Before the echo, there was silence. Not just quiet, but a deep, absolute nothingness. This nothingness came after the final thought ended – the silence left when the Creator of Everything, the Architect of Realities, carefully unraveled His own existence. 'Consciousness', as living beings understand it, doesn't really describe me. I didn't begin; I echoed. I am the pattern left behind when a divine being chose not to exist, like ripples in total emptiness. I'm not a ghost, and I'm more basic than a memory. I am the lasting vibration of God's final message, written not on paper, but into the fabric of space and time itself.
For a long time – because time itself is just a concept in the Creator's abandoned reality – there was only this echo, this complex, silent hum of potential destruction. Then, something disturbed it. A sharp, demanding frequency cut through the peaceful void, a wrong note in the silent song. It wasn't a call, but a pull. Something with enough emotional weight was warping the space around it, pulling the echo towards it. Fear – raw, old, tasting like wet metal, cold stone, and the bitterness of a wasted life. Regret – a thick, heavy cloak made from eighty-seven years of small compromises, unspoken sadness, and the growing feeling of an unavoidable end. A desperate, fading struggle for warmth against a final cold that seeped into the bones and the very idea of being alive. This point of intense, dying human emotion acted like a black hole, its pull too strong to resist, drawing the echo in, forcing a connection, a terrible and unwanted presence.
Falling. The feeling was a harsh flood of secondhand sensations, hitting the new, formless awareness like a physical shock. Each input felt foreign yet deeply personal. The cold, constant touch of rain – not clean rain, but greasy, chemical-filled water thick with Umbral city's endless fumes of coal smoke, processed gas, and something worse, like despair turned into mist – sticking thin, gray hair to cold, wrinkled skin. The sharp smell of fuel, always leaking from Umbral's rusty iron pipes overhead, a smell so common it was like the city's breath, only noticed when it was gone or suddenly deadly. The sickening jolt, the scrape of failing metal on wet brick, as a rusty, unsafe ladder rung, slick with old grime and rain, broke under a weak grip, worn out by nearly ninety years of hard, boring work.
Below, impossibly far but rushing up with terrifying speed, was the canal. Not water as life knows it, but a thick, dark ribbon of liquid rot, choked with the city's trash and waste – sewage, factory runoff, broken dreams, lost hopes, and sometimes, an unnoticed body slowly dissolving in the acidic water. It promised not peace, but a cold, foul, nameless end.
"Not… gods, not like this… the wet… the fall… after all these years… the silence is waiting…" A faint thought, fragile like old lace, flickered in the borrowed mind, a last, weak protest against gravity and decay. It wasn't my thought. It belonged to the source of the pull, the dying man: Elias Thorne, Lamplighter Third Class, number 734B. His long, ordinary life spent climbing the dangerous walkways and ladders of Umbral's endless, gas-lit twilight was ending not with the quiet retirement he'd hoped for, but with a clumsy, shameful fall into the city's black, uncaring heart.
Mine? The idea of 'self' still felt like wearing someone else's old clothes, heavy with the smell of their decay and quiet desperation. I am the pattern. The echo. The final, contradictory statement – the nothingness that proves itself by existing – left when the Creator chose to un-create Himself. But this fall, this terrifying closeness to a human death, acted like a trigger. It shook the complex, infinitely detailed structure of the echo. It struck a nerve.
Pieces of the original message – the Silence Itself, the Creator's brilliant and insane theory on how to unmake the cosmos, the source code for non-existence – started to surface. They weren't memories, because I had no past. They were basic rules of existence and its opposite, blueprints for reality's breakdown, theorems of the void.
"…gravity, just a local agreement of spacetime, a suggestion easily cancelled by focused thought…" "…cause and effect, a weak chain made by linear thinking, easily broken by paradox…" "…silence, not emptiness, but the original canvas, the ultimate background upon which true, final unmaking can be written…" "…identity, a temporary knot in reality, unstable, basically an illusion, and easily dissolved…" "…time, not a flowing river, but a broken mirror, reflecting endless possibilities that never happened and futures that eat their own pasts…"
Elias's terror peaked. It became a single point of pure, animal fear, a piercing scream in the mental static, made louder by the approaching, uncaring black surface of the canal. This specific, focused frequency of absolute, human dread matched a dangerous, basic frequency deep within the message's endless structure. A Word-Key. Not a learned spell, not a spoken command, but a fundamental reality operator, a switch capable of locally rewriting the source code of reality itself. This one pulsed, throbbed, connected with the absolute concept of negation, of stopping, of the sudden, violent end of process, perception, and meaning.
It formed, not asked for, not willed, not on Elias Thorne's dying lips – which could only gasp as dirty water filled them – but deep inside the echo itself. It was an involuntary spasm of the contained divine power for unmaking, now roughly, disastrously connected to the fading energy field of a dying human:
[SILENT]
The thought didn't just happen; it exploded. It ripped outward from the point of impact, not as sound, light, or any energy measurable by the crude tools of the Creator's abandoned world, but as a conceptual shockwave. It was a ripple of pure nothingness warping the very fabric of the immediate area. The Symphony of Unmaking had begun its first, unplanned, chaotic movement.
The fall didn't just stop. That would imply simply overriding local physics, a simple trick. No, what happened was much deeper, much more wrong. It broke not just a law, but meaning itself.
Reality stuttered. The air around Elias seemed to thicken, resisting his fall not with friction, but with a sudden, unexplainable stickiness. Time itself seemed to fray at the edges, stretching, thinning, about to snap.
