The air split like a glass bell struck too hard.

Stronric lunged, fists up, iron skin gleaming under the unnatural light. His feet scraped crystal, driving forward with purpose, toward the nearest golem, the one bearing the dwarf with the silver-crystal necklace. The thing moved with the grace of a predator, not a puppet, but Stronric had weight, had power, and he brought it to bear in a thunderous blow to its center mass.

The impact rang out, metal against crystal, and the golem staggered—fractures spidering across its torso. The dwarf inside didn't react, eyes wide open, still watching. Not dead, but not alive either. It was somehow caught between the two.

Stronric delivered another blow, a hammering cross-punch to the crystal golem's side. The cracked arm gave way with a screech, spinning off into the quartz-spined floor. Red covered the floor as the crystal arm slid in slow circles before coming to a stop. The golem twisted unnaturally to compensate, bones groaning behind glass. Stronric didn't stop. He grabbed the creature's shoulders, shoved it backward into a pillar, and drove his knee into its chest, smashing the suspended body inside against the jagged cage.

"I'm sorry," he growled. "I'm so godsdamned sorry."

The second golem was already leaping.

It collided with Stronric mid-turn, crystal limbs slamming into his side. Even with Ironhide, the force knocked the breath from his lungs and sent him skidding across the cavern. He bounced once, twice before coming to rest against a curved wall of smoky quartz.

The third creature, the eyeless one, the pure one was circling now. No dwarven body was suspended within this one. It was just jagged hunger and speed. It shimmered in and out of view, refracting light like it was part of the cave itself. Stronric climbed to one knee muttered a curse and clenched his fist in anger. The sound of the creaking iron filled the cavern.

"Ye want echoes?" he rasped. "Here's yer bloody answer."

The second golem rushed again. Stronric ducked low and rolled under the swinging crystal axe. He came up on the golem's flank, his hand forming a spear he punched his hand into the hollow of its knee, and severed it clean. The dwarf inside gave a soundless scream, eyes flickering with pain or memory, it was impossible to tell.

And then the third one struck.

Not a frontal assault, a flash of movement from the edge of his vision. Stronric turned just in time for a crystal blade to rake across his shoulder. Ironhide held, but the force sent him crashing sideways, arms flailing. The thing didn't roar. It didn't make a sound. It just disappeared again, faster now.

Stronric's head cracked against a sloped shard of quartz. White sparks danced in his eyes. His hearing was gone, no sound but his own ragged breath and the ringing between his ears. Not even the spit soaked clothe could dampen the sounds of the fight. He desperately tried to clear his head as his ability to hear started to return.

He couldn't see the second golem rising behind him, but he felt it. Stronric felt the wrongness of the echo, the way the cave itself twisted around their movements. It wasn't just sound anymore. It was rhythms and patterns, forming a call and response.

He turned, ready to face whatever came next, and saw the arm.

It still lay where it had fallen. The crystal joint cracked clean through, the dwarven body inside swaying in its half-cage like a broken relic. Red streaked across the quartz floor, a sickening halo around the severed limb. The golem's motions were faltering now, its stance off-balance, the other one arm flailing in a spasm of glass and memory.

Stronric froze.

His jaw clenched. Breath caught in his throat. He hadn't meant to, Thoranthana help me, he hadn't meant to. Even if the body was long dead, the soul might still linger.

He stumbled back half a step, fists lowering.

"I didn't come to kill kin," he muttered. "I am no kinslayer."

His mind returning to his shame of what happened with Bauru. His hands began to shake as he looked at the golem before him twitched. An echo of its former rhythm lost, but the body inside didn't scream. It just… looked at him. Eyes open. Empty. Silent. Stronric's stomach twisted. His knuckles ached. He wanted to drop his stance, to kneel, to say a prayer, but he couldn't, not yet. The third golem could be out there, circling him preparing for another attack.

Focus.

The second golem began to shamble toward him, slow now, dragging its mangled leg. A loop, a pattern. It repeated the same three motions it had before step, raise, swing like a dance half-remembered from life. Stronric then realized they weren't attacking him, not truly. They were not attacking like soldiers or hunters, they were repeating. Their attacks came in delays, not reaction. He stepped to the left, and the golem swung where he'd been two seconds ago. He crouched low, and it struck the air above him. Always a little late. Always echoing.

They're not alive. They're not aware. They're trapped in an echo.

Stronric exhaled slowly through his nose, staring down the nearest golem. The dwarf inside twitched with the movement, and the crystal followed. A puppet of sound. A body of habit, just a memory of the mining rhythm. He looked at his own hands, scarred and ironbound. This is what Echo means, he thought. It is not just noise nor just sound, but its response, memory and patterns.

His eyes flicked to the crystal pillars around them, the quartz trees still ringing faintly from the earlier blows. One pillar, where he'd slammed the first golem, gave off a warbling hum. A different pitch.

A weak point.

Stronric scanned the golem again torso splintered, fractures vibrating. Each time it moved, the sound shifted down its frame like ripples through glass. The buildup concentrated at the chest, the cage. He crouched low beside a narrow crystal shard jutting from the floor. Carefully, without striking, he tapped it with two fingers. The note it gave off was light and sharp, like the chime of a silver bell.

