Z3ke (Original Poster)

  As soon as the words House of Seasons left my mouth, both Cole and Corva locked onto me with a mixture of curiosity and hunger. They completely forgot about the battle playing out in front of us and the echoes of the soldiers who’d been dead for a hundred years clashing and dying and clashing and dying over and over again. Instead, they closed in around me.

  Off to the side, Pell and Wren had their own thing going. They were crouched and watching the echoes fight like it was an action movie. They whispered back and forth to each other, pointing occasionally wherever something caught their eye. I was able to catch bits and pieces of what they were saying even though we were currently in one of those bubbles that muffled sound.

  “Vash standard on the left…”

  “Those look like the rangers Cole talked about. The ones led by that young commander guy.”

  Apparently the two of them had been listening during Cole’s hour-long lectures about the battle.

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t see the fight anymore because Cole and Corva were hovering in front of me, pressing me for details about the House of Seasons. So, I told them what I knew. Well…most of what I knew. It’s kinda hard to talk about the dungeon without sounding completely insane.

  I explained that it was a massive mansion somewhere out in the Deadlands, but that it also wasn’t there anymore. The physical site of the House had been abandoned years ago, and somehow I was able to access some kind of sub-dimension(?) and ventured into a version of the House as it once was. Yea, that got me some stares.

  I told them about how each wing of the mansion was a different season and how the whole thing was stitched together and run by this woman called the Blooming Witch. I talked about the echoes trapped inside and how they were replaying fragments of their lives until I eventually came along and nudged them enough to get them to move on.

  That little tidbit was enough to open the floodgates. They kept talking over each other, lobbing questions at me about the Witch, the echoes, and whether I could find the House again.

  I did my best to answer but I still kept a few things back. I told them that the Blooming Witch was incredibly old and dangerous and powerful and tied to the House in ways I couldn’t fully understand. She’d claimed that she’d built the House, but I figured she only really added onto it and helped to create the echoes that lived there. I don’t know, it was all very confusing.

  Then I explained how I helped the echoes and that that had earned me a reward from the Witch. I showed off my dimensional storage space and explained she was the reason I could act as a pack mule for the expedition.

  I did leave some things out though. While I did tell them they were more than welcome to go and poke around the House for themselves, I also made it clear I wasn’t going back. Instead, I warned them very plainly that the Blooming Witch wasn’t someone they wanted to mess with.

  “She’s dangerous enough that some friends of mine swear she wipes out trained mercenary groups like it’s nothing.”

  That part landed and I doubt either is all that interested in setting off into the Deadlands to poke around the House.

  What I didn’t tell them was that the House of Seasons was a dungeon from a video game. I also didn’t tell them that the Blooming Witch was an elite-level boss who had traumatized an entire online fanbase. I didn’t explain that this entire world was the setting of a video game, that they might be NPCs, and that Corva is a well-known character who shows up repeatedly throughout the series or that I got yanked out of New York and set down in this world with no idea how to get home.

  I mean…how do you start that kind of conversation? The second that I try and tell them about New York or forums or Earth or video games, they’re gonna think I snapped and lock me up somewhere for my own good. So I stuck to the facts as I experienced them and let them draw their own conclusions.

  Cole seemed to take everything in stride. He jotted down some notes about the House and then let his attention drift back to the battlefield and the echoes fighting about fifty feet in front of us.

  I could understand his interest. They were a living (arguably) snapshot of a battle from a poorly documented period of history. How often does a historian get first hand accounts of a battle that was found a hundred years ago?

  But Corva kept pressing me about the House. He kept circling back to the same questions over and over again. Why were the echoes here? Why this place? Why this battle? Why now?

  There was an intensity to him that I hadn’t seen before. It was like the idea of the echoes had lodged itself deep inside him and refused to let go. He stared at the battlefield and the echoes like they were hiding some invisible truth and he could almost grasp it if only he thought hard enough and asked enough questions.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t really give him any answers.

  How long had the echoes been dead?

  Did they know what they were?

  Could they change what they were doing, or were they trapped in those loops forever?

  He gestured at the battlefield, pointing out a Vash soldier who’d just taken a spear to the chest and then got up and continued fighting.

  “Those echoes are all dying, over and over again,” he said. “Are the ones in the House like that?”

  “No. not really,” I said. “It’s more they’re stuck in very small loops. Like, twenty seconds or so. They repeat the same actions until something interrupts them. I had to find objects that meant something to them and that snapped them out of it.”

