In the city of Echo Hollow, people didn’t just lose things—they lost pieces of themselves. A baker woke up one morning without the memory of his mother’s laugh. A violinist realized she could no longer recall the sound of her own music. Even the mayor forgot the exact timbre of his daughter’s voice after she moved away.
No one knew where these lost sounds went.
Until Alba, a deaf archivist, found them.
The Silent Girl Who Heard Everything
Alba had been born without hearing, but she felt sound in ways others couldn’t—through vibrations in floorboards, the pulse of air against her skin, the way light bent around noise. She worked in the Archive of Echoes, a crumbling library where people donated forgotten things: diaries with missing pages, paintings with blurred faces, and music boxes that played silent tunes.
One day, while reshelving a donated violin, she pressed her palm to its wood and felt a hum. Not from the instrument—from the wall behind it.
Behind a loose brick, she found a tiny, silver key.
The Hidden Floor
The key fit a door Alba had never noticed before—a narrow, cobwebbed entrance beneath the library’s main staircase. Behind it, stairs spiraled downward.
The room below was impossibly vast, filled with floating glass orbs, each pulsing with soft light. When Alba touched one, it shivered against her fingers—and suddenly, inside her mind, she heard:
"Happy birthday, my love." (A man’s voice, warm and trembling.)
Another orb:
"I’m not afraid anymore." (A child’s whisper, fierce with bravery.)
She realized—these were lost voices. Not recordings, but the essence of the words themselves, preserved like fireflies in glass.
The Keeper of the Lost
A figure emerged from the shadows: Harlan, the previous archivist, who’d vanished decades ago. His lips moved, but Alba felt no vibration—he had no voice left to lose. Instead, he wrote in a notebook:
"They’re drawn to you. You don’t take—you listen."
Harlan explained that the orbs were unclaimed echoes—words spoken with such love, grief, or truth that they couldn’t simply vanish. The library had always collected them, waiting for someone who could return them.
"But I gave mine away," he wrote. "Now I guard them."
The Thief of Silence
Not everyone wanted the voices to be found. Madame Vey, a wealthy widow who traded in forgotten things, had been siphoning echoes for years, selling them as "memories" to the highest bidder. When she learned Alba could hear the orbs, she sent her Silent Men—thugs who’d sold their own voices—to steal the key.
Alba and Harlan fled deeper into the library, where the orbs grew larger, holding not just words, but whole conversations. One pulsed with an argument that had shattered a marriage. Another held the last words of a dying poet.
"They’re heavy because they matter," Harlan wrote.
The Choice
Madame Vey cornered them in the heart of the archive, where the oldest orbs floated like planets. She clutched a knife in one hand and an empty orb in the other—ready to steal the voices forever.
Alba did the only thing she could: she shattered the nearest orb.
The released voice wasn’t a word—it was a scream. Madame Vey recoiled as the sound hit her, a lifetime of stolen echoes rushing back into her all at once. She collapsed, overwhelmed, as the Silent Men clutched their throats, their own voices returning in ragged gasps.
The Library Finds Its Voice
In the aftermath, the orbs began drifting upward, through cracks in the ceiling, seeking their owners. The baker woke to the sound of his mother’s laugh. The violinist played her old compositions perfectly.
As for Alba?
When she touched the last orb—a small, bright one—it melted into her skin. Inside her mind, a voice she’d never heard before said:
"You are exactly as you should be."
(She didn’t know who’d spoken it. But it felt like hers.)
Harlan stayed in the archive, his notebook now full of new words. Madame Vey opened a hospice, whispering comforts to the dying.
And Alba? She still couldn’t hear.
But now, when she pressed her hands to the library’s walls, the whole building sang back.