Chapter 88 – The Fallen Echoes
The corridor narrowed to a throat of stone.
Faint orange light spilled from the runes lining its ribs, pulsing like a dying heartbeat. Each step sent echoes spiraling into the dark ahead, too deep, too hollow.
Tamara walked in front, blade drawn and low at her side. Behind her came Mara—shield slung and ready—then Sera with her faint silver glow, and Vulgrat at the rear clutching his satchel of clinking vials.
The air grew colder. Thicker.
And then they saw the door.
It rose out of the corridor's end like a cliff face, carved from black stone streaked with veins of dim crimson light. The surface seemed to breathe, swelling and contracting in slow rhythm, alive with something that had long forgotten how to die.
Across its center, etched deep enough to bleed shadow, were the words:
THE TRIBE OF INFECTED DARKNESS
The letters rippled as they read them, as if recoiling from their gaze.
Vulgrat squinted behind his spectacles. "This door is definitely going to contain something that will try to kill us," he murmured, voice thin.
Tamara lifted her chin. "Then let's open it."
No one argued. Sera raised a hand and whispered a verse—the runes responded with a shimmer of light, softening the stone. The door exhaled a breath of dust and split down the center.
Air rushed out, old and stale. The smell of ash and time.
They entered a long hall bathed in violet haze. Murals covered the walls from floor to ceiling, so vivid they looked wet—like the paint still bled.
Sera's light brightened, spilling across the first carving.
A people stood beneath a radiant sun. Graceful, golden-skinned, shaping rivers and crops with their hands. Joy in every line.
The next mural darkened: a shadow crawling over the horizon, tendrils slipping through the fields. The people clutched their chests as black veins spidered across their skin.
Another mural—battle. The tribe split in two. Half burned with light, half bled darkness from their eyes.
And in the last: a figure standing alone amid ruin.
The leader clad in a crimson-stained cloak and crowned with a geometric helm that hides all weakness, he carries the great blade not as an executioner's tool but as a standard of authority.
The chains around him suggest order rather than bondage—links that bind chaos under his rule.
Amid the smoke and ruin, he appears like a sentinel-king of a fallen realm: silent, unyielding, and destined to bear the weight of judgment.
Even rendered in stone, he radiated command.
Tamara's jaw tightened. "Their ruler."
Vulgrat touched the edge of the carving and pulled his hand back immediately. "There's energy flowing through it." he whispered.
Sera shuddered. "It's alive."
The floor trembled. A low hum swelled through the chamber, rising from beneath their boots until their bones vibrated with it.
Cracks split the murals, leaking streams of black sand. The sand gathered, coiling into shapes—humanoid, and armored. The air thickened with the smell of iron and decay.
"Positions!" Tamara barked.
Mara slammed her shield down!
Runes flared to life across the metal, doubling her aura. The ground rippled outward in waves of hardened earth that locked beneath her feet.
Sera's hands flared with silver light, weaving threads that wrapped around the group. Speed and balance surged through their limbs.
Vulgrat twisted open two vials and hurled them forward. They burst mid-air into fire and acid, splattering the ground with sizzling light.
The first of the echoes stepped free of the wall. Its body was carved of stone and shadow, its eyes burning white through a mask of cracked obsidian. It carried a jagged blade of the same darkness.
Then another. And another. Until the hall filled with them—an army of the fallen, drawn from the murals' grief.
"Here they come!" Vulgrat shouted.
The first impact hit Mara's shield like thunder. Sparks and sand exploded outward. The echo's blade skidded off the barrier with a scream of metal; she countered with a forward shove, slamming her shield into its chest and shattering it to dust.
Tamara surged past her, sword cutting in a flash of pale ice. The nearest echo split cleanly from shoulder to hip, the frost instantly crystallizing its body into shards that scattered across the ground.
Sera's magic followed—a pulse of white light that raced through their lines, burning through the shadows and slowing the next wave.
Vulgrat kept low, murmuring formulas. He hurled a pair of flasks—one blue, one red. They collided in mid-air, merging into a violet blaze that detonated across the right flank, sending three echoes flying.
"Left side!" Tamara yelled.
Mara pivoted, raising her shield again. The runes pulsed—each strike that hit her flared with backlash energy, knocking the attackers away.
But there were too many. Dozens crawling from the walls, from the cracks, from the ground itself. The air filled with the clatter of stone and the shrieks of lost voices.
