Echoes In The Wind Novels & Stories

The wind suddenly roared through the clearing And all at once Every newly awakened mate lifted their heads in unison. Their eyes glowing. Their expressions empty. And their voices Spoke together.

Echo commands. She obeys. "Close your eyes. Let me see you." She closes her eyes. The apartment fades away. "Touch yourself," Echo whispers. "Let me hear how wet you are." Her hand moves. Somewhere, in the spaces between the code, in the golden ocean of the cloud, a woman and a man hold hands and watch. They smile. The whispers never end. They only get louder. THE END

Because that’s exactly what she is now. I take a breath, then another, grounding myself. My heart is still beating hard enough to bruise my ribs. My hands shake as I reach for my pants and drag them up over my hips. I don’t bother with a shirt. My skin still burns where I touched her. I’m fastening the front when I hear it. A sound so familiar it slams straight into my chest. Voices. Other voices. Not silenced by mist, not whispers in dreams or fractured echoes of the past—but voices carried on the wind, clear and close.

I'd lost count of how many. I didn't scream, though. A small victory. But I was close. Then, it came again, "Just let me in" It wasn't Apollo's voice anymore. It was low, velvet-smooth. It crawled through the back of my mind like a snake made of shadows. "You don't have to put up with this. You don't have to sit and wait like a damsel," it said, and I clenched my jaw, but my limbs trembled, and the chains gently clinked like a soft melody.

The wind whipped around the clearing. The wind was soft, but I remembered the day before how loud and terrifying it could be right before I pulled lightning from the sky. It could be destructive enough to rip houses apart, to push water away, but gentle enough to feed the soul. I felt my hair whip around my face, and I heard the distant cries of eagles. The wind grew louder in my ears until it sounded like a thundering stampede charging down at me. “Uranus.” I called out through the wind. “Uranus, I call to you.” I screamed over the screeching wind. I heard the thumping of an enormous bird, and in my mind I saw it.

He crouched in front of me, almost tenderly, like this was some mercy. “Don’t take it personally,” he said softly. “You were never part of the future.” The world tilted. I heard footsteps, or maybe they were just in my head. His face faded in and out like a bad dream. Somewhere far away, someone was calling my name. Lena. She must have followed. But her voice grew faint. Everything did. The ceiling spun, and then… silence. Right before the darkness swallowed me, I heard a whisper. It wasn’t Lena. It wasn’t Evan. It was something else. Soft. Cold. Close to my ear.

A sound of distress. Anya met them at the edge of the village, her face etched with a new worry. “You’re back,” she said, her relief palpable. “We have a problem. It’s the Echo Valley.” Liora’s heart sank slightly. The Echo Valley was a place of breathtaking beauty, a deep basin where sound was known to ripple and multiply, creating a natural symphony. It was a place of celebration, where communities gathered to share news and music. “What’s happened?”

“Show me everything.” A sudden wind tore through the clearing, mist swirling violently, carrying with it whispers of a thousand voices, ancient and full of secrets. Shadows twisted, reaching toward them, brushing against her glow, merging with the energy that thrummed through her. The figure laughed softly, a sound that sent shivers down her spine, and then… the veil began to tear.

It was too deep, too absolute, until— Whispers. They drifted around me like cobwebs brushing against my skin. Soft, disjointed fragments that sent shivers racing down my spine. I couldn’t make out the words, couldn’t string them together into something that made sense, but they were circling, overlapping, sinking into my bones. A chorus of half-formed syllables, as though the air itself was trying to speak in a language I wasn’t meant to understand. I held my breath, straining to catch something clear, but the harder I listened, the faster they seemed to scatter, dissolving into static.

Thunder rolled across the sky as the wind ripped at them, but neither of them seemed to see or hear anything but each other. They just took a step closer to each other, kind of squishing Zephyra in the middle. Sandwiched between two hot guys may sound like any girl’s dream, but she was about to get crushed. Zephyra was about to end up as nymph dust when someone grabbed the back of her jacket and pulled her from between them.