The Echoed Realm

by A. J. Vrana

  At the center of the throng lay Velizar’s lifeless body. The king’s head appeared disjointed from his neck; his throat was ripped open, viscera spattered around him like a bloody crown. His eyes were glassy and blank, his blue lips parted as death stole the colour from his skin.

  “Gods,” Kali breathed out, taken aback by the grizzly sight. Whatever had done this had intended to savage and kill, not eat. It was like the culprit wanted to crush Velizar’s greatest weapon: his voice.

  Kali dragged her eyes to the bone-coloured moon, the midnight sky an abyss behind its pale glow. She knew who’d done this.

  “It was the black wolf!” a hunter proclaimed.

  “That’s not possible,” Bartha wheezed from the entryway of his longhouse as icy winds whistled all around them. “The black wolf is dead. Velizar led the hunters…they killed him!”

  “I saw the corpse with my own eyes!” someone shouted.

  “I pierced its belly with my sword!” said another.

  From the corner of her eye, Kali caught Pavel hobbling towards the ruckus. He was free of the cellar, but his broken leg was still healing. He watched from a distance, then glimpsed Kali’s way. Without a word, he retreated into his home.

  Then, from deep in the woods, a howl rang out like a war cry, shattering the villagers’ confusion and driving them into a panic.

  “The wolf lives,” Bartha realized. With a grief-stricken sob, he collapsed against his doorframe as several villagers rushed to his aid. “It’s a demon…a demon from the underbelly of the Silent Place.”

  “It’s the Dreamwalker,” one of the women hissed. “She was missing from the village when the hunters went into the woods.”

  “She brought the beast back with her! And who knows what else!”

  Fear clawed up Kali’s throat as every pair of eyes in the wretched night turned on her. For once, they were right. The wolf lived because of her.

  Before they could hurl another accusation, a woman shrieked from across the Hollow.

  “Help! Please!”

  Kali spun towards the plea, recognizing the voice. “Lana!” she called out, then rushed past Velizar.

  Lana’s family was already there, holding the widow’s arms as she sank to her knees. Her father barred Kali’s path.

  “Stay back, witch!” He threw his arms out, and several other men gripped the hafts of their blades.

  Kali skidded to a halt, shock coiling around her limbs. Witch?

  “I mean no harm,” she declared, but they allowed her no further.

  “You’ve done enough.” Bartha grabbed her shoulder from behind, tugging her back. “Go home, Ekaliya. You’re not needed here.”

  Kali tried to look past the bodies blocking her view, but all she saw was the earth around Lana darkening with blood.

  Surrendering to Bartha’s pull, she headed back to her cabin. The howls persisted in the distance, but the hunters had given up their search.

  Kali buried herself under her blanket and waited for the wolf’s sorrowful song to stop. It didn’t. The aching call wrenched at her heart, echoing her loneliness. Was he searching for her? Did he miss her? Was he telling her where to find him?

  Or perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps he simply mourned the death of his brother.

  A dark presence clung to Kali as she descended into a nightmare. A shadow—viscous like black smoke—spooled around every home in the Hollow. The villagers breathed it in like a sweet fragrance, intoxicated by its rancor. Whenever Kali tried to banish the shadow, it retreated into the woods. As it lurked behind a tree, two gleaming aurous eyes bore into her.

  It was watching her, waiting to strike.

  Kali could no longer separate her dreams from her waking moments. She thought the entity, like the howls that came before it, were conjured only in her sleep, yet the phantom crept from Kali’s dreams and into the sunlit world. The soil had hardened with frost, mirroring the villagers’ hearts. Their gazes clouded with malice, and the shadow’s grip tightened. Two weeks passed, but the miasma of suspicion did not abate. The shadow grew claws that sunk deep into the hunters’ minds, puppeteering them like marionettes.

  Even in death, Velizar continued to reign.

  Some demanded Kali’s life in retribution. Bartha held them at bay, if only by a thinning thread. Another seven days passed before Kali was permitted to see Lana.