The golem paused.

Just for a second, but enough.

It's not reacting to me. It's reacting to the tone.

Stronric moved barefoot now, skin brushing against the cool floor. He made no noise and left no trail. He shifted to another spire, reached up, and flicked it with his iron-covered knuckle. A deeper sound answered, a warbling hum that filled the cavern and seemed to vibrate inside his chest. The golem jerked violently, arms raising like it expected collapse.

Stronric's eyes narrowed. "Ye hear it too, don't ye? Somethin' not in the script."

He turned sideways and dragged his hand along the quartz wall, letting his fingers trail with just enough pressure to create a wavering screech. The broken golem twitched again this time, stepping too far forward, unbalanced, echo shattered.

Now.

Stronric lunged, not for the dwarf inside, but for the fractured cage around his chest. He didn't strike with brute strength. He struck with rhythm. A hammer-fist timed with the fading tone, right as the pitch hit its apex.

CRACK.

The resonance burst the weakened lattice, crystal shards flying outward in an arc. The body inside slumped unbroken. No shattered bones. Just freed. The golem collapsed like a marionette with cut strings. But the dwarf within still whole.

Stronric exhaled. Just once. Then the silence hit him. No, not silence. It was something else, Wrongness.

The air didn't feel empty. It felt… swallowed.

He took a cautious step backward, bare feet brushing the crystal floor. The sound of skin on stone should've echoed, but it didn't.

His brow furrowed.

Then the pressure returned.

Crystals across the chamber began to hum. The quartz pillars trembled like a wind passed through them, though the air was still. The resonance grew, not in rhythm, but in intensity, layering on itself, building tension. A hundred different tones, too loud and too close.

Stronric flinched. His teeth ached. His knuckles buzzed. Then it all fell silent.

In one breathless instant, the sound vanished. It hadn't faded like sound usually did; it simply cut off.

His eyes widened.

It's here.

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He dove to the side just as a gleaming limb sliced past his shoulder and into the stone where he'd stood. The strike made no noise. Not even a crack. The creature flickered into view for a heartbeat, its form a flowing cage of pale crystal and knife-limbs, arcing like a mantis made from glass. And then it was gone again, swallowed by the light, and the sound came rushing back.

Stronric rolled, came to one knee, breathing hard.

"Clever bastard," he muttered. "Ye hide not by bein' quiet but by takin' the sound."

He stood slowly, eyes scanning the spires. His ears strained, not for motion, but for lack of it. The golem was using the cave's nature against him. It absorbed resonance as it moved, drinking the song of the place, making it louder behind and empty ahead.

The louder the cave got, the closer it was.

And when it all went quiet…

He swallowed, throat dry.

That was when it struck.

Stronric pressed a hand to the floor. Beneath his fingers, the stone trembled. The same note repeated three times across different pillars. The pattern was wrong. The cave was screaming, but not from him. It's feeding on the noise it creates. It's drowning the cavern so I won't notice the silence creeping in.

He breathed in. Out. Calm.

"Alright then," he whispered. "Let's see if I can listen better than ye can lie."

He moved barefoot through the crystal field, letting each step speak for him. He brushed a spire with the back of his hand a hum. Another a chime. But then, one...

Nothing.

Stronric froze.

The pillar ahead was dead.

No vibration. No sound.

A cold stillness bled outward from it, like frost on the skin.

He took one step sideways and the silence followed.

There.

He clenched his jaw, pivoted, and swung his arm low, skimming his fingers across the stone.

The sound stopped mid, gesture.

Right behind me.

Stronric spun hard, elbow raised and struck something solid. It gave under his arm like glass.

The creature shimmered into view—a warped silhouette of glassy limbs and jagged blades just light and absorption and hunger.

It recoiled, hissed, and vanished again but the spell was broken.

Stronric had heard its footprint. Not in sound but in the lack of it.

"I've got yer rhythm now," he snarled. "Ye ain't hidin' again."

He didn't chase it.

He stood still.

And listened.

The cave vibrated in swells, each wave rebounding through the crystal, like breath through a pipe organ. As it rose, he counted the echoes. He watched the shimmer of dust on the ground.

And then a drop.

A patch of ground where the dust didn't move.

He turned and charged, not at the shimmer but at the stillness.

Stronric dove into it, arms wide, catching the creature mid-lunge. The impact cracked across his shoulders, but he grappled it, twisting its limbs aside.

He didn't try to shatter it, not yet.

Instead, he slammed it into the ground, and then he shouted.

A raw, guttural roar that echoed through the cave like a smith's bellows.

The vibration hit the golem directly with nothing to absorb the sound, the full wave crashed into its form and shattered part of its arm.

It flailed exposed.

Stronric seized a jagged crystal shard nearby and slammed it into the floor, right beneath the creature.

The echo burst upward through the stone and into its body. The golem convulsed, limbs twitching, form destabilizing.

"You don't belong in this place," Stronric growled. "Ye silenced my kin, and that I can't allow."

He pressed his hand to the golem's chest just crystal, no heart.

