Ravenwood Manor, Acoustic Chamber
Last Night Edmund recounted his strange echo experiment. My curiosity outweighed my caution, tonight I assembled the séance in the Acoustic Chamber, its walls of lined with the most fabolous metal that Edmund informs me is called Aluminium.
By ten o’clock the room brimmed with candlelight: a circle of iron chairs, an obsidian-tipped wand on the central table, and the sealed archway leading below. I called my assistants, two local mediums dismissed from polite society, and instructed them to hold hands and focus on the chamber’s silent mouth. Even in daylight, that archway felt like a yawning mouth.
I stepped forward, grasped the wand, and whispered: “Show us your truth.” My voice trembled. Across the circle, the candles flickered without breeze. The only sound was the soft scrape of boots as my assistants shifted on the cold floorboards.
I leaned toward the arch. “If you hear me, speak”, the words had barely formed on my lips when I heard it: a single echo. But this time, its cadence was deliberate:
“Truth … us show?”
My breath caught. It was not merely mimicry; the words were rearranged, punctuated, as though the echo understood grammar. The mediums gasped. Olivia, pale and trembling, insisted she felt something brush her ankle, cold as midnight dew. I felt it too—a shiver that ran up my spine.
I attempted to coax it: “We ask your purpose.” Again:
“Purpose … your ask?”
Each echo seemed to turn my question inside out, an uncanny mirror of my own voice. We sat in silence until dawn, but the chamber spoke no more. I gathered my notes, concerned that in summoning this voice, I’ve awoken a presence no mortal should command. Tomorrow I will consult Percival on reinforcing the circle, and perhaps dispatch a messenger to Shining Cliffwood where the Blackwell ruins lie—rumored to share the same resonance.