  She sat up in bed and fisted the covers resting over her belly. Her skin was lily-white, her russet eyes guarded as she watched Kali enter the room lit only with a guttering candle.

  “Lana, are you well?”

  “My womb is empty,” her whisper lashed through the air.

  Kali had suspected as much when she saw blood soaking the ground between Lana’s knees.

  “Well?” Lana hissed.

  “Well, what?”

  “Did you do it?” Lana’s knuckles drained of colour as she gripped the fabrics.

  Kali sighed. “You’ll have to be more specific. I’ve been accused of quite a few crimes.”

  Lana whipped the blankets off her legs. She was still bleeding, crimson life pooling at the front of her muslin gown and staining the sheet beneath her. Rage seized her and she screamed, “Did you trade my child’s life for the wolf’s!”

  Kali was calm as a lake in winter. “And what if I did? You didn’t want the child to be a cruel reminder of Decebal’s death, but it was, wasn’t it?” She took a step forward, and Lana jolted with fear. “I’ve seen the truth.”

  Lana drew her knees to her chest, inching back. “What are you talking about?”

  Something tugged at Kali’s lips—a morose, bitter smile. “Your heart was left with no way to speak, so it revealed its most dreaded desire in the only place it could.”

  Lana shivered as the season of the dead announced its arrival with an icy gale, battering the windows like a longing ghost. “And where’s that?”

  Kali waited until the silence grew unbearable, until Lana finally met her stormy gaze. “In your dreams,” she answered. “Or perhaps it was a nightmare.”

  Lana’s hostility moulted like snakeskin, and raw terror glistened in its place as grief threatened to implode.

  The ground beneath their friendship had finally fissured and collapsed.

  Kali had nothing left to tether her to the Hollow. She was entirely bereft. Every drop of love bled out of her, and the absence left behind was more than a mere emptiness; it was a living presence, and it consumed every crevice of her heart. Without a word, Kali turned and abandoned Lana to the pieces of her broken life.

  That night, Kali barred her door. She would have already gone if not for the bitter cold. With the forest soon to be blanketed in white, she couldn’t possibly survive outside the Hollow on her own, so she stayed in her hovel, protected only by the villagers’ fear of her. When they slept, she ventured outside to scavenge for sustenance and returned before dawn. As the weeks wore on and the forest slumbered under snow like ashen dust, Kali’s cheeks grew sunken, her hands became frail, and her ribs stuck to her skin. Two moons passed, and the silvered earth finally browned with mud.

  The Hollow knew her time had come. Kali slipped on her hooded cloak and traipsed towards the mouth of the village. A mob awaited there, holding up torches and gibbering prayers as she approached.

  “Dreamwalker,” they dared utter.

  “Dreamwalker,” they broke into cries.

  “Dreamwalker,” they cursed with venom.

  Once they’d needed her. Now they damned her. They spat on the ground she trod upon, but none dared approach. Their courage had evaporated with the loss of their leader and their once blessed seer having turned on them.

  The shadow with golden eyes was there too, gliding from one villager to the next, whispering dark temptations in their ears. Soon, they’d be frothing like wild dogs.

  Kali paid them no mind. She’d made her decision. While Velizar had once sought control and order, his lurking shadow now infected the Hollow with the only thing he actually
knew how to create: fear.

  But she would not be afraid.

  She would not be controlled.

  She would not be subdued.

  She was the Dreamwalker. Of all the horrors the Hollow had hunted to sate their hunger for blood, she was the only one left that had teeth. She was the only one that was real.

  37

  Kai

  Trapped in the nightmarish fable, Kai locked onto his brother’s face. Velizar’s lips twisted into a sneer, and his eyes widened with something between hatred and dismay. Kai’s teeth—sharpened to kill—rent through the king’s soft flesh, and his strangled scream died in his mouth as they both bathed in scarlet.

  Horror seized him the moment his brother’s pulse slowed, the seconds yawning out between each waning thud. Kai fought to wrest himself from Sendoa’s memories, to shake the empathy ensnaring him, but it was too late. Velizar’s death was already on his hands.