  He fired off a few more questions, one after another. How were the echoes still there years, or maybe decades or centuries, after their deaths? Did everyone who died in the House become an echo? Was it something that needed to be created? Was there a spell involved? A ritual? Some kind of magical surge at the moment of death that anchored them to the House?

  “Is it the location that does it?” he asked. “The House, I mean. Or is it the Blooming Witch? Is she waking them and binding them to the House? Or are the echoes forming naturally and she’s just maintaining them?”

  I didn’t have any good answers for the man. Hell, I didn’t even have okay answers. All I could say was that I didn’t know. I gave him what answers I could, but as more and more of his questions were answered with a shrug, he seemed to realize that I couldn’t help him.

  I saw the look of desperation on his face so I pulled out my notebook and started sketching out a map. It was rough. My trip from the House through the Deadlands to The MIZ involved a lot of dehydration, panic, and blind wandering. Still, I managed to give him something workable.

  When I finished, I tore the page out of my book and handed it to him. And because he’d helped teach me a bunch of skills during this whole expedition, I gave him some last bit of advice.

  “If you go there and meet the Blooming Witch, be respectful. Like…ridiculously respectful. From everything that I’ve been told, she is incredibly dangerous. While she let me leave the place, that doesn’t mean she’ll do the same for you.”

  Corva nodded and I saw him already tracing the route on the page like he was walking it in his head.

  Cole, meanwhile, had been watching all this with a deepening frown. Eventually, he asked the question that I’d been too polite to bring up.

  “You’re fixated on this like it changes everything,” he said. “The echoes are just another manifestation of the valley’s resonance phenomena. Why are you so interested in this House of Seasons?”

  Corva turned to him and let out a slow breath.

  “When you described this battle to us, you talked about troop movements and formations and the generals who fought it and the strange weapons they brought to the battle. But nowhere in there did you mention anything about soldiers who would die and then stand back up to fight the same moments over and over again.”

  Cole opened his mouth, then closed it, seemingly deep in thought.

  “That’s something completely new,” explained Corva. “You didn’t talk about any magic tied to the Resonance Engines that could do all this. So, how did these echoes come alive? What actually happened here? Why are we watching a battle that ended a hundred years ago?”

  Cole looked rattled by the question. He opened his mouth, closed it, tried again, frowned, glanced around like the answer might be hiding in the valley itself, came up with a different conclusion, once more looked around in confusion, changed his answer, then disregarded that answer, and finally just stood there deep in thought.

  Pell and Wren drifted closer, curiosity pulling them into our conversation. Finally, Cole exhaled and spoke slowly, like he was building his theory as he went.

  “There are gaps in the historical record. Especially towards the end of the battle.” He flipped through his notebook, scanning dates and notes that he’d jotted down.

  “General Kheled, the leader who arrived late to the battle and brought with him the Resonance Engine…there are reports that he was killed in a massive magical detonation during the final day of battle.”

  Wren frowned. “I thought you said the engines just vibrated everyone to death. You mentioned something about an explosion without flames or something like that.”

  “They did,” Cole nodded. “That’s what killed most of the soldiers. Which is why those reports always bothered me. A magical explosion doesn’t fit.”

  He started pacing along the ridge, all of us ignoring the ongoing battle as we stood listening to his explanation.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Kheled’s command tent was positioned next to his engineering corps,” Cole continued. “The same engineers and experimental mages who built the Resonance Engine. That much is confirmed. What isn’t confirmed is what other new technologies they were working on.”

  Corva’s eyes sharpened. “You think the Engines didn’t cause these echoes.”

  “I think,” said Cole slowly, “it’s a mistake to assume they did. If Kheled brought his experimental mages and engineers with him, and we know he did, then it’s possible they brought additional prototypes to the battle. There might have been magical technologies that never made it into the official record because they never survived the battle.”

  I asked the question that was on all our minds. “So…what sort of magic creates something like all this?”

  “I don’t know,” Cole shrugged. “I can’t think of a single branch of magic that explains this on its own. Necromancy doesn’t fit. Chronomancy almost does, but not quite.”

  He scribbled something down in his notebook, frowned at it, and then looked back up at us.

  “Alchemy, maybe. Alchemical catalysts interacting with the vibrations from the Resonance Engine. Experimental compounds stored too close to the Engine and then…activated when it was detonated?”

