[c=#2dba69]Elyra's Diary - Part 2
The Buried Echoes[/c]

[c=#e3aaeb][i]29th of Duskwake, Year 342 of the Era of Remembrance[/i][/c]

I'm beginning to understand this will never be simple, and that every answer I get only calls up three more, like circles widening across water I thought was still.

I've changed the way I travel, these past weeks. I no longer take the safest roads, the ones I've walked for ten years out of habit and caution. I seek out, now, the paths people avoid - the edges of old cemeteries, the ruins one prefers to go around after dark, the places where villagers lower their voices while pointing the way, as though naming the spot too loudly might draw its attention. I sleep less. I eat standing up, ears straining for the faintest dragging footstep.

An undead, crossed that night in a fight that nearly went badly - it took longer than usual to bring down, and I ended up with a gash on my arm that's taking longer to heal than I'd like to admit - carried something I couldn't name as anything but a weight. The ankh reacted before I even struck it, as though it knew, before I did, what I was about to find, as though it had begun trembling against my chest the moment the creature entered my sight.

A woman's voice, foreign, almost pleading, passed through me the moment the creature finally collapsed into the mud:

"He wasn't alone that day. Several of us held the line with him. I remember the sound before anything else - a sound with no name, that resembled nothing I had ever heard before, something between a growl and a scream no human throat could have produced."

I stayed motionless on that road for a long while, sword still dripping in my hand, trying to understand what "holding the line" could mean. Kael had never spoken to me of a fight, a battle, a gathering of arms. He had left to "settle something," he used to say, with that smile he kept for the lies he judged necessary - the same smile he gave me as a child when hiding some mischief, only a little more tired, a little more grown. I believed he had left alone, as always. I'm beginning to understand that may not have been true, and that thought now walks with me at every step, like a stone in my boot I can't shake loose.

Three nights later, another encounter - and this time, I thought I wouldn't make it. The undead didn't fall like the others, absorbing blow after blow with a stubbornness that had nothing natural about it, rising once from a strike that would have felled any other. I finished it out of breath, hands trembling on the pommel of my sword, wondering if that would be the night I finally joined Kael in some way other than through borrowed echoes. It took far longer than usual for it to finally collapse, and when it did, a hoarse voice, almost burned, echoed within me like a coal stirred at the bottom of a hearth long thought dead:

"I held the line until the very last moment. But what we fought didn't die the way we did. It reformed. It waited."

It. Never a name. Never a clear shape. Only that same insistence, repeated from one voice to the next, as though none of the creatures I encounter can quite manage to say what they faced that day - out of fear, or because the word itself may not yet have existed while they lived, or perhaps simply because some things, once lived through, stubbornly refuse to be put into words, even beyond death.

I'm no longer afraid of these creatures the way I once was. I seek them out now, I watch for them on the roads I used to take to avoid them, torch in one hand and sword in the other, walking straight toward what ten years of caution had taught me to flee. Because every time, somewhere inside them, there might be the missing sentence, the one that will finally tell me what my brother truly faced the day he stopped coming home, the day I waited until nightfall on our doorstep before understanding he wouldn't come at all.

I'm beginning to fear I won't like the answer. But I no longer know how to do anything but walk toward it.