  This was how it felt when he cut into Rusalka’s heart.

  Tremors wracked Kai’s body. His muscles seized as fire seared up his esophagus until he began to choke on something thick and metallic—Velizar’s blood. He coughed and coughed and then laughed and laughed and laughed. His lungs burned and his shoulders shook, but he couldn’t suppress the damn laughter no matter how hard he tried.

  “I got you, fucker!” His eyes opened to the dead grey sky. “You killed me, and what’d you get for it? A mangled throat.” The triumphant declaration was a tin-foil shield against the invading grief. That’s not your shit, he told himself. You aren’t Sendoa.

  She was the reason you survived. The reason I died. I failed the Hollow, and you, dear brother, ended me for it.

  “Rightly so, you sadistic fuck.” Kai sat up and rubbed his face. He should’ve been elated by the sweet retribution, but Sendoa’s regret dithered in his chest.

  Yes, you killed me, but in doing so, you gave me exactly what I needed.

  Kai’s heart sank like a stone. The shadow. It’d been there three years ago when he knifed his way through swaths of rabid townsfolk. It was in the doctor’s dreams; it must have been there in the beginning too.

  With my mortal coils cast off, I was finally free. The phantom’s voice turned syrupy sweet. You showed me a better way, brother. You taught me that control over men means nothing when you yourself are a mere man. My final acts before my spirit succumbed to the wretched cycle of rebirth were surely my finest.

  “You turned the town against her,” Kai realized.

  Yes, cooed Velizar. And the good people of the Hollow cast her out for it.

  “No,” Kai shook his head, tightening his stomach to keep the knot from rising. “She chose to leave because there was nothing left for her there. She went back into the woods for me and left the Hollow behind.”

  Velizar rumbled low like thunder, And the cycle has continued ever since.

  “Seriously?” Kai’s guilt evaporated like a fart in the wind. “It wasn’t enough that you turned everyone against her, made life so unbearable that she opted to fuck off into the woods and take her chances there?”

  I wanted the witch gone, Velizar spat. I wanted them to expel her like the infection she was. And then I wanted her to disappear. I wanted her forgotten.

  A smirk crawled up the side of Kai’s face. “But they didn’t forget, did they?”

  No, Velizar confessed. They didn’t.

  38

  VELIZAR

  Velizar never truly left the Hollow. Although his body lay buried in the ground, his essence poured from his flesh and blood, soaked into the earth, and ascended like vapour.

  Gods were hardly omnipotent forces ruling the skies and seas. They were living spirits, their mortal containers the very personification of ideas, of pure want. And only the fleeting beauty of impermanence made that want worthwhile.

  When Velizar rose from the tainted soil, the Hollow looked different. Where he once saw bodies made of meat and bone, he now perceived collections of colours, each hue a different desire, every shade a new dream. Some shimmered with hope while others blanched with fear.

  He could tug on those dyed human threads to bring out the tones he wanted and drown out the ones he didn’t. He drew them in, absorbed them until he became all colours condensed into one. He was the myriad brought to order. He was the abyss where no light could penetrate.

  Then there was the Dreamwalker. Her colour was not like the others. There were no clear boundaries between her shades of fear and the tinctures of hope and want. She was iridescent, the shine of her multitudes blinding him to her threads. Or perhaps there were no threads for him to manipulate. Sometimes, he caught glimpses of violet and black swirling like oil in water, but every time he reached for her, she slipped right through his fingers. It was like grasping at smoke.

  He turned his attention to the villagers instead. First, there was Lana—the sweet, heart-broken widow whose belly now ached with emptiness. She spilled slate-blue grief that blurred the contours of her longing. Her desire shuddered helplessly like burnt orange grass in an arid summer wind.

  He took hold of that dust-coloured grief and pulled. It blossomed like a dark dahlia, consuming Lana until she stumbled to the edge of the Hollow and cried to the woods that’d stolen everything from her.

  She stopped eating and sleeping, and then the speaking went. When family and friends tried talking sense into her, she’d lash out in waves of grey and copper that swarmed her surroundings, repelling loved ones until they stopped trying to reach her.

