Page 25 of Echoes From the Void
Lyra’s music shifts to something lighter, her notes dancing with our shadows like celebration made visible. Liliana joins her, humming harmony, and suddenly the room fills with light and shadow and sound—all the pieces of us coming together.
“Did you see it too?” Lyra whispers when Dad finally leaves. “The shadows under his skin—they weren’t right, Leo.”
“I know,” I reply, reaching into shadow space to pull out a chocolate bar for Liliana. “Mom warned me this might happen. That’s why she made me practice so much.”
“So,” Lena says, clicking her pen. “About that therapy session...”
“Not now,” Luna groans.
“Thursday works,” I say, laughing at their surprised looks. “What? Even sunshine needs maintenance.”
Matteo’s twilight shadows curl around mine as our father’s car drives away. And yet a nagging thought swirls in the back of my mind. Darkness swirls underneath the car.
Something tells me this isn’t the last we will be seeing of him, and something else tells me that he’s been corrupted as well.
Only time will tell.
Chapter 9
Dorian
Time isn’t supposedto affect me.
Yet here I stand in my vault beneath the library, watching my reflection age decades in the cursed mirror before snapping back to eternal youth. The effect lasts longer each time, like reality itself is tired of my defiance. The cracks in my skin spread further with each fluctuation, matching the spiderweb patterns appearing in every reflective surface of my carefully organized sanctuary. Frost spreads from my fingers across the mirror’s surface—another charming side effect of temporal stasis. Being frozen in time apparently means being literally frozen.
Each fluctuation sends ripples of pain through my carefully maintained form—bones aging and regenerating, skin withering and restoring. The cracks in my skin pulse with each wave, spreading like frost across glass.
How tediously symbolic.
“Still brooding in the dark?” Uncle Everett’s voice carries down the stone stairs, disrupting my precise categorization of temporal anomalies. “You know, most young people your age are out enjoying life, not cataloguing centuries of family curses.”
“Most people my apparent age are actuallylivingtheir twenties,” I reply, adjusting my perfectly pressed cuffs. Frostpatterns follow my fingers across the fabric, another tedious reminder of temporal stasis. “And most don’t have to worry about freezing everything they touch.”
“Ah yes, because surrounding yourself with moldering books and talking to your reflection is the height of scientific inquiry.” He picks up one of my meticulously organized texts, deliberately misaligning it from its fellows. “Though I suppose it’s better than pining after your pack.”
“I do not pine,” I say with all the dignity I can muster while straightening the book. “I maintain appropriate professional distance while conducting necessary research into our unique metaphysical situation.”
“You reorganized the entire archive after Leo brought coffee down here.”
“The archives needed reorganizing. The timing was coincidental.” He grabs a different book off my desk. One I’ve been meaning to ask him about.
Before Uncle can further dissect my organizational habits, my thoughts drift to Lyra’s earlier display of power. The way her music had made shadow essence dance had triggered something in my academic memory—a theory about harmonic resonance between realms that I’d dismissed as improbable. Yet the frequency patterns... My attention snaps to my father’s duplicate portrait, where new cracks spread across the canvas like aging skin.
“Uncle,” I say carefully, recognizing the book from years of searching through family archives. “Mother’s diary. The one you claimed was lost after she...” I can’t finish the sentence. “I’ve been looking for this since I first noticed the connection between Lyra’s music and the realm resonance patterns.”
He nods slowly. “It wasn’t lost. It was waiting. Your mother encoded it to reveal itself only when someone understood enough about harmonic resonance to actually usethe information. Rather like you encoding your research notes in seventeen different languages.”
“Reveal itself?” I reach for the book, then hesitate as my reflection ages again. The diary seems to pulse with its own energy, like a heartbeat trapped in paper and ink. “Are you suggesting an inanimate object has been waiting for an appropriately dramatic moment?”
“Says the man who color-codes his grimoires by century and magical resonance.”
“That’s different. That’s proper archival procedure.”
The diary practically falls into my hands, its pages crackling with preserved power. My mother’s elegant script fills every page with observations, calculations, and... theories on shadow manipulation. She wrote about the intersection of shadow and time, about using the energy of the shadow realm to stabilize Father’s curse. And... music? The notations seem to vibrate against my fingers, reminding me of the way Lyra’s violin made shadow essence dance.
“The frequency patterns,” I breathe, academic excitement momentarily overwhelming my composure. “Like Lyra’s violin. The realm resonance?—”
A surge of power from the medical wing interrupts my revelation. The twins must be practicing again, their combined energy making reality itself shudder.
