The morning mist clung to the ravine like a burial shroud, and twelve-year-old Eris Vayne knew they shouldn't be here. The Cracked Bridge groaned beneath their feet—ancient stones held together by little more than moss and prayer. Each step sent pebbles tumbling into the void below, where they disappeared without sound.The ravine below seemed deeper than usual, its shadows stretching upward like grasping fingers. Eris noticed how the mist clung to the gorge's walls, refusing to dissipate even as the afternoon sun broke through the canopy above.
"Keep up, Eris! You're walking like an old man," Liran called from ahead, her auburn braids swinging as she turned.
At thirteen, she moved with the confidence of someone who had never truly fallen, never truly failed, with the fearless grace of someone who'd never met a consequence she couldn't outrun.
"The bridge has stood for centuries. It's not going to collapse just because you're scared."
But Eris heard what she didn't—or wouldn't. The stones beneath him hummed, low and hungry, a vibration that climbed through his bones like frost. The ravine breathed. It waited.
Turn back, something whispered. Not wind. Not imagination. The voice came from the spaces between stones, from the dark beneath the bridge where sunlight had never reached.
"Liran—" he started, but she was already dancing ahead, arms outstretched for balance, treating the decaying structure like her personal tightrope. She'd been doing this more lately—pushing boundaries, testing limits. Ever since their father's last visit, when he'd looked at her with those measuring eyes and declared she was "too wild for her own good."
The stones beneath him, once again, hummed, low and hungry.
"Little shadow," the ravine whispered. Not in his ears—in his bones. "She'll fall. Will you follow?"
Eris's hands trembled. The morning had started simply enough—Liran sneaking into his room before dawn, shaking him awake with that mischievous grin. "Adventure day," she'd declared, as if those two words erased all danger. He'd followed, as he always did, because the alternative was letting her go alone.
Now, watching her leap from stone to stone, he understood with crystalline clarity that this was different. The bridge wasn't just old. It was wrong. The mist didn't behave like mist should—it moved with purpose, coiling around Liran's ankles like spectral hands.
And suddenly, while the boy was lost in his thoughts, the girl leapt—not into the ravine, but onto a crumbling ledge. The stones groaned. Eris lunged, grabbing her wrist as the ledge gave way. For a heartbeat, they teetered on the edge, Liran's laughter dying in her throat as she finally saw what he'd been seeing all along—the darkness below wasn't empty. It writhed.
Then the world shifted.
A sound tore from Eris's chest—not a scream or a child's shriek, but a raw, resonant note, like a bell struck too hard. The vibration started in his chest and expanded outward, visible as ripples in the air. The bridge shuddered. The mist recoiled. And Liran... changed.
Her eyes widened, pupils dilating into black pools that reflected not the morning sky but something else—landscapes of ash, cities of bone, memories that weren't hers. Shadows coiled around her arms like serpents, and for a moment, Eris saw them—shapeless figures in the mist, their forms flickering like candle smoke. They had faces, almost. They had been people, once.
The villagers called them Lamentus, phantoms born from hearts that refused to let go. They whispered now, not in the ravine, but in Liran's voice: "Why did you stop me? Why won't you let me fall?"
The words came from her mouth, but they weren't hers. Each syllable carried the weight of a dozen griefs, a hundred regrets. Eris saw tears streaming down his sister's face, but she wasn't crying—the Lamentus were, through her.
Liran stumbled back, her bravado crumbling like the ledge beneath their feet. "Eris, what did you—?" Her voice cracked, switching between her own and something ancient, something that had been waiting in this ravine for someone to hear it. She wrenched free of the boy's grip, scrambling back as the whispers swelled into a cacophony. "Make it stop!"
But Eris couldn't. The sound that had torn from him hung in the air like a physical thing, resonating with frequencies that made reality blur at the edges. He saw the bridge as it truly was—not stone and mortar, but memory and grief, held together by the weight of all who'd jumped, all who'd considered jumping, all who'd stood here and stared into the abyss until it stared back.
The Lamentus pressed closer, drawn by his voice like moths to flame. They wore faces now—a woman clutching a swaddled bundle that wasn't there, a soldier still fighting a war that had ended decades ago, a child searching for parents who'd never come home. Each one whispered its story, and Liran heard them all.
By the time the villagers arrived, drawn by that impossible sound that had echoed across the valley, the bridge stood intact. No voices whispering. No shadows dancing. But Liran's hands wouldn't stop shaking, and her eyes—her eyes kept seeing things that weren't there.
Eris tried his best to explain to the villagers what happened, words tumbling over each other in desperate confusion. But as he spoke, he watched their faces transform—concern melting into something darker. Fear. Revulsion. The kind of look reserved for diseased animals that needed to be put down.
