The lecture hall was empty, save for the faint scent of chalk dust and the lingering warmth of sunlight on the wooden floor. I had stayed behind to copy a sentence the professor had scrawled on the board, a passing example in Middle English, words that seemed Ancient even to me.
Curiosity urged me. I read it aloud, carefully pronouncing each vowel, tracing the strange rhythm of the long-dead tongue.
BUT! The Sound did not fade...
Not like a note stuck on a piano dissipating into the air. Not like an echo bouncing off walls, it remained, hovering - not audible but perceptible, you might think I'm going crazy, My hand trembled and I stepped back instinctively, staring at the sentence as if it was a living thing.
I tried to speak in modern English: "It's just—just an echo, right?"
Nothing happened. The air was still. The sentence remained, unyielding, as if reality itself remembered my utterance.
A creeping unease filled me. I repeated the line, deliberately altering a vowel, testing the boundaries. The chalk flaked slightly. The shadows in the corners of the room shifted, though the sun remained unmoving.
I swallowed hard. My heart pounded in the silence that was somehow heavier than sound. This should not be possible, I thought. Words do not behave like this.
The memory of old linguistics texts flickered in my mind, the warnings about structure, about lost forms, about languages so precise they could alter perception. Then I realized this world has forces that hold it and makes it the world that we live in.
I took a step back and breathed slowly. The line on the board quivered again, almost like it was aware I was watching. My reflection in the window shifted as I did, but it was not quite right—something in the angle of my eyes, the tilt of my head, lingered too long before returning to normal.
I did not understand what I had done, but I knew it had consequences. A sentence spoken in the wrong tongue had left its mark—not in the air, not in sound, but in the world itself. Which made me realize, this power can either make the world a better place, or just warp it to something that is grotesque, unimaginably dystopian.
I shut the door quietly behind me and left the hall, my footsteps echoing unnaturally long. Somewhere, far away, something had noticed.
And I was certain it would not forgive mistakes.