# Chapter 764: The Canyon of Echoes
The chorus of the dead faded, leaving a silence more profound and more terrible than the noise. Each voice had been a dagger, twisting in old wounds, but their collective departure left a hollow ache, a vacuum that the Withering King was all too eager to fill. The grey dust, kicked up by Kaelen's futile punch, hung in the still air, catching the dim, ambient light like a shroud. The canyon walls, once merely imposing, now seemed to actively lean inward, their striated surfaces like the compressed layers of a geological tomb. The air grew thick, heavy with the scent of ozone and ancient, petrified ash.
Kaelen stood rigid, his head bowed, his knuckles white where they gripped the hilt of his axe. The taunts about his own failures, the men he'd lost in brutal Ladder matches, had struck him with the force of a physical blow. Elara was pale, her fingers trembling slightly as she clutched the now-useless map, the intellectual certainty of their trap offering no comfort against its emotional assault. Kestrel and ruku bez were statues of tension, their gazes sweeping the high cliffs, searching for an enemy that had no body.
Nyra felt the pressure in her bones, a deep, resonant thrum of despair that was not her own. It was the canyon itself, or the thing that controlled it, pressing down on her spirit. The Shard of Hope in her hand felt cold, almost dormant, its light a distant memory. She had used it to shatter the illusion of the path, but this new prison was not one of light and shadow. It was a prison of the mind, and her mind was the battlefield.
"Alright," Kaelen said, his voice a low growl as he forced himself upright. He turned from the wall, his eyes hard with a desperate pragmatism. "So the way back is gone. The way forward is a wall of nothing. We're boxed in. There's always a weakness." He pointed his axe towards the sheer rock face to their left. "That strata looks weaker. Fractured. If we work together, Boro could probably bring a section down. Create a new path. Or at least bring the whole damn thing down on us and take this thing with us."
Elara shook her head, her mind already working past the brute-force solution. "It won't let us. The King is controlling this space. If we try to break the walls, it will probably just make them stronger, or trigger a rockslide that buries us. The trap isn't just the null-field; the entire canyon is the mechanism. It's designed to be inescapable."
"So we just stand here and wait to starve?" Kaelen shot back, his frustration boiling over. "That's your grand solution? There has to be *something* we can hit!"
"There is," a new voice whispered, and it was not a chorus. It was a single, intimate murmur that slithered into Nyra's ear, bypassing the air and the stone to speak directly inside her skull. It was Valerius's voice, but stripped of its pompous righteousness, leaving only the cold, analytical cruelty beneath. "But you're not looking for it, are you, Nyra?"
Her breath hitched. The others heard nothing; they were still arguing, their voices a distant, irrelevant buzz. The whisper was for her alone.
"You're so focused on saving everyone else," the voice continued, a silken thread of poison. "Soren. Your team. The world. A grand, heroic crusade. It's a noble lie you tell yourself. A distraction."
Nyra clenched her jaw, her gaze fixed on the unremarkable wall of rock in front of her. She wouldn't give it the satisfaction of a reply. She focused on the physical sensations: the grit under her boots, the weight of the Shard, the slight ache in her shoulders. Grounding herself in reality.
"Look closer," the voice coaxed. "Not with your eyes. You're a Sableki. You feel the currents of power, the flow of a deal, the weakness in an opponent's strategy. Feel this one."
Against her will, her perception shifted. The grey stone of the canyon wall began to shimmer, not with light, but with meaning. She saw the faint, almost imperceptible lines of stress, the hairline fractures Kaelen had noticed. But she also saw something else, woven into the very fabric of the rock. A pattern. A flaw. A single point where the immense pressure of the converging walls created a tiny, unstable nexus of force. It was a weakness, just as Kaelen had said, but exploiting it would require a precision and a kind of power she wasn't sure she possessed.
"See?" the voice murmured, a triumphant note in its tone. "A way out. A single, perfect blow, and the wall collapses. But you can't do it, can you? Your gift is not one of force. It's one of… hope. How quaint. You can't even save yourself from a simple rock. You always needed someone to do the heavy lifting for you. Your father. Soren. Now Kaelen."
The words were designed to sting, to poke at her pride and her perceived helplessness. But a different thought, colder and sharper, cut through the haze. Why would it show her this? Why reveal the flaw in its own perfect trap?
"Because I want you to understand the nature of your failure," the voice answered, as if reading her mind. "You stand there, holding a shard of a dead god's power, and you can't even use it to break a rock. You think you can save him? You couldn't even save yourself."
