Elias Thorne didn't wake up in his basement. He woke up in the center of a dream that felt more real than his own skin.
He was standing in a vast, endless hallway. The floor was polished obsidian, reflecting a sky that wasn't blue, but the color of a bruised memory. There were no walls, only rows upon rows of transparent glass jars lining the path as far as the eye could see.
Elias walked toward one of the jars. Inside, he saw a flickering, grey mist. When he touched the glass, his fingertips vibrated violently. He didn't hear it with his ears, but he felt it in his teeth—a high-pitched, jagged sound of a child crying for a lost toy.
He looked at the next jar. This one was darker, pulsing with a deep, rhythmic thud. It was the sound of a heart breaking.
"This is the Archive," a voice resonated.
Elias spun around. Standing there was a woman, but her face was a shifting mosaic of a thousand different people. One moment she had the eyes of an old man, the next, the lips of a young girl. She didn't speak with her mouth; the words appeared directly in Elias's mind, cold and crystalline.
"Who are you?" Elias tried to speak, but his throat felt like it was filled with dry sand.
"I am the Librarian of the Unheard," she replied. "Every scream that was ever swallowed, every cry that was choked back by fear, every whisper lost to the wind—they all come here. We collect what the world rejects."
She pointed to the horizon, where a massive, swirling vortex of black ink towered into the grey sky. "That is the Core. The Silence you felt in your room? That was a leak. The Core is overflowing, Elias. Humanity has suppressed its pain for too long. The jar is about to burst."
Elias felt a cold shiver. "Why me? Why did I hear it?"
The Librarian leaned in close. Her face stabilized for a second into a hauntingly beautiful woman with silver eyes. "Because you were the only one quiet enough to listen. But listening has a price. You have tasted the scream, and now, the scream wants to be born through you."
Suddenly, the glass jars around them began to crack. A low hum started to rise from the ground, vibrating Elias's boots. The obsidian floor turned liquid.
"If the screams escape all at once," the Librarian warned, her voice flickering like a dying candle, "the world won't just hear them. The world will be shattered by them. Sound is energy, Elias. A thousand screams of pure agony can level cities."
"How do I stop it?" Elias shouted in his mind, his desperation clawing at his chest.
The Librarian handed him a small, silver tuning fork. It felt impossibly heavy. "Find the First Scream. The one that started the silence. Tune the world back to its original frequency, or become the first note in the symphony of the end."
Before Elias could ask what the 'First Scream' was, the hallway exploded into a million shards of glass. The grey mist from the jars rushed toward him like a tidal wave.
Elias opened his eyes.
He was back in his basement. The candle was still out, but the room was glowing with a faint, eerie blue light. His hand was clenched tight. When he opened his palm, the silver tuning fork was there, cold and real, humming a note that sounded like a lonely star.
Outside his window, for the first time in years, the wind didn't just blow. It moaned.
The Silence was over. The Echo had begun.