Chapter 6: First Lesson in Pain

Chapter 6: First Lesson in Pain

The change was not gradual. As Liora’s words—“you will learn not to drown”—faded, the room’s subtle wrongness intensified into an all-out assault. The temperature plunged, the air growing so cold that his breath plumed in front of him. The polite, distant whispers that had haunted the edges of his hearing swelled into a cacophony, a psychic tidal wave of human misery.

It slammed into him. He staggered back, clutching his head as a hundred lives, a hundred final moments, flooded his mind. These weren’t memories; they were raw, unprocessed emotional data, the psychic stains left on the wallpaper.

Lust. Not the warm, intimate kind, but a desperate, gnawing need. He felt the phantom touch of clammy hands, smelled the stale perfume of a cheap motel room. The image of the black lace garter flashed in his mind, not as a memory, but as an artifact of this kind of pathetic, hungry desire. It was the frantic craving for a connection so intense it burned itself out in minutes, leaving only the ashes of shame.

Despair. A heavier, colder wave followed. The crushing weight of failure. The hollow echo of a businessman who had lost everything, staring at the noose he’d just tied. The bleak emptiness of a young woman who had been promised stardom and given only exploitation, her hope bleeding out on the cold marble floor where Elio now stood. It was a thick, suffocating sludge that seeped into his bones, whispering the seductive logic of surrender. It’s over. Just let go. There is peace in the ending.

Fear. This was the sharpest, the most vibrant flavor in this spectral buffet. It was a raw, primal scream that vibrated in his teeth. The terror of being hunted down a dark hallway. The panic of realizing the friendly face was a mask for a predator. The final, mind-shattering moment of understanding as a victim looked upon The Echoes for the first and last time.

Elio cried out, a real sound this time, and stumbled back against a large, silk-covered sofa. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to build a wall in his mind, trying to block out the noise. He tried to focus on his own anger, the pure flame he’d felt on the hill, but it was like trying to light a match in a hurricane. The sheer volume of secondhand agony was extinguishing him.

“Pathetic,” Liora’s voice cut through the din, sharp and clear as breaking glass. “You are trying to be quiet in a library full of screams. A wall will not work. They will simply flow over it. Your shield is a pane of glass, and this is a hailstorm.”

He opened his eyes. She hadn't moved. She stood by the fireplace, watching him with detached curiosity, completely immune to the psychic tempest she had unleashed.

“I can’t,” he gasped, his teeth chattering. The despair was the worst, a siren song pulling him down into a welcome darkness.

“Of course you can’t,” she said, her voice devoid of sympathy. “You’ve spent your life learning to do the opposite. You open yourself up. You invite the pain in. You pour whiskey on your wounds not to sterilize them, but to make them burn brighter. It is your most profound and tedious character trait.”

He pushed off the sofa, his body trembling with the effort to remain standing. His mind instinctively scrabbled for its crutch, the familiar, fiery oblivion of alcohol. The desire for it was so intense it was a physical craving, a thirst that eclipsed all others. If he could just have one drink, he could mute this, push it away…

As if hearing his thoughts, Liora’s lip curled into a sneer. “There is no bottle to save you here, Elio. You will learn to swim, or you will drown in the sorrows of others.”

He had to do something. He couldn’t build a wall. He couldn’t numb the pain. So what was left? He looked around the room, his gaze darting frantically. The ornate mirrors on the walls, tarnished and vast, reflected his pale, terrified face a dozen times over. In his own apartment, he had used mirrors to try and catch a glimpse of the other side. Here, the other side was looking back.

In the reflection behind his own, he saw them.

Not a full manifestation. Just the eyes. Floating in the shadowed depths of the mirror’s surface were two pairs of glowing, milky-white orbs. They were not just watching; they were focusing. The ambient psychic noise of the room began to coalesce, drawing toward him like iron filings to a magnet. The Echoes were no longer just a passive presence in the house’s history. They were here. Now. Attracted by the fresh struggles of their intended meal.

The whispers in his head stopped being a chorus and became two distinct voices again, speaking in their chilling, layered unison.

The Beacon… it flickers so brightly in its fear.

The air in front of him shimmered, distorting like a heat haze. A shadow detached itself from the deeper gloom of the far corner, impossibly tall and thin, its form a tear in the fabric of reality. It had no substance, yet its presence had more weight than anything in the room.

It reached for him.

He felt an ice-cold hook latch onto his mind. It wasn't a physical touch, but an intimate violation, a psychic harpoon that bypassed flesh and bone to sink its barbs directly into his soul. It wasn't grabbing his fear or his despair. It was targeting the one thing he had left. His rage. The pure, clean fire he’d felt when he saw them feeding on Sarah. The entity was trying to pull it out of him, to consume the very fuel of his defiance.

His anger, which had been his shield, was now the bait drawing the predator closer.

Panic gave way to a primal instinct for survival. He couldn't let it take that from him. It was all he had. It was all that was left for Sarah.

He stopped trying to build a wall. He stopped trying to hide. He did what Liora had accused him of his whole life: he leaned into the fire.

Instead of shielding his rage, he stoked it. He dragged the image of Sarah from his astral vision to the forefront of his mind—her small, pure light being drained by these… things. He poured all his hatred, all his guilt for leading them to her, all his love for her into that single point of focus.

The anger was no longer a diffuse heat. It was a white-hot spear.

GET AWAY FROM HER!

He didn’t shout the words aloud. He projected them. He took the spear of pure, focused fury and shoved it down the psychic link the Echo had attached to him.

The effect was explosive. The shadow-form recoiled as if struck by lightning, letting out a silent, psychic shriek that scraped the inside of Elio’s skull. The pressure in the room vanished. The chorus of whispers died instantly. The milky-white eyes in the mirror blinked out of existence.

Silence.

Elio collapsed to his knees, gasping for air. Warm, thick liquid dripped from his nose onto the priceless oriental rug. He swiped at it with the back of his hand and saw it was blood. His head felt like it had been split open and scraped clean. He was utterly, profoundly exhausted, but he was alive. And he was alone again in the quiet, dusty drawing room.

He looked up at Liora. She was examining her fingernails with an air of mild boredom, but when she met his gaze, there was a new, sharp light in her eyes. It was the look of a craftsman who has just confirmed her raw materials are of a high enough quality to begin her work.

“Well,” she said, her voice betraying nothing. “That’s a start.”