  His voice trailed off, clearly unsatisfied with that answer.

  “If volatile alchemical ingredients were present and exposed to that kind of sustained vibrational force…it could have imprinted moments and people and actions into the environment itself. Not souls though. No. These are more impressions of people. Residuals.”

  None of us argued with Cole’s answer, mostly because none of us knew enough about magic to challenge a single word he said. Even Corva, who I was becoming increasingly convinced knew more about magic than he let on, looked like he was barely keeping up.

  “Could it be animancy?” Corva asked.

  “No,” Corva snorted. “Animancy isn’t real. It’s just storybook nonsense. Magicians have been chasing it for centuries and no one’s ever found a spell or ritual or any sort of framework that actually touches on it.”

  “Uh…can someone tell me what that is?” I asked.

  Cole sighed and I immediately regretted my question because that sigh was the sign of him devolving into lecture mode.

  “Necromancy is a school of magic that concerns itself with the body. A necromancer animates flesh. There’s no soul involved, it’s just a magically puppeted corpse. Interestingly, some scholars argue that golem crafting is a sub-branch of necromancy, since neither discipline interacts with the soul at all. Golem making is just animating clay or stone and giving it a shape. There is a tribe in Galmassa who developed a religion around golem creation. Their children build their first golem at ten. It’s meant to be a lifelong tool that will carry them through-”

  Corva snapped his fingers, trying to stop Cole from going on a lecture about golemancy. “Cole. Animancy.”

  “Right. It’s entirely made up. It is a fantastical belief that magic can touch the soul directly. The idea behind it is that a true animancer could move, bind, or manipulate souls in the same way that a necromancer manipulates flesh. One example of what it could do would be to transfer a soul from one body to another.”

  He shook his head. “But like I said, it’s pure fiction. Academically speaking, there is no true magical school that deals with animancy. Theoretical magicians have been trying, for eons, to affect the soul and they have come up with nothing.”

  With that, the conversation kind of died. We didn’t have any sudden revelations or answers to any of our questions. All we were getting were questions piled on top of questions. So, we did what we’d been doing all day. We moved on.

  Traveling through the valley was a little different after that. Cole stopped us more often, especially whenever we spotted echoes forming up for another charge. He’d crouch and pull out his notebook and scribble notes in it while the battle played out in front of him. I caught a few glimpses of his notes. They were diagrams of troop formations with arrows marking advances and retreats. The margins of his notebook were filled with frantic observations.

  We hit a couple more sound bubbles on our way through the valley. By then, most of them were familiar to us and we knew how to navigate them. There were the muted zones where everything was quieter than it should be, and the loud zones where we were bombarded with noise. We hit a couple layered bubbles too, where all the sound stacked and morphed together.

  But it was the last two bubbles that we found that really drove home how dangerous the Valley of Echoes could be.

  We stepped into a bubble and Corva immediately raised a hand, signaling for us to stop. He bent down and picked up a small rock and threw it into the bubble.

  Clack.

  Three seconds later. Clack.

  Ten seconds after that. Claaaccck.

  It was the same sound all three times, but the last sound had been twisted and stretched and warped. We all shared a look and I muttered under my breath. “Alright. That’s new.”

  We started walking through the bubble quickly and quietly. My foot hit the ground and I heard alright, that’s new. I took a few more steps and three seconds later, the sound hit us again, except by then my steps were added to the echo.

  Alright, that’s new. Step. Step.

  Then the ten-second echo kicked in.

  Allllrrrriiiiighhhhhht, ttttthhhhhhattttt’ssssss nnnnnnneeeeewwwww. Step. Step. Stteeeeeeeppppp. Stteeeeeppppp.

  Every sound we made in the bubble kept piling up on top of each other. There was the immediate noise and then the three-second echo and finally the ten-second distortion. All our movements kept adding layers until, after a few seconds, all the sounds blended together and assaulted us with a cacophony of noise that had been multiplied and staggered.

  As we raced out of the bubble it was like we were being chased by the ghostly sounds of our own footsteps, our own panicked breathing, and our own gasps of surprise. Corva waved us to go faster and we picked up speed and rushed through the bubble as fast as we could go, our teeth clenched and our hands hugging our ears. The sound followed us the entire way, chasing after us as we tried to escape. Then finally, just like that, the sound stopped. One step outside the bubble and everything was quiet again.