"They saw it!" Old Henrik's voice cracked as he stumbled backward. "They saw the Lamentus! They are cursed."
The crowd rippled with whispers, with hands making warding signs, with mothers pulling their children back as if whatever had touched the Vayne siblings might be contagious.
The walk home stretched like a funeral procession. Liran hadn't spoken since the bridge, but Eris could hear her breathing—short, sharp gasps, as if she kept forgetting how lungs worked. The villagers flanked them at a distance, close enough to ensure they went home, far enough to avoid contamination.
Their cottage sat at the village's edge, where Mara's loom click-clacked through the days and nights. She stood in the doorway as they approached, and Eris saw the moment she understood. Her face didn't change—Mara had always known this day would come, she had woven it into her tapestries in symbols only she could read.
That night, Mara didn't weave. She lit every candle in their cottage and sang the Hymn of Unseeing, her voice trembling over ancient words meant to blind the eyes of things that shouldn't be seen. The shadows cast by the flames danced wrong, reaching for corners they shouldn't reach, and Liran sat in the center of it all, knees drawn to her chest, still seeing whatever the Lamentus had shown her.
"What is a Lamentus?" Eris asked later, huddled under his quilt, the question barely louder than breath.
Mara's hands stilled on the half-formed protection charm she'd been knotting. In the candlelight, her face looked carved from wax. "A soul that couldn't let go," she whispered. "The roads—the old roads, the ones we don't walk anymore—they show you what you've lost. What you'll lose. And if you cling too tight…" She touched his chest, right where that terrible sound had originated. "They'll hollow you out, fill you with their hunger until you can't remember which grief is yours."
Sleep, when it came, brought no peace. Eris dreamed of bridges made of voices, of Liran's eyes reflecting deaths that hadn't happened yet, of the ravine calling his name in a thousand different griefs.
Gareth returned the next morning. He was a stranger with a familiar face that returned from the capital every few months, his armor smelling of steel and sour wine, his hugs too tight and yet too brief. He filled the doorway like a thundercloud, taking in the abundance of candles, Mara's red-rimmed eyes, the way his children sat too still and too quiet.
Liran hated him. "He's a fossil," she used to say. "Thinks duty's a cage for everyone but him." But now she just stared through him, as if he were another phantom, another echo of something lost.
He didn't ask about the bridge or why Liran refused to speak to Eris. Warriors of the Dawnguard dealt in steel and certainty, not shadows and maybes. He just knelt before his son, calloused hands gripping thin shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
"You'll join the Dawnguard one day," he'd tell Eris, ignoring the boy's flinch, ignoring how those words sounded more like threat than promise. "Honor's the only legacy that outlives us. And a soldier doesn't flinch at whispers."
But Gareth's eyes betrayed him. When he thought no one was looking, Eris caught him staring at Liran with something that might have been fear, might have been recognition. As if he'd seen those hollow eyes before, in battlefields where the dead didn't always stay dead.
Days passed like held breaths. The whispers from the bridge followed Eris home—a cold thread in his ribs, humming in time with his heartbeat. Sometimes he'd catch himself resonating with things—Mara's loom, the well's echo, the spaces between words. Each time, reality would shimmer at the edges, threatening to show him what lay beneath.
Liran felt it too. She stopped racing her brother. Stopped laughing. She'd stand at windows for hours, watching something none of them could see, her lips moving in silent conversation with the air. When she finally spoke to him again, it was a slap, not a sentence.
"You ruined it."
Three words, delivered with the force of a physical blow. She stood in his doorway, fists clenched, and for a moment her shadow seemed to move independently, reaching for him with too many hands.
"You ruined everything," she continued, each word precise as a knife. "I was brave. I was free. And you—" Her voice cracked, shifted, became the voice of the woman on the bridge for just a moment. "You made me see."
In his mind, Eris could only feel guilty. Even though he was trying to protect his sister, he couldn't shake the feeling that he, in a deeper manner, had scarred her. The sound that had saved her body had torn something in her mind, creating a wound that invited the Lamentus in.
He'd given her the curse of sight in a world full of things better left unseen.
That night, as Mara sang her protective hymns and Gareth sharpened his sword with mechanical precision, Eris pressed his palm against the scar the bridge had left. The stone's edge had cut deep, but the real wound went deeper—into that place where sound became power, where protection became prison.
Outside, the mist gathered thick around their cottage, and sometimes, if he listened closely, he could hear the Lamentus whispering. Not threatening now, but welcoming.
Waiting.
First lesson: Some echoes are better left unheard.
But Eris was beginning to understand a harder truth—some echoes, once awakened, could never be silenced again. They could only be carried, like stones in the chest, like songs in the bones, like sisters who would never again meet your eyes without seeing the shadow of what you'd made them become.