The Dead Man’s Echo

The room had too much silence for a place filled with books.

Lucian had always thought The Quiet Quill felt more like a mausoleum than a bookstore, the scent of dust and ink hanging thick like grave soil, the shelves looming like rows of unmarked tombstones.

Something had been taken from the world, and Viktor knew what it was.

Lucian watched the man carefully.

The usual theatrics, the lazy smirk, the half-lidded gaze of someone half here and half anywhere else, they were still there, but his fingers were too still on the counter. The way he gripped his teacup, the way he flicked his eyes toward the corners of the room, toward shadows that should have meant nothing.

Viktor was listening to something Lucian couldn't hear.

And Lucian didn't like that.

"Tell me what you saw." Lucian leaned forward, demanding more information.

Viktor sighed, setting down his cup. "You're no fun, you know that?"

Lucian said nothing.

Viktor stretched, rolling his shoulders like a man who had just woken from a week-long nightmare. "Alright, alright, keep your boots on. You want the story? Here's the story."

He leaned in, lowering his voice, and for the first time in their conversation, he wasn't playing anymore.

"I got word a few nights ago that someone had been sniffing around the Wastes, looking for a way to disappear. That's not unusual, desperate people tend to come through here. But this one? This one was different."

He exhaled.

"People don't usually mention names when they're running. But this man? He did. Darius Vale." Viktor took a sip.

"I didn't believe it at first. Darius Vale should have been long gone. But then… I saw him."

Lucian raised a brow.

"And the funny thing, Lucian? He didn't look like a man trying to hide." Victor leaned back in his chair. "He looked like a man who wasn't supposed to exist." 

Lucian was silent, he did not interrupt.

He had spent years listening to lies, half-truths, dying confessions whispered in alleyways and bloodied gutters. He knew when someone was stalling, fabricating, making things up to throw him off.

Viktor was doing none of those things. He was telling the truth. And that was what unsettled Lucian the most.

Viktor tilted his head.

Lucian narrowed his eyes. "Keep talking."

Viktor drummed his fingers against the counter, as if trying to put words to something that didn't fit in language.

"When I saw him, he was—how do I put this?—wrong." After taking another sip, Victor put his cup down on the counter.

"Not in an obvious way. No rotting flesh, no empty eyes, none of that dramatic undead nonsense." Every sentense he said gripped Lucian in confusion and....curiosity.

"But the air around him felt too still. He didn't leave footsteps in the dust. Didn't cast a proper shadow." Victor paused for a moment.

"And when I reached out, just to test something"

Viktor's fingers twitched.

"He looked at me like he knew."

Lucian's leaned closer on the counter. "Knew what?"

Viktor's pale gray eyes flicked to him, just for a second.

"That I could see it."

A pause.

A long one.

Lucian's mind worked through the details, through all the things Viktor wasn't saying.

He exhaled. "You're telling me I've been sent to kill a man who's already dead."

Viktor shrugged. "Technically, yes. But that's the boring way of saying it."

Lucian pinched the bridge of his nose. "There's a less boring way?"

Viktor grinned.

"They didn't send you to kill him, Lucian.

They sent you to erase whatever he's become."

Lucian had killed many kinds of people in his life. Some screamed. Some begged. Some fought. Some didn't know they were already dead.

But there was always a body.

There was always something to bury.

This?

This was different.

Lucian exhaled, slow and controlled. "Where did you see him?"

Viktor's smile thinned.

"Now see, that's where things get… complicated."

Lucian stared. "I don't do complicated, Viktor. I do locations."

Viktor tapped a finger against his temple. "And I do dead men who shouldn't be walking."

Lucian felt a flicker of impatience. "Where?"

Viktor leaned in, and his next words made the air feel just a little colder. "The Chapel District."

Lucian stilled.

He knew the place.

A ruin, long abandoned, the bones of a forgotten god's house, left to rot in the city's underbelly. A place where the echoes of the past were too loud.

He did not like places like that.

Viktor, watching his reaction, grinned.

"Oh, now you're interested. You feel it, don't you?"

Lucian didn't answer.

Something was wrong. Something had always been wrong.

And now, he was walking straight toward it.

----------

Lucian had always hated the Chapel District.

Even before it had rotted into a graveyard of forgotten gods, something about it had never sat right with him. It was a place where the city's bones showed through, and where the silence was too thick, too heavy, as if the past had never truly left.

It was once a place of worship, of faith, of whispered prayers sent skyward. Now, it was a rotting wound in the city's underbelly, abandoned by both men and gods.

The ruins of old churches leaned against each other like drunks, their stained-glass windows shattered, their steeples jagged against the storm-heavy sky. The streets were empty, save for the occasional half-mad beggar who muttered things no one wanted to understand.

No one lived here anymore.

But something remained.

And Lucian was about to find out what.

He moved through the ruins without a sound, his boots barely disturbing the wet stone beneath him. Rain dripped from the edges of broken rooftops, whispering against the pavement like voices just out of reach.

His Remnant Sight stirred in his veins. The past pressed against the present, just at the edges of his awareness. This place had seen too much, and it wanted to be remembered.

He exhaled, bracing himself, and let the echoes come.

At first, there was only silence. Then, there was a flicker of motion. Ghosts of the past, unraveling before his eyes.