  The villagers whispered that she’d gone mad. Save for the occasional visit from her mother, who brought fresh milk and flowers, the Hollow hunters abandoned her to her isolation.

  As for those hunters…they were toys to be toiled with, their sticky yellow-green pride slopping off like sludge. Their colours were the easiest to skew—the most satisfying to paint with. Pride was so easily warped into shame, its vibrance fading to something sickly like moulding straw. One could not exist without the other.

  Velizar slid his slick, shadowy hands over the hunters’ bile-coloured conceit and shook it loose. I’m still here, he hummed. Your king still lives.

  He wanted them to remember him; he wanted them to be ashamed for forgetting, for moving on, but in the fragile border between Velizar’s world and that of the hunters, something had gotten lost. Where he declared his presence, they saw only hers—the Dreamwalker’s. They grew paranoid beyond his desire, believing she lurked in the woods, waiting for the right time to strike.

  I am here! Velizar bellowed, yet all they understood was that she was here.

  The Hollow had forgotten their king, but they remembered their monster.

  Velizar had expended so much energy villainizing the Dreamwalker to solidify his rule. Now, she was etched in the Hollow’s memory. Trauma, it seemed, was a remarkably enduring scar.

  Enraged by the Hollow’s insolence, Velizar plucked at the strings of the hunters’ paranoia. If they worried the Dreamwalker was watching them, he would make them sure that she was.

  He had the perfect scapegoat.

  Go to the woods, he whispered to Lana in her bleakest moments. Confront the beast that robbed you of your life—your love, your child, your friend.

  And so she did. She wandered the woods for days, slashing at the trees and tripping over rocks in a half-wake frenzy.

  “It’s the Dreamwalker,” her mother cried when she returned, clothes torn and face bruised. “She’s taken hold of my girl! She’s haunting us!”

  The more Lana wandered the woods at Velizar’s command, the more ill she became. Her father began to wonder if perhaps the husk lying in his daughter’s bed wasn’t his daughter at all. Perhaps she was something else.

  “There’s nothing left of her,” Lana’s father sobbed to Bartha. “She’s a thrall—the Dreamwalker’s thrall.” He braved a glance at his emaciated daughter, who sat slumped in the corner. “Look at her! I don’t even recognize her.”

  Yes, Velizar goaded them. She’s been con
sumed, her spirit corrupted. The Dreamwalker has possessed Lana and will take her cloying soul. Were they not friends? Your rebellious daughter ignored your warnings since girlhood. She took pity on that witch, and now she’s been overtaken by her. Her own foolishness is to blame.

  “She never listened to me,” her father spat. He slammed his fist on the table, spilling Bartha’s ale. “I told her…years ago I told her…that orphaned brat was trouble. But she didn’t listen. Even after she married, she didn’t listen. She’s always sympathized with the witch. Now the witch has her.”

  Bartha hesitated, but he was too old and frail to oppose the overpowering will of a bereaved father. “You’re certain?”

  “We must do this.” Lana’s father took up the old man’s leathery hands, and Velizar wove their ashen fear into a knot. “We must purge the Dreamwalker, or my daughter’s soul will be lost. She’ll never find her way to the Silent Place.”

  Bartha’s eyes sunk to the floor. “Your wife will not consent.”

  “She’ll see reason,” Lana’s father insisted. “She must.” He dropped Bartha’s hands and sat back. “There’s only one way. We must destroy the Dreamwalker’s thrall.”

  If Velizar was capable of smiling, he would’ve grinned like a child plucking the legs off an ant. Lana had become the village’s stand-in for the Dreamwalker, and once she was gone, they’d finally remember their king.

  Lost to madness, Lana didn’t fight them. They dragged her to the village square and tied her to the totem of the Viyest—an ironic place to die. Her mother had been barred in the house, her screams piercing the walls as she threw herself at the door. Desperation like an indigo storm cascaded from the seams. The poppy milk and valerian tea had done little to soothe her, but Velizar didn’t want her to be soothed.