Just to hear the echo.
But the walls have grown tired of answering me.
Even my voice returns different now.
Crooked. Thinner. Unfamiliar.
I want someone to talk to.
Not a savior. Not a warden.
Just someone who will stay for a moment and let me be real again.
Lyrax, if you're out there.
Speak. Just once. Even if it's hate.
Tell me what your final thought was.
Was it of me? Did you curse me as the light left you?
Or did you hold my name in your mouth like a relic,
something warm and broken?
Mother, I would even take you.
Your endless questions, your whispered fears, your trembling hands.
You never knew what I was, did you?
You thought I was gifted.
But you raised a storm and called it your daughter.
I laughed when you burned.
But now I only hear the way you used to hum when you braided my hair.
Even the souls I broke…
the ones who shrieked and shattered beneath my hands.
I’d let them scream again.
At least it was sound.
I'd talk to a Dredd Beetle now.
Let its mandibles click nonsense into my ears.
Let it crawl into my chest and nest there, whispering horrors.
At least I wouldn’t be alone.
Hell, I’d even welcome Carceron.
Let him sneer. Let him monologue.
Let him feed off my misery while I imagine flaying him alive.
Just speak to me.
Someone.
I am too many voices now,
and none of them answer.
(Encoded in the resonance gap - “listen / echo / gone” - is a desperation-phase broadcast shard. It is crafted to emulate distress patterns only audible to entities that feed on isolation. The signal does not beg for rescue. It tempts predators. It dares them to look inside. It will never leave this prison.)