  Around twenty minutes later we reached an absolutely massive crater. The edges were covered in glassy sand, like the ground had been flash melted. Cole crouched near the rim of the crater and jotted down a few words in his notebook before turning it to us so we could read what he wrote.

  This was caused by a siege engine. Probably early Vash design of a canon. This would have been in the later days of the battle.

  We all knew what that meant. We were getting closer to the site of the eighth day of the battle; the spot where the Resonance Engines had destroyed each other and most everything in the valley. The implications of that were pretty dire. Whatever sound bubbles we were coming across in our travel through the valley, it would get so much worse at ground zero.

  None of us wanted to head through the crater, but it was the quickest way to the other side of the valley. The sound in the crater was wrong but it was one of the muted bubbles and we’d long since grown used to them. We were able to walk through it easily enough.

  Halfway through our trek something whipped overhead. I barely caught a glimpse of the translucent shape that cut through the air and slammed into the ground ahead of us.

  There was an explosion. But, also not. There wasn’t any fire or noise, just a strange, muted boom in the air. It was like the memory of an explosion. An echo. The whole thing broke my brain.

  We all still flinched. Pell flung himself to the side. Wren swore and stumbled back. My heart tried to punch itself out of my chest while I braced for the shockwave to hit. But nothing came. The explosion that struck was completely harmless. There wasn’t any fire or debris raining down on our heads. There wasn’t a pressure wave slapping us in the face. All we got was the afterimage of a blast.

  Our group just stood there, breathing hard as we stared at the impact site. Finally, Corva let out a relieved sigh and whispered.

  “Not real.”

  Of course, that’s when the explosion happened.

  The shockwave tore out from the impact point, ripping loose dirt and gravel and flinging it in the air and slamming into us. The ground bucked under my feet and I was thrown backwards to land on my ass.

  “What the shit was that?” I complained as my ears rang and I tried to pick myself up off the crater floor.

  Before I could get an answer to my question, the crater came alive. Echoes poured over the rim and charged. Vash and Concordant soldiers rushed down into the bowl, screaming their heads off and charging at their enemy. Steel rang out and shouts called out and spears thrust and bodies fell.

  “Out,” Corva snapped. “Out of the crater. Now!”

  He shoved me towards the slope of the crater, his eyes scanning the battlefield as another blast thundered somewhere beyond the rim.

  “That shockwave was real,” he shouted. “I don’t want to find out if these echoes can hurt us.”

  That was all it took to get us running. We all clawed our way free of the crater, ignoring the battle below us. The echoes crashed together in an endless loop of violence. At the edge of the crater, none of us looked back. We just kept running. Cole wasn’t jotting down notes and Pell and Wren weren’t treating it like entertainment. We were panicked.

  We didn’t stop running until our lungs began to burn. When we did finally come to a halt, it was in one of the valley’s quiet bubbles. Everyone bent over with their hands on their knees, trying to suck in air. I straightened last and looked back the way we’d come, worried that the echoes might be chasing us.

  It seemed that Pell had the same idea because he kept glancing back towards the crater too. He’d gone pale again and I saw his hands shaking. Wren looked better on the surface, but he was carrying some serious tension. He was all hunched in on himself, cradling his gun like it would protect him. Neither looked like they wanted to wander through the valley anymore.

  Corva quickly reorganized our group and got us moving again. Pell was placed closer to the center and Wren took up his spot on the flank. Both Cole and I were in easy view of Corva. Then, after a five minute break to catch our breath, we set out again.

  The deeper we pushed into the valley, the more the land was destroyed. There were signs of the Resonance explosion everywhere we turned. The ground was cracked and folded in on itself. Ridges rose and massive craters overlapped with one another.

  Finally, we reached the epicenter of the explosion; the place where Tappal had made his last stand and where the Resonance Engines had killed everyone.

  We stood on a ridge, staring down at the valley floor and the site of the last day of the Eight Day Thunder, and I was struck mute at the sight.

  The valley floor was twisted and broken. The engines hadn’t just destroyed the armies, they’d carve the entire place open. Deep furrows had been sliced into the ground and the entire battlefield had been turned into a massive, sprawling maze of trenches and ridgelines. And at the center of it all was a massive white hill.

  At first, my brain couldn’t really understand what I was looking at. It took me a while before the shape was able to resolve itself.

