Echo

Next character is up! story below:)

Echo

Seven-year-old Echo woke to the smell of smoke and the screams of people. She could barely breathe, and the orange light was bright enough to make her squint. She pushed open the shutters and tumbled over the edge of the windowsill into a pile of ash and dirt that was once her father’s garden. The screams. The screams had stopped, the screams that she now realized had been coming from the direction of her parents’ and siblings’ bedrooms. As she turned to rush back to them the carcass of the house collapsed. A village of eighty people disappeared overnight, all except one little child.

Echo sat in the wreckage for days before a traveling merchant found her. They fed her, wrapped her in a blanket and took her away. She had dug through the debris collecting any photographs that had survived, they were all she had left of her life, they were her friends, her family. After some while they arrived in Ihana, the merchant and her husband took Echo in and gave her a home, a soft bed, and hot food, eventually adopting her as their own. Even then, Echo never let her precious photos out of her sight, she eventually had them bound into an album to protect them on their frequent travels.

It's a rare gift to be able to manifest shadows of the dead. Bringing back the essence of one person with nite dust is hard enough, but the reports from the trade routes of a young woman bringing back dozens of shadows at a time must be a merchant's tall tale…