Prologue to Echoes

 Penny couldn’t find Otter. The dog had disappeared.

He murmured a soft curse under his breath— “sashafyre,” something he heard his dad say all the time and not in a good way— before catching himself. Good boys didn’t curse.

Good boys didn’t let their baby sisters die, either.

He fought back tears as he stumbled onto his bike and began to pedal, sticking for a little bit in the freshly watered grass. He wouldn’t cry. Good boys didn’t cry. From the will of suppressing emotion, he shook.

“Otter!” he called, a high-pitched cry that barely carried down the street. Verior nox-- the second night of each day, after starlight passed from dawn to covered by the sea to below the horizon-- was setting in, the world cooling by the second, as the sun and his mistress the darkling sea stole the warmth every night. His hair spilled into his eyes and he had to spit it out. He couldn’t let Otter go missing. Not now. Not while his wrists were still bleeding and his lower back still stung from the belt.

You don’t want that again, do you?

Don’t worry, in time, you’ll learn to love it.

He screamed for Otter until his voice was hoarse. He sucked in his breath and came back home, dumping it off by the shed.

From somewhere, there was a rustle, like a hog hiding in underbrush. He couldn’t tell by the sound if it was too big to be a beagle.

“Otter?”

The rustling froze before disappearing rapidly in front of him. Despite himself, Penny’s heart started to beat fast.

Slytharines aren’t scared of anything. That’s the only rule of this family. You scared of something? Scare it back. Scare it even if it hurts you, even if it makes you more scared than before. Scare it back into wherever it came from.

Penny shivered as he opened the door to the shed and turned the light on. It flickered and, thankfully, stayed illuminated. He started to go through his dad’s guns and his own airsoft ammo before pausing. There was a whimper outside, in back of him.

Penny scampered out of the shed, barely remembering to turn the light off. He heard a howl and was pedaling through the muck, back onto the street, before he even realized where he was going.

He crossed the bridge over onto the other side of the river, towards old Pyrrha the Crone’s house. He paused for half a moment and continued again at another howl. He jumped off the pavement onto a small dirt trail that led behind Pyrrha’s house, into a small sliver of the deep forest.

Overhead, the darkling sea rumbled like thunder, but he paid it no mind. Instead, he banged on his handlebars, trying to get his light to work—

The bike hit a rock and he tumbled down. Shaking off his fear, he wrenched the bike out of the mud and wobbled towards a clearing. Someone was there, and that was where the howls had come from— had his father found the beagle?

“Otter?” he asked the forest. He kicked himself— his voice was timid. If he was scared of a bunch of trees, he’d never get anywhere.

The trees are alive. And they know. They know what you don’t know about yourself. His mom was always the more superstitious one. She believed in the forest, in the raw power of the sea, of nature.

And in that moment, Penny did, too. Just a little.

Penny got to the clearing. No beagle, no humans— just a bunch of glowing toadstools on the ground. And a horrific, orange, pulsing carpet, woven together chaotically, crawling up the trees. On a couple, carnations grew out of trunks, somehow in bloom, despite the season.

A whimper. He briefly got excited before it dawned on his that he had whimpered. What did the Dr. Kizimir call it? Dissociation? Dissonance? Some big word with too many S’s. Good boys didn’t have to pronounce all their words right.

He kicked at toadstools, pulling back as it rippled and reacted. Forgetting the bike, it fell into another part of the patch. The toadstools erupted into motion, the pulsing orange threads spreading, spreading over his bike. Suddenly, the forest was ablaze in more light than he thought possible.

He didn’t have time to move before someone behind him said his name.

“Pendragon.”

Instinctively, he turned and was struck over the head. Crumpling, he shrieked as he fell into the fungi, kicking and screaming. Quickly, he lost all resistance. Not only because his body had gone slack, but because he felt a vague— somehow comforting— pressure over his entire body. He mustered enough strength to pull his dizzied head up and saw the orange threads conquering his body. He was too dazed to fight and let his head hit the soil, a warmth and pressure invading his skull, his ears, his open mouth. He could feel his skin, bones, marrow collapsing.

Above, the darkling sea had erupted into light as some sort of craft— an aircraft, but the size of a building, sleek and pyramidal and planar and shining with impossibly bright lights— descended into the forest. It hovered, lowering something off to the side of him. A ramp? A bridge? Several people— or people-like figures— stepped off of the craft, whatever it was. He could hear them conversing in Continental— Continental! Sashafyre!— somewhere, before the original man who had assaulted him stepped into his view. Smoothly, a pistol appeared in his grip, the end of the barrel maybe six inches from Penny’s bloodied forehead.

He barely had time to croak out “Dad?” before there was a BANG! and an explosion of light and suddenly he was choking, choking on blood and vomit and fungi, as his body decomposed, decomposed while he was still in it, until he went numb. The fungus had taken over, taken over everything—

Within an instant, Pendragon knew what it meant to be a slave.