City of Echoes

I. The Weight of Silence

Silence wasn’t peace in Veritas.
It was law.

In a city where sound was outlawed, silence echoed louder than screams. Every building, every street, every breath was soaked in stillness—enforced by fear, monitored by the ever-present eyes of the Voice, a faceless regime that had surgically removed speech from humanity’s throat.

The punishment for sound was simple: disappearance. First, your voice. Then, your name. Finally, your face from every record, as if you’d never existed at all.

Seventeen-year-old Liora had never heard a lullaby. Her parents vanished when she was six—arrested for vocal misconduct, a crime as vague as it was fatal. She remembered only fragments: her father’s lips moving in a silent plea as enforcers dragged him away, her mother’s fingers signing I love you in outlawed hand-speak before the door slammed shut.

Since then, she’d lived under the rule of soundless obedience, communicating through approved gestures and sterile digital screens called ComSlates.

But one month ago, everything changed.


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II. The Book of Forbidden Sound

It started with a crack in the wall of a crumbling library—one of the last standing after the Literacy Purge, when the Voice burned every book to ensure words couldn’t ignite rebellion. Liora had crawled through the dust and mold like a ghost haunting the past and found it: a forgotten, mold-flecked book of poetry. Real paper. Real ink. Words no longer sanctioned.

The first line she read sparked something electric and painful:

> Even silence remembers
The scream it swallowed—
And waits for it to rise.



It wasn’t just beautiful.
It was treason.
And she was hooked.

Now, each night, she slipped from her dormitory at the orphan block with stolen chalk and a smuggled pen, leaving handwritten notes around the city—poems, questions, truths. Park benches. Elevator panels. The underside of café tables. Each signed simply:

—TheSilentPen


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III. A Spark in the Stillness

Then, one day, she found something that stopped her breath. A reply.

Folded under one of her original notes was a scrap of brown paper:

> “I remember my brother’s voice. Thank you.”



No name. No signature. Just proof—someone else remembered the world before the silence.

The replies grew:

> “My mother used to hum when she baked bread.”
“Words taste better than silence.”
“We are still alive.”



Liora’s hands shook as she collected them, pressing each scrap into a hidden compartment beneath her floorboard. They were evidence of a crime punishable by erasure—and the only thing that made her feel human.

The city was still silent.
But not asleep.


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IV. The Boy Who Remembered

One night, crouched beneath a stairwell taping a new message, she was caught.

“Citizen. Stand still.”
A patrol drone hovered, red lens gleaming.
“Suspected alias: TheSilentPen. You will be detained.”

Liora’s blood turned to ice. Detainment meant the Sound Rooms—where they’d carve the voice from her throat like her parents, like all the others.

Before the drone could strike, a shadow leapt from the dark—
CRACK.
A metal pipe shattered the drone’s core, spraying sparks like dying stars.

A boy—maybe nineteen, with scars raked across his neck—grabbed her wrist.

“Run!”


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V. The Underground

They fled through the city’s underbelly: sewer tunnels repurposed as hideouts, subway tracks where trains no longer ran. Finally, they stopped in a cavernous maintenance shaft lit by bioluminescent algae stolen from Voice labs.

“I’m Kael,” he said, voice rough from disuse. “My brother was a linguist. Taught me to speak, to read lips… even to sing. The Voice cut his tongue out for it.”

Liora’s eyes burned. She touched her own throat, imagining the knife.

Kael pulled a rusted harmonica from his pocket. “He left me this. I’ve never dared to play it… until now.”

The first note trembled in the air—a sound so foreign, so glorious, Liora felt it in her bones.

“You’re not alone,” Kael whispered.


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VI. The Sound of Revolution

The next morning, Veritas woke to the unthinkable—sound.

Hacked speakers atop Voice towers erupted with forbidden recordings: a woman’s laughter, a baby’s cry, a protest song from the Before. Beneath every speaker, the same message glowed on ComSlates citywide:

> You are more than silence.



The Voice scrambled. Drones descended. Enforcers beat doors down, but the people had learned to hide—not just their words, but their defiance.

A girl in a café whispered to her sister.
A father sang a lullaby through clenched teeth.
A child shouted one word into the chaos:

“Hope!”


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VII. The Last Line

Liora stood atop a rusted subway platform, Kael’s harmonica clutched in her hand. Below, the city stirred like a beast shaking off chains.

She pulled a pen from her coat and wrote the final line on the wall:

> This city was quiet once.
But the echoes were always ours.



—TheSilentPen