The accusation hung in the air, stark and undeniable. It was the same taunt, refined and aimed at the heart of her insecurity. She remembered the Bloom-Wastes, the first time she had truly understood the cost of her choices. The mission had gone wrong, her team ambushed. She'd frozen, overwhelmed by the chaos, and it was Soren's raw, desperate power that had carved them a path to escape. He had paid for it in blood and Cinders, a cost she still felt responsible for. The King was dragging that memory into the light, using it to paint her as weak, as a perpetual passenger in her own life.
The whispering voice of Valerius faded, replaced by a silence that stretched for a long, agonizing moment. The air grew still. The dust settled. The argument between Kaelen and Elara died down, their own despair mirroring the oppressive atmosphere.
Then, a new sound began.
It was soft at first, a faint scraping from the direction they had come. They all turned, a flicker of hope igniting in their chests. The way back was opening?
But the sound wasn't of rock grinding against rock. It was a slow, inexorable sliding. The floor of the canyon behind them was rising, a seamless sheet of grey stone lifting from the ground, sealing the entrance with a final, grinding thud that vibrated through the soles of their boots. The last sliver of the world they knew vanished. They were entombed.
Panic, cold and sharp, pricked at Nyra's skin. The walls *were* pressing in. She could feel it now, a subtle but undeniable shift in the air pressure. The canyon was narrowing.
"Nyra," the voice returned, and this time it was different. It was no longer Valerius. It was Soren.
Her heart stopped. It was perfect. Not the pained, accusatory echo from before, but the gentle, teasing tone he used when he was trying to get her to relax after a mission. The sound of it was a physical blow, a wave of warmth and agony that washed over her.
"Hey," the voice said, soft and intimate, seeming to come from right beside her. She could almost smell him, the clean scent of soap and the faint, metallic tang of his Cinders. "Look at you. All trapped. Remember that time in the Sable League archives? When we got locked in that sub-basement overnight? You were so mad you were pacing a hole in the floor."
A memory, vivid and unbidden, surfaced. The musty smell of old parchment, the single flickering lamp, their laughter echoing in the silence as they'd waited for the morning shift to find them. It was one of her happiest memories. And now, it was being used as a weapon.
"You were so strong then," the voice of Soren continued, a wistful, heartbreaking quality to it. "So sure of yourself. What happened, Nyra? You let them put all this weight on your shoulders. The League. The world. Me. You carry it all, and it's crushing you."
Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. She bit her lip, drawing blood, the sharp pain a desperate anchor to reality. *It's not him. It's not him.*
"Don't fight it," the voice pleaded, and the sound of it was so full of love, so full of *Soren*, that it nearly broke her. "Just let go. You don't have to be the hero. You never wanted to be. Just rest. I'm here now. I'll wait for you."
The offer was a siren's call. To rest. To lay down the unbearable burden of responsibility. To stop fighting, just for a moment. The temptation was immense, a dark, seductive tide pulling at her soul. She felt her knees weaken, the Shard of Hope feeling impossibly heavy in her hand.
"Nyra!" Kaelen's shout was like a thunderclap in the enclosed space. He was in front of her, his face a mask of fury and concern. He hadn't heard the voice, but he could see her swaying, see the tears on her face. "Snap out of it! Fight it!"
His words were a lifeline, a rope thrown into the swirling darkness of her mind. She grabbed onto it, her training, her discipline, her sheer stubborn willpower reasserting itself. She was not that girl in the archives anymore. She was not the frozen operative in the wastes. She was the woman who had walked into the heart of the Ladder, who had faced down Inquisitors, who had chosen to fight a god.
"No," she whispered, the word a ragged, torn thing. She wasn't answering Kaelen. She was answering the voice.
The Soren-voice sighed, a sound of profound disappointment. "I was afraid you'd say that. You always have to be the one to make the hard choices, don't you? Even when you're wrong."
The tone shifted. The warmth bled away, replaced by a cold, hollow emptiness. The gentle teasing was gone, and in its place was the sound of a man broken, his voice raspy with pain and accusation.
"I died because you were weak, Nyra."
The words struck her with the force of a physical blow, driving the air from her lungs. It was the ultimate accusation, the deepest fear she harbored, the secret guilt she carried in the darkest corners of her heart. The one thing she had never allowed herself to fully articulate.
"Because you failed."