Chương 156: 12. Echoes 1

As we moved down the corridor toward the underground dry dock, we discovered an odd room set into the side passage. Calling it a room was generous—it felt more like a small auditorium. No beds, no storage facilities. Just rows of tiered seating bolted to the floor, all facing a single flat black wall that rose taller than a man. Beside the wall stood a long table cluttered with ancient devices whose purposes I couldn't begin to guess—some cracked open, others barely clinging to their original forms.

I stood in the doorway, and the longer I looked, the more unsettled I became. Not the kind of unease that screams imminent danger. Something subtler—the discomfort of a space that was too orderly, too patient, arranged as though it were still waiting for people to return and take their seats.

"What was this place for?" I asked quietly. Ignicia stepped past me into the room, her gaze sweeping across the tiered rows before settling on the black wall.

"Gatherings, perhaps. Or instruction." Her tone carried uncertainty as she moved toward the table of devices.

"Possibly where they transmitted information." I nodded, though my attention didn't linger. Honestly, since entering this cursed facility, everything I'd encountered looked like something the ancients had used to transmit information, kill each other, store things, sleep, or systematically drive themselves insane. One more assembly hall wasn't going to shatter my worldview. What actually mattered was behind us.

Faint sounds of the sea-dragon search party still echoed from the far end of the passage—distant, but not gone. I didn't believe for a second that they'd abandon the hunt over one blocked door. If they were already using the island's outer facilities, they probably knew this place better than I wanted to contemplate. I positioned myself at the entrance and listened carefully. Nothing close. I let out a quiet breath. That was when I heard a soft click behind me.

When I turned, Ignicia was standing beside the long table, one finger still resting on a raised panel. I stared at her. She stared at the device. After two heartbeats, I asked with complete sincerity, "Your Highness, did your hands just act on their own again?"

"I merely wanted to see if it still functioned."

"In places like this, things that still function are rarely good news."

"You didn't survive this long by being cautious, did you?" I was preparing to reply that at least I wasn't the one pressing random surfaces—when a faint electrical hiss rose from somewhere deeper in the room. The next instant, the wall that had been completely black exploded into light. My hand flew to my sword before conscious thought caught up. It wasn't fire. It wasn't a magical projection.

It was pale, trembling light riddled with static—the entire wall surface suddenly alive, flickering twice before displaying a column of ancient script I couldn't read. The text held for a moment, then vanished, replaced by something that made every muscle in my body go rigid. A human face. A man I had never seen, yet who felt as real as if he were standing directly in front of me, looking out from the wall without warning. He wore clothing similar to the uniforms on the skeletons outside—same cut, same style.

He sat with deliberate straightness, the posture of someone straining to maintain composure. Even across thousands of years and through whatever cursed technology this was, I could see the tension he couldn't quite suppress. He paused for two seconds, as if confirming the recording had begun. Then he spoke. I didn't understand a single word. Not the Kingdom's tongue, not the Blazing Summer language, not any dragon dialect I'd ever heard.

The rhythm was short and clipped, certain syllables landing hard and dry—like stones skipping across an iron plate. Ignicia's voice brushed my ear: "He's giving his name." I glanced at her. Her brow was furrowed—she wasn't catching everything either, but she was ahead of me.

"And his place of origin. He's identifying himself." The man spoke at length. I could only latch onto a few recurring sounds, fragments that refused to form meaning. At the end, he made what looked like a strained attempt to smile, then spoke again—slower this time, in a way that somehow pressed down on the lungs. After a pause, Ignicia translated quietly: "He says... if anyone ever sees this recording, he hopes they'll tell his wife and daughter that he didn't run. He just... couldn't make it home."

The image lurched. His face distorted, swallowed by static, and when the picture stabilized, someone else sat in his place. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. A younger soldier. His voice was faster, rougher. He gave his name first, then a place I couldn't parse—something ending in what might have been "state" or "district." Then he started cursing. I didn't need translation for that. Some emotions don't cross borders—they just are.

His fury was vicious, accelerating with every sentence. His eyes reddened, his words stumbling over themselves, until he slammed his hand on the table and half-rose from his seat. He didn't look like a man recording final words. He looked like someone on the verge of tearing apart whoever had put him here.

"He's asking why they have to die here," Ignicia murmured. My throat tightened. I stayed silent. The image jumped again. The third recording showed an older woman. She'd positioned herself close to the device—so close she seemed afraid that leaning back would cut off her words before they were finished. Something small dangled from her hands—a chain, or an ornament. I couldn't make it out clearly.

What I could see was how hard she was working: keeping her voice steady, articulating every word with desperate precision. She managed it, for a while. Then she stopped. She bowed her head and pressed her hand hard over her eyes. When she looked up again—back at the wall that would preserve her face—she kept going. This time, Ignicia didn't translate immediately. Only after the image faded did she say, very quietly: "She was saying goodbye to her children." I suddenly had no idea where to look.

