The voice was gone. The box lay open on her workbench, a silent, silver accusation. The key continued its slow, deliberate weeping, each dark drop a stain on the velvet, a stain on reality itself. Elara stood frozen, her back pressed against the cold metal of a tool cabinet, her breath held tight in her chest. The Echo hadn't faded like the others; it had spoken, and then it had sealed itself inside her, a cold, heavy stone in the pit of her stomach. The usual psychic noise of the city. the distant murmur of televisions, the restless dreams of her neighbors, the hum of wiring in the walls was now filtered through this new, internal silence. It was a silence that listened.
Her hands shook as she forced herself to approach the bench. She couldn't leave it there. It was a part of her now, an uninvited tenant that had moved in with a single, chilling sentence. It is time. Time for what? Her rational mind, the part that had built a life on denial, screamed at her to throw it out the window, to run, to forget. But the stone in her gut knew better. It was an anchor. She was tethered.
With a shuddering exhale, she reached for the key. The moment her bare skin made contact with the cold, weeping iron, the world dissolved. Not into the chaotic impressions of a normal Echo, but into a single, crystalline memory that was not her own. She was standing in a grand, circular library, its shelves carved from living, dark wood. The air smelled of ozone and decaying roses. A man with hair the color of winter ash and eyes full of a terrible, weary kindness was handing her the key. "For when the light fails," he said, his voice echoing as if from the bottom of a well. "For the lock that should never be turned." The vision shattered, leaving her gasping, the key clutched so tightly in her hand its intricate bow was biting into her palm. The weeping fluid was warm now, and it clung to her skin like oil.
She needed to understand. The compulsion was a physical force, a pull stronger than fear. The key was a question, and the answer was not in this sterile, modern box of an apartment. It was in the one place she had vowed never to return to: the Vayne mansion. The inheritance she had spent a decade ignoring. The house was a tomb, a place she was sure would be saturated with the worst kind of Echoes, the final, agonized moments of her family. But the key in her hand was a lodestone, and its polarity was set irrevocably to that source. She looked at the clock she had been repairing. Its hands, freed by her earlier work, now ticked forward with a frantic, jerky motion, though its mainspring was still disconnected. A warning. A countdown. She had no choice. She was a leaf caught in a current, and the waterfall was just ahead.