormcloak, bare feet pressing into the damp moss.
Jonas and Sefina were asleep in the shelter.
The moon glared overhead like a single, wide-open eye.
And the river… spoke again.
Not in words.
But in a pattern.
A flicker of movement.
A clicking sequence.
A shape in the dark.
Something w