Staring at the wall felt like an intrusion. Looking away felt like cowardice. So I stood there rigidly and let the voices come—one after another, ancient and entirely foreign, filling a room that hadn't heard sound in millennia. The recordings grew increasingly fragmented after that. Some people gave their names and managed two sentences before glancing off-screen, as though something was happening beyond the frame.

Others began speaking only to be cut off by violent shaking, leaving blurred figures and harsh static. Some repeated the same phrase endlessly, as if they couldn't believe what was happening was real. The further we went, the less these looked like documentation. They looked like collapse. When the final soldier appeared, I couldn't even tell if he'd managed to state his name. He was young—so young that calling him a soldier felt wrong.

He sat hunched in the center of the frame, hands pressed hard over his head, and spoke a few words before everything came apart. He started crying. Not quiet tears. Not suppressed sobs. The kind of crying where breathing stops working properly—where everything breaks at once, leaving a person hollowed out, still technically alive, saying things I couldn't understand into a device that would outlast him by thousands of years. I stood there with a weight in my chest that had no name.

Ignicia's expression was equally grim. She didn't translate. There was nothing to translate. When someone cries like that—in any era, in any country—whatever comes out isn't going to be dignified final words. After that recording ended, the wall held black for just a moment. Then the last person appeared. He was darker-skinned, older than the others, with a steadiness to his shoulders that none of the previous faces had carried.

His uniform was more precisely arranged, decorated with insignia that clearly marked higher rank. If I had to guess, he was the commanding officer of everyone who had come before. He gave his name first. Then his place of origin. The ancient syllables remained foreign to me, but from the moment he began speaking, something changed in the room. Not because his voice was louder.

Because he was using what remained of his composure to impose order on something that had already come apart—and that quality carried through the recording like a current. He didn't cry. He didn't curse. He simply looked at the device and said what needed to be said. I could only follow fragments through Ignicia's quiet translation—something about the facility being lost, orders severed, no response from outside. The practical language of endings. But toward the end, he paused.

Something shifted in his expression as he looked into the lens—something I didn't have words for. It wasn't pleading. It wasn't rage. It wasn't even grief in any form I recognized. It was the look of a man who knew that everything he belonged to was ending, and who had chosen to spend his final sentence speaking to something larger than himself. He opened his mouth:"God bless America." I heard every syllable with perfect clarity. Not because I understood it.

Because he said it so slowly, so deliberately—as though pressing the weight of an entire civilization's ending into those few sounds. The image held for a heartbeat after he finished. Then the wall flickered twice and changed. Not a person this time. A flag. Tattered, faded, barely clinging to its mounting—hanging in some high space against deep shadow, as though filmed in a chamber even deeper than this one.

The fabric was in terrible condition: corners curled, edges frayed, colors bled so far toward grey that the original design was barely visible. And yet I could tell it wasn't the banner of any kingdom, empire, or dragon clan I knew. It belonged to something I had never heard of. Something that had nevertheless, without question, once existed. America. I turned the word over in my mind. Unfamiliar. Awkward. No correspondence to any nation in the current world.

But as I watched that ruined flag and thought of the people who had said goodbye to families, the one who had raged, the one who had wept until he broke, and finally the officer who had used his last reserves of dignity to speak those words—I understood something. I didn't know what America was. I didn't know where it had appeared on any map, how large it had been, how many cities and soldiers and ships it had once commanded. But I recognized the shape of its ending.

Because when a nation reaches its final page, it doesn't look like the heroic mythology would have you believe. No golden light flooding the sky. No lone hero roaring defiance at the world from some high place. None of the beautiful, polished endings that get written into poems for people who weren't there. Just a group of people still alive in a freezing underground facility. Going before a recording device, one by one, to give their names and their hometowns, then falling apart in whatever way was theirs.

Until finally, someone who still remembered he was an officer said the last decent thing on behalf of a nation that no longer could. I stared at that broken flag until my throat ached, and found I had absolutely nothing to say.

"... What was he praying for?" I finally asked, barely above a whisper. Ignicia stood beside me, looking at the flag. She was silent for a long time.

"It wasn't a prayer," she said at last.

"It was more like... a blessing." I didn't ask anything else. Because I suddenly understood that a blessing might be harder to bear than a prayer. A prayer means you still believe someone might answer. To bless a nation in the moment of its destruction—that sounded more like refusing to let it die without dignity, even when you already knew no rescue was coming. The wall flickered twice more, then went dark entirely. The room settled back into silence.

But that silence was completely different from what we'd experienced just minutes before. It was no longer merely the quiet of something ancient, sealed, and dust-choked. It had become the particular stillness that settles after a nation ceases to exist. Ignicia looked away first.

"Let's go," she said quietly.

"There's more below." I nodded, but before turning, I glanced once more at the wall that had gone dark. If a nation's final moments ended up preserved like this—buried deep underground, waiting for strangers to stumble across them thousands of years later by accident—then it must have been both incredibly powerful and impossibly alone.