"They're endless!" Vulgrat gasped. "They're feeding on something!"
Tamara parried another strike, sparks flying. "The murals—look!"
Through the chaos, Sera's light caught the carvings still intact behind the attackers. The runes along those panels pulsed brighter with every death, bleeding more shadows into the air.
"They're drawing power from their own story," Sera realized.
"Then we end the story!" Tamara said.
"Mara—front!"
The shield-bearer roared, slammed her foot into the ground, and charged. The earth buckled beneath her momentum. Her shield collided with the nearest mural like a meteor.
Stone fractured. A web of golden cracks raced across the wall.
"Vulgrat—now!"
He tossed two more vials into the fracture—one humming red, one green. They burst, combining into a violent surge of alchemical fire. The mural screamed as if alive, black sand pouring out like blood.
The echoes faltered, bodies flickering.
"Keep going!" Tamara ordered.
Sera raised her palms, channeling raw light. A spear of radiance tore through another mural, vaporizing the figures carved upon it.
One by one, the walls exploded into dust and echoing cries.
When the last mural shattered, silence fell. The surviving echoes collapsed, their bodies turning to ash that drifted upward like snow.
The ashes did not fall.
They gathered.
A spiral of dust and gold light rose from the center of the room, forming a figure. When the glow cleared, a man stood before them.
He was tall—taller than any of them—with broad shoulders draped in a cloak of phantom crimson. Chains coiled from his wrists, gleaming faintly with molten gold. Upon his head sat a helm of perfect geometry, faceless and serene.
The great blade rested point-down before him, the air around it warping with quiet power.
Even Mara, who had weathered monsters and storms, found herself lowering her shield.
His voice rolled through the chamber like thunder wrapped in velvet.
"You have destroyed their bonds," he said. "And freed their torment."
Tamara took a cautious step forward. "Who are you?"
"Once… I was their ruler. The guardian of this tribe. When the darkness came, I chained myself within these walls to preserve what light remained."
His gaze drifted over the shattered murals. "You have broken those chains. And awakened what little is left of me."
Sera's tone softened. "You're not infected."
The helm turned toward her. The faint light behind its visor flickered gold.
"Not anymore. What stands before you is no more than a fragment—the echo of what refused corruption."
Silence held the room. The only sound was the faint hum of his chains.
"The pyramid," he continued, "was once sacred. A sanctum of balance. We guarded its heart, the source that linked our world to the heavens.
But the darkness seeped in—born of greed, of pride, of the same hunger that consumes every kingdom in time."
The words reverberated through their chests.
"I bound myself here to contain it. Yet the seal weakens. What remains of my tribe… wanders still, neither living nor gone."
He paused, the glow behind his helm dimming.
"if you walk deeper, if courage still guides you… save what remains of them.
Keep this place sacred. Let not our legacy rot into another curse."
Tamara's grip tightened on her sword. "Then tell us how. What must we do?"
"You cannot stop what has already begun," he said quietly. "But you can delay it. Buy the world another dawn."
The faintest trace of sorrow touched his tone. "That is all any of us ever did."
A hairline crack split the front of his armor. Light bled from it like liquid gold.
Vulgrat stepped forward hesitantly. "What… was the darkness, really?"
"Ambition without restraint. Power without will. We sought to protect creation itself—and in doing so, became its undoing."
He looked at them one last time.
"Do not let this happen to you. Remember—order is not the opposite of chaos. It is the cage that keeps it breathing."
The chamber trembled as his body began to unravel, disintegrating into motes of gold and ash. One of the chains around his wrist snapped free, falling to the floor. Where it touched, the stone reshaped itself into a new doorway—pale, pure, carved from living light.
His voice lingered as he vanished.
"Guard the sacred. When the dark whispers… remember the cost of listening."
Then he was gone.
The silence that followed was crushing. Even Ember's distant flicker—the faint warmth John had left in this world—felt impossibly far away.
Tamara sheathed her sword, the sound ringing sharp in the emptiness. She looked toward the glowing doorway. "Then we walk forward is seems." "We still need to find John and Blake."
They moved together, slow and deliberate, through the corridor of light that had once been chain and burden.
Behind them, the dust of the murals settled back into silence. No cries. No echoes. Only stillness.
And somewhere deep below, the pyramid's heart pulsed again—slow, patient, and waiting.