16 June, 2024
Ravenwood Estate, Echo Vault
find it oddly fitting that on this Father’s Day I’m once again beneath the manor, surrounded by stone and shadow rather than hearth and hearthside voices. The candles I lit flicker against the curved limestone walls of the echo chamber, our family’s oldest vault, first tested by Edmund, spoken through by Winifred, and now in my care.
I came bearing no gifts but this battered leather journal, and a single question I whisper softly into the darkness:
“What makes a father?”
The chamber’s silence hangs heavy for a heartbeat… then returns my words warped and distant:
“Father … makes what?”
A crooked smile. I’ve always suspected these echoes have a sense of irony. My thoughts drift to Alister, my own father, who chased curses in Egypt and died not long after unsealing that Luxor sarcophagus. He would have scoffed at my devotion to ancestral mysteries. Yet here I am, on the day meant for gratitude, seeking counsel from a voice that is neither flesh nor phantom.
I close my eyes and imagine him: dusty brim of a fedora crooked over suntanned brow, notebook in hand, mind racing to translate hieroglyphs. I remember the warm rumble of his laughter when he first heard the echo answer him from the tomb:
“Within … lies who?”
He’d patted my shoulder and said, “Son, you weren’t meant to hear that alone.” That was the last Father’s Day we shared before the curse claimed him.
Tonight I ask the echo for one more answer:
“Guide me, father.”
It falls silent. My palms grow damp against the cold brass funnel. For a moment, I feel a heartbeat against my chest, and I swear it matches Alister’s cadence. Then, from the far end of the chamber, a soft repetition drifts back:
“Father … guide me.”
I let the words wash over me like a benediction. If this is all the communion I can have with him, an echo in stone, so be it. I will carry his daring spirit forward, mapping every distortion, every shimmer of the Endless Echo, until the chambers of Ravenwood know no more secrets.
Tomorrow, I will break the seals on Elizabeth’s locked journals and journey to the Blackwell tunnels. But tonight, beneath Father’s Day moonlight, I rest in the company of ghosts and echoes, grateful for the faint imprint of a father’s voice that still reaches across time.