  Ghostly banners and the echoes of Vash and Concordant soldiers flickered in and out of existence. It was obvious that a truly massive number of soldiers from both sides had been caught in the blast. Cole had explained that much back at camp during his lecture. But seeing the effects of it was…different. Seeing it all there, the consequences of the attack stretched out in front of us, made it all feel so much more real.

  Some of the soldiers had been pulped instantly. Their bodies had been reduced to a pink mist that stained the dirt. Other soldiers hadn’t been so lucky. They’d bled from their eyes and ears and noses as the vibrations tore through them. A few had been crushed inside their armor or been split in half by the sound.

  And nobody had ever buried the bodies.

  Bones were everywhere we looked. They were scattered or piled together, and all of them were left to bleach under a century of sun. Skulls stared up at us. Ribcages jutted out of the dirt like broken fences.

  Cole swallowed and muttered under his breath, giving a name to the site. “The Ossuary Field.”

  It fit. Everywhere we looked there was bone. And at the center of all that bone was a massive hill that wasn’t carved out of stone or earth. It was a mountain of fused remains; nothing but bones twisted together into a single malformed shape, melted and pressed and warped together by the final attack. Femurs and spines and skulls and ribs had all blended together into a single, towering, unnatural mass. A monument to the dead.

  We all just stood there for a while, none of us saying anything. I don’t know if you could say anything while staring down at a mass grave.

  Cole was the first to move. He knelt near the ridge and found a cluster of bones that were half-buried in the dirt. They weren’t scattered about like the rest of the bones were. These were more woven together. Braided. If I had to guess, three or four soldiers had died standing shoulder to shoulder.

  “Fascinating,” Cole murmured.

  Corva hissed under his breath. “Don’t touch anything.” But it was too late.

  Cole hooked his fingers under the edge of a cracked breastplate and lifted. The armor came free with a soft tug and the bones beneath it shifted. The sound of them falling to the ground was wrong and it got inside me. Made my skin crawl.

  The valley stopped. I don’t mean that it got quiet. I mean, everything froze. Every echo was locked in place. The banners all stopped fluttering and the soldiers stopped swaying and the very air seemed to hang silent.

  Then slowly, every single head turned to us. I felt like throwing up at the sight of hundreds of echoes focused on me. Corva lunged and tried to kick Cole, hissing at him “stop…stop…”

  But Cole had already stopped. He’d looked up when he felt the same ominous feeling we were all feeling. His eyes went wide as he took in the sight of thousands of echoes staring straight at us. I saw him freeze there, his hand still resting on the armor and a look on his face like that of a kid caught touching something he absolutely shouldn’t have.

  All around us the bones on the ground began to move. At first it was a subtle thing. It was a faint rattle as they started shifting. Then it got louder. Bones scraped against stone. Skulls rolled. Femurs dragged grooves through the dirt. The sound spread outward in a wave as the bones across the valley began to stir.

  “Shit,” Wren swore under his breath.

  The bones started pulling themselves together. Ribcages clicked into place. Spines stacked themselves vertebra by vertebra. Arms clawed their way free from piles of debris and latched onto shoulders that weren’t theirs. Some of the echoes shimmered as they stepped forward…and then solidified.

  Armor hung crooked over newly created skeletal frames. The echoes flickered, half-illusion and half corpse. Their faces phased in an out between living soldiers and grinning skulls. Bones jutted out at wrong angles. Ribs protruded through cracked mail.

  We all slowly drew our weapons and I silently cursed myself for only having a single dull knife. Corva never took his eyes off the growing mass of skeletal warriors. He quietly addressed us all.

  “Everyone. Back away. Now.”

  We started to shuffle, keeping our focus on the emerging army. But before we got too far off the ridge I noticed the hill at the center of the valley move. The bones scraped together as the hill vibrated. And then it rose.

  The thing grew outward and upward at the same time. All the skulls and ribs and bones and pieces of broken armor came together and created a massive…thing. I don’t know how to describe it. It was weight. It was a monument made of soldiers who’d died there. Bones fused together and spines stuck out at weird angles and shields layered themselves together like scales.

  The sound of it was unbearable. Thousands of bones grinding together, the noise vibrating through the valley floor and into my teeth. As the thing finished rising, the echoes below it went still again. The massive construct loomed over the Ossuary Field. It shifted and turned to us and I heard that grinding sound again.

  Then it roared. Wren cursed. Cole whimpered. And Corva told us to run.