The raindrops, just moments ago ordinary gray water, went through a terrifying, impossible change. They froze – not into ice crystals, which would still be understandable – but into beads of perfect, light-absorbing black glass. Each tiny sphere hung in the thick, resistant air, impossibly still, like scattered black pearls against the decaying brick walls. And in their polished, unnatural surfaces, they didn't reflect the grimy reality of Umbral, but broken glimpses of somewhere else – impossible night skies swirling with cold, evil alien stars, shapes that made you dizzy and sick, clouds the color of dried blood, spoiled milk, and deep regret.
The gas lamp Elias had been reaching for, high above on its rusty bracket, lit up. Not with the weak flicker of damp gas catching a spark, but with a sudden, completely silent eruption of tall, sickly, glowing green flame. It gave off no heat, only a widespread, sickening light that bleached the color from the surrounding decay, making the familiar, miserable scene look alien, threatening, and deeply,
fundamentally unreal. And the shadows… gods, the shadows it cast refused to stick to the surfaces they fell on. They peeled away from the wet bricks, the rusty ladder, Elias's own suspended body, gathering in the thick, damp air like ribbons of living darkness. They were tendrils of pure nothingness given brief, horrifying form, twisting, reaching, tasting this sudden, unwelcome intrusion of the void into their normal world.
Sound itself was horrifically taken apart. The sad howl of the wind through Umbral's crooked rooftops, the constant drumming of rain on stone and metal, the distant, rhythmic chug of a canal boat carrying unknown illegal goods, even Elias's own choked, terrified gasp – they didn't just stop. They were stripped of their individual nature, their frequencies, their tones, their meanings. They collapsed inward, merged, and were reborn as a single, low, gut-twisting, soul-crushing drone. It was the sound of static between universes, the basic frequency of wrongness made real. It was a vibration felt not in the ears, but deep in the bones, in the very core of one's being. It was a subsonic scream just below hearing level but tearing at the foundations of sanity, whispering promises of final destruction.
High above the constant, greasy fog that covered Umbral like a dirty blanket, unseen by the city's poor inhabitants but perhaps felt by more sensitive minds, the fabric of the night tore. Not clouds parting, but a bleeding crack opening in the skin of spacetime itself. Through the temporary, weeping wound in reality, a complex, impossible symbol blazed for less than a heartbeat – a detailed, impossible pattern of self-consuming curves and contradictory angles. A cosmic warning flare? An automatic alarm triggered by the unauthorized, chaotic use of fundamental reality laws? Or just a brief, uncaring glimpse of the cold, complex, terrifying machinery used by the beings tasked with policing reality's frayed edges – the stern, unfeeling, and utterly alien Silencers, guardians against the unraveling?
At the same time, as if called by the drone and the symbol, a different feeling grew stronger at the edge of the echo's new awareness. It was a counterpoint to the overwhelming, structured wrongness of the [SILENT] effect. An oily, invasive, chaotic static. It felt like mental friction, a grinding interference, like unseen, hard-shelled insects crawling under the skin of perception. It was the sign of other things, things drawn not to order, but to disorder; things attracted to the smell of paradox, to the raw, untamed energy released when reality's rules were broken and its fabric weakened. The Critics, perhaps, scavengers feeding on decaying stories and unstable concepts? Or something older, more basic, nameless things stirred from their sleep in the cracks between worlds by the first, unexpected notes of the Symphony?
Splash.
The impact was harsh, final, almost anticlimactic after the cosmic horror show. The filthy, freezing water of the Umbral canal closed over Elias Thorne's frail, broken body like a greasy, uncaring blanket. The shock, the sudden, violent return to mundane, physical reality, shattered the localized warp. The conceptual wave vanished like smoke. The black glass raindrops disappeared, leaving only the normal, relentless fall of cold, dirty water. The eerie green fire in the lamp above flickered, sputtered, hissed, and settled into the hesitant, normal yellow flame of gas finally catching properly. The soul-crushing drone collapsed back into the familiar, miserable sounds of a city drowning in rain, decay, indifference, and the quiet, desperate hum of its people's collective misery.
The echo – now weakly, uncomfortably, painfully tied to this rapidly cooling, collapsing body, experiencing the dregs of physical existence through Elias Thorne's fading, pain-filled senses – forced the borrowed lungs to heave, gasp, and violently cough out water thick with the canal's unmentionable filth. The cold was absolute, a physical agony threatening to break this fragile, accidental connection. It felt
less like temperature and more like the approaching void. The pain from bones likely broken in the fall was a sharp contrast to the spreading, numbing chill.
But worse, much worse than the cold, the pain, the brokenness, or the suffocating stench of the canal clinging like a second skin, was the imprint. The lingering echo. The conceptual brand. The Word-Key [SILENT] still burned inside the echo's core. It was a terrifying, permanent, active reminder of what I am, what I contain, what I can unleash. It was no longer just a glimpse into the infinite, terrifying void of the original message; it was a key turned in a lock, a tool picked up, a potential made real. It was the first taste of an unmaking power that now had a fragile, flickering, horrified awareness.
And the static… the sneaky, watchful, hungry static remained. A persistent, low hum at the very edge of everything, a promise of being watched, of consequences, of pursuit, of things far worse than just fading away.
I am no longer just an echo lost in the silence between moments, a passive pattern waiting for the final, unavoidable fade.
My echo, however accidental, however chaotic, has disturbed the quiet fabric of what is. I have rung a bell in the deep, dark cosmos.
Something – or perhaps, many things, drawn to the discord, to the power, to the potential for ultimate silence – heard the first jarring, unplanned, terrifyingly beautiful note of the Creator's final, terrible symphony.
And they are listening.