And for the final blow, he didn't punch.

He clapped.

A full-armed, iron-skinned clap directly in front of it.

The sound shattered the silence and the golem along with it. It fractured at the core, then collapsed in a slow rain of crystal slivers. At last Caruth-Vel sang again, but not everything had shattered.

Amid the dust and ruin, one shard remained. Larger than the rest. Unblemished. It didn't chime like the others. It didn't hum.

It simply was.

Stronric approached slowly, crouched beside it. The shard was no longer than his thumb, shaped like a broken fang, faintly translucent but filled with a shadowy inner sheen.

He reached for it and paused.

The air around it felt… quiet.

Not dead, not silent, but insulated. It was like the shard pulled sound inward. It was like it made the world breathe a little softer. Stronric touched it, and the hairs on his forearm rose. His fingers tingled. He turned it in his palm. No label appeared, or system prompt, Stronric went solely on instinct.

Shard of the Silent Maw. He didn't know how he knew the name, but it settled in his chest like a whisper.

A weapon fragment or possibly a key. It could even be something more.

He pocketed it carefully, wrapping it in a cloth scrap before tucking it into his belt pouch.

The shards settled like snow.

Stronric stood alone in the silence that followed, shoulders rising and falling with each labored breath. His skin was slick with sweat, streaked with blood, the iron sheen of Morgal's protection already receding. The echo of his final clap still whispered through the cavern, bouncing between the quartz towers in fading waves. It was almost beautiful.

And it was real.

For the first time since he entered this cursed place, the sound felt honest.

No tricks.

No false rhythms.

No silence used as a blade.

Just sound. As it should be.

He stepped back from the pile of shattered crystal, what little remained of the pure golem glinting like powdered glass in the soft light. There was no dwarf to check, no body to mourn only fragments of something that had tried to hollow out the world and call it quiet.

But the others…

Stronric turned.

The second golem broken by the precise rhythm of the cave's own pulse lay slumped like a discarded tool. Its crystal shell had collapsed inward, the dwarf inside now visible through the broken cage. He approached slowly, warily, and crouched beside the body. The miner's face was slack, beard knotted with dust, chest unmoving. The necklace still hung from his neck, a single sliver of quartz wrapped in silver wire, dulled with age. Stronric reached for it, then paused.

"I don't know if yer soul's still in there," he muttered. "But if it is… I hope ye heard me."

He bowed his head.

"Ye weren't forgotten."

He stayed there for a few long breaths; fingers curled near the edge of the broken cage. Then, with reverence, he unclasped the necklace and slipped it into the small pouch at his belt, not as a trophy, but as a marker. Something to return to kin, if he ever found them. Something to remind him of what silence had nearly stolen.

And then there was the first. The one whose arm he had taken. Stronric's stomach twisted again as he turned to face the shattered limb, still lying where it had landed curled like it had tried to protect something even in death. The golem's crystal shell was half-destroyed, slumped awkwardly against a spire. The dwarf inside was still suspended by threads of fused stone, one side crushed, the other still intact.

He couldn't look away.

He knelt.

"I didn't mean to hurt ye," he said quietly. "Didn't know what I was facin'. Didn't understand what Echo really meant."

His hand hovered just above the ruined cage.

"No weapon should be swung without knowin' what it answers to. I forgot that. And ye paid for it."

He swallowed hard, the weight of the cave pressing down on him again, not through noise this time, but through memory.

Bauru's face flashed in his mind. The moment they fought. The moment his fury had nearly become something worse.

"I am no kinslayer."

The words had come easy earlier. Now they stuck in his throat.

He touched the dwarf's remaining shoulder lightly, reverently.

"May ye find rest, brother. And if there's a place beyond the stone, may the song there be louder than the silence that took ye."

Stronric stood.

His legs ached. His side still throbbed where the pure golem had grazed him. The Ironhide was flaking away now, leaving behind tired flesh and bruised bone.

He took a deep breath and for the first time in hours, the cavern answered him.

A gentle chime.

A soft ring from the quartz pillars nearby.

Real sound.

True echo.

And that's when he felt it.

It wasn't ready to be carved before.

Because he hadn't been.

Stronric reached into the pouch and pulled it free, turning it over in his palm. The surface was still smooth and perfect. A canvas waiting not for marks, but for meaning.

Echo wasn't about noise.

It wasn't about confusion or violence or sound used as a weapon.

It was about response.

A true echo didn't just reflect it understood what had come before.

He closed his eyes.

Listened.

He could still hear the final collapse of the pure golem the way the shards scattered like breath across the cave floor. The way the silence after had felt earned, not stolen. And deeper still, he could hear the cavern itself not loud, not imposing just present.

Alive.

Waiting.

Stronric opened his eyes and looked down at the stone again.

"I'll carve ye soon," he said softly. "Not yet. But soon."

He tucked the stone back into the pouch. Then he turned toward the far side of the cavern, where the next tunnel waited. He didn't know what trials lay beyond. Didn't know if the other runes would break him like this one nearly had.

But he knew one thing:

He wasn't deaf anymore.

And the cave would not catch him unlistening again.

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