Echoes of the Lost Voice

Prologue: The Prisoner

"Legends don't burn down villages" —Ulfric Stormcloak

These walls were no strangers to screams, though with the fathoms of solid rock enfolding the dungeon, they were the last ones to ever hear them. Not that the prisoner was doing much screaming anymore; his vocal cords had become as useless to him as his tongue was.

He looked around, though not actually expecting to see anything. Out there nothing had changed, never did change. Throughout the eternity of pain and desecration that stood between now and the time unimaginable when he'd been the man he once was, everything remained just so. But in the other word, the one within his mind—the only place they could never touch—things shifted and moved. Possibilities, ideas, plans. It was impossible to tell through the broken and anguished husk of his fleshly coil, but inside his world was ripe with activity.

And through the rippling, oscillating matter of his mind, through the eternally pulsating—expanding and contracting—darkness of the Void it was connected to, there was the familiar voice. Echoing through the untold depths of the Mind, coming from everywhere all at once but slowly concentrating, taking shape. The voice, the seductive whisper, was calling to him. The sweetest, most frightening voice in all existence, or outside of it.

It was her.

"I will rise."

The prisoner lifted his head towards the mildewed ceiling and opened his chafed, cracked lips. "Yes!" he whispered, the sound emerging from his parched throat but a rasp.

More words came, undecipherable but as sweet as any balm to his ears. Then some that made sense again.

"They will know my wrath."

A tremor went though his mangled body, as ecstatic as it was agonizing. He felt life ignite within his filthy loincloth. He had to admit he was surprised anything still worked down there.

More cacophony, like the wordless, primordial Voice that had created reality itself. Amorphous, pure intention: unadulterated meaning before it lend itself to any verbal form. Amid the rush and roar, then, words of familiar significance.

" . . . power . . . piles and piles of bones."

They never changed, the words; the prisoner could move his lips with them, repeating each one. He longed to hear them again and again. The promise they contained—of redemption, of the cataclysmic changes to come. The promise of unparalleled suffering. Of—

"Revenge!"

Yes! Yes! That, more than anything, was what the Prisoner wanted. For the longest time he'd lost all hope, gotten beyond thinking it could ever be his. Stopped dreaming. But now, now . . .

"They will quiver at the sound of my voice."

"They will!"

Just like he did now, so would they all.

The voice got louder, more intense. The hatred, the indescribable wrath in it, was frightening to bear witness to.

"THEIR CITIES WILL BURN DOWN . . . "

"Down!" the Prisoner repeated.

"ALL BOW BEFORE ME!"

"I will!I will!"

He would be her most loyal servant. He would do anything to serve that voice, anything to please it. Kill anyone. Torture the whole word. Slaughter them one and all.

He would follow the voice's commands.

He knew what he had to do now. She had told him. She would guide him, get him out of his state of degradation. He would serve her, and she would reward him for it. Her return would be his return. Her world would be his world. Tomorrow would be theirs.

All he would need was patience. And to do what he was told.

The prisoner's split lips spread into a smile, and a tortured cackle erupted from his ruptured throat.

The true storm was about to come.