We stayed the night in Elyr’s home, I was delighted to find out that the Aethri do have very comfy spare bedrooms!

We stayed up far too late into the night talking and practicing resonance communication. Elyr says I can get above a whisper now. It’s like learning to speak again I think, although I was very small when I did that the first time.

I wonder if I will be able to do it outside of Aethryn, the resonance is so close here.

When we awoke in the morning we made straight for the Echo Keeper’s chamber. It is an archive of sorts but not like any I have seen before. There were resonance fibres within the walls the whole room seemed to be alive with something. The whole building sounded like it was trying to tell me things.

Inside there was another Aethri, so comfortable in their surroundings that they seemed to be part of the room itself. As soon as we walked in, they looked at me and said, “you can feel them can’t you?”

I didn’t reply, I wasn’t sure exactly what I could say, I felt them but I didn’t know what they were. Inside my head, Elyr said, “It’s ok Fia Veylin, you won’t get the answers wrong”

As we talked the Echo keeper explained that all events cause ripples and movements in the resonance and that the strongest ones can cause permanent shadows to develop. These shadows are what get called echoes, and can be from huge momentous events or the repetition of small events again and again over time, like the goose paths. They exist free and loose in the patterns of the resonance but Echo Keepers can gather them together and store them in the Chamber of Echoes. The echoes in the chamber are copies or acoustic maps of the original which are archived in the resonance fibres of the chamber.

The Echo keeper spoke about ancient people who could recognise patterns across the human world and the resonance. They were rare but there had been a few over the years. They also said that the strongest echo they could feel was one word.

Threadwarden

The name seemed important somehow, like I could feel its echo as well as hearing the sound of the word. When I asked more about the Threadwardens, they said that the new echoes stopped forming about them around 100 years ago but that there were scholars in some of the cities who had made a study of something called threadmapping.

I think my next step is to track down some of these scholars.

As we were leaving, the thread keeper said to us:

“You are kith, it is rare but not unheard of, look after each other”

I replied instantly that I would, and happily so did Elyr! I hope that means they might come along on the next leg of this journey!