Welcome back to The Archivist. This week we focus on the world where you would be lucky to be murdered.
PART ZED 0
The Echo Killer
Rhea was dead. Burned alive from the inside while a man in a featureless mask held her face like a lover singing her a lullaby. And her duty would call her to do it eleven more times before the morning was over.
She had never experienced a pain so profound in her over a decade long career. The seven feet tall man’s face was hid behind an unassuming matte grey mask. He lifted his hands webbed with spidery, blue, pulsing veins of light and cupped her face gently. Those glowing blue eyes locked on her and she screamed her lungs out. He made her live through burning of every bone, muscle and sinew from her toes to her torso, refusing to let her die till he was done destroying her spirit, body and mind.
PART ONE
The Archivist’s Record | VEHL’S REACH | SPECTRALITE POWERS
To solve a murder in Vehl's Reach, a Spectralite Echo Seer detective has to die inside the victim. And no, not metaphorically. On the planet, called Elyndra Prime the dead always leave echoes imprinted in the Space Time Continuum. Rhea Vale, a career Spectralite Echo Seer, reaches into the resonance of space and time, matches the frequency of the dead, and drops into the body of the person she is investigating. Not their last second, but up to a whole day before, reaching across the fabric of time itself.
In eleven years, she has read the echoes of hundreds of murder victims and died in every way imaginable. Cut up, crushed, poisoned, drowned, everything. It takes hours to stop shaking. Sometimes a full day before her hands are steady enough to write the report. But she has never failed till today. She was the master of the Echoes, till someone burned the echoes themselves.
The Murders | ARYAVERSE LABS
This morning she walked into a research laboratory and found twelve bodies. Arranged in a perfect semi-circle. Backs straight. Heads tilted upward. Faces intact.
Eyes burned black. Mouths charred from within. Long, precise finger-shaped burns framing each face, as if someone had cupped each one with deliberate care before the killing began. From the neck down: ash.
Rhea reached out to the dead as usual. What waited on the other side was not a memory or echoes. It was death itself, occupying the only sliver of life it had been allowed to enter, devouring it from the inside.
She tried to move backward through the victim's life. There was nothing. The killer had reached into the echoes itself and erased every moment that came before the killing. The only thing left was their ending. The only thing the dead can leave behind, taken from them after they had already lost everything else.
I built this world to hold something I could not hold alone.
[Archivist’s Footnote: Rhea didn’t need to burn alive twelve times. No one would have blamed her for stopping after even a single reading. What started as a usual investigation became a psychological war between her tenacity and her sanity. That she survived this proved her strength to some and her foolishness to the rest.]
PART TWO
From the Author
In the voice of R.R. Panwar
I have C-PTSD. For most of my life I have lived as two people in one body: the dreamer who builds worlds and the executioner who keeps the dreamer alive. Not unlike Harmony with the Shards of Preservation and Ruin in Brandon Sanderson's work. The world I have spent twelve years building is the only place those two have ever made peace.
We will talk more on the powers of the Spectralites (which are quite cool and quite varied than what we covered this week.) But equally compelling are the characters inhabiting this world. Rhea in particular is facing quite a unique challenge. The Systems that run this city are bent on destroying her because she refused to break when she didn’t fit in the system. This is not a story just about the investigation. This is a story about the war between the systems’ scale and individuals’ right to exist.
The Archivist surfaces what the city would prefer to keep buried. Every Tuesday at 8 AM. Free.
Someone in your life would read this at 2 AM and tell you about it the next morning. Send it to them.
Until then notice what disappears when no one is looking.
— Eshal & R.R.
Rahul (R.R. Panwar) The Parasite Wars — The Infection Protocol. In progress.
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