Perfect Echoes

[yutzen]

This particular tale will upset some of my most avid, yet quietest readers, of this I am sure. For its origins are less than certain, contested between the Burnt and Bellbound hives, and the resulting struggles of ownership have whittled it down to uselessness with revisions and accusations within their respective territories. I find this contrary to the pursuit of knowledge as a whole, to the point I will throw caution to the wind and state the Bellbound should be ashamed for letting it reach such low points. Any who object to my statement may come to me, as they surely know my dwelling by now, and I wish to tell them my grievances in person for once.
Nevertheless, the following tale’s origin is as obfuscated as the Hives’ own, and I could find nothing I could satisfactorily call an original. Instead, I was forced to piece it together from different translations in different languages, acquired all across the caverns and compiled together into a single version. I suspect Bellbounds (that's the Nirhaq, for those not yet aware) that objected to the aforementioned squabble much like I did spread these out by themselves, but that is beyond the scope of this volume.

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While it remains obvious to any denizen of the Subterraneum with any sense of where they stand, even before taking refuge many of its now-dwellers had found that there are many realms beyond their own. Philosophers and scholars of reality itself often found ways to peer past the assorted veils, and find the existences beyond. Of course, in trying to reach such sights, most of them became familiar with what separated them. They saw where all they knew came to an end, giving way to a thick nothingness, separating them from all others… And they found the thin, thin layer keeping it all out. For everything we know is but another bubble, adrift in a sea few could ever cross. A million, million bubbles, all floating freely in an ocean[1] with neither surface nor bottom…

All except one.

There is a singular bubble of existence, greater than any other, with the thickest walls of all keeping its being within, and the weight of nothingness outside. A perfect bubble, a flawless sphere, which – whether as coincidence or as an anchor to the rising archipelago[2] of bubbles in every direction – lies in the perfect center of it all, its own center matching that of everything. It is the First and Greatest[3], the most Perfect of all, perpetual and unassailable.

And utterly, unquestionably empty, once.

Nothing spawned within it, no life to grow and thrive, no land to be carved by age and water, nothing within but the walls and the darkness. It was not until bridges could be tended from other bubbles that anyone at all saw such perfect emptiness for what it was…

And it was perfect. Utterly different from the nothingness outside, which crushed the chance of anything at all coming to pass. This was a void full of potential, a place that could hold anything, and had so little within it that even just a word or a thought could make a lasting mark upon it… And with its perfect shape, and the perfect walls surrounding it that could not be pierced by anything, such words and ideas could remain for a long time, bouncing off the walls in a similarly perfect echo if spoken in the right tone, reigniting their idea with every pass. With nothing to dampen them as they echoed across the interior, and nothing to lose with each bounce upon walls that seemingly received nothing, and pushed back everything. With the right words and dedication, one could bring anything to pass, feeding the echo as it passed each time, hitting the right cadence and tone each time[4]…

But as always, it only took one fool to set off its ruin.

Whoever pushed the first pebble in this avalanche that haunts us to this day, we don’t know. It was lost to time, if not rightfully wiped from it. We just know this emptiness had gathered a crowd, an actual settlement, by the time said individual raised their voice and called out the presence of a monster that wasn’t there. Cried out in fear, most likely feigned, that some indescribable destroyer was out for their life, and that of others. Yelled that it was a powerful beast, an outright abomination that could tear down anything and anyone…

And so it began. Just one voice to contaminate it all, its echoes bouncing back upon themselves, resonating with themselves, and with the ideas they brought in this utter emptiness that wouldn’t let them dissipate. Slowly, something began to take form, the faintest outline of a being that embodied this long-forgotten person’s claims… And yet, with such lofty claims, even this outline could kill, well before it could have a proper shape. Weaved together from the shouts that made it be, this unseen, phantasmal nightmare reached out and tore down their settlement, one stone-rending screech at a time. No one saw if it was clawing at them or striking with any limbs at all, all anyone knew was that where it screamed, homes crumbled, and their dwellers were rent apart.

Then, panic reigned. Monster, those attacked called out. Destroyer, they screamed out as they ran. Abomination, they cried as they witnessed their fellows slaughtered without warning[5]. What was just one voice quickly became an unwitting choir, feeding and strengthening the thing that’d come to pass. The thing would grow with their panic, drawn in by their cries, and so grew its reach and bloodshed, which spurred the horrified masses further into disarray…

Those who knew what was happening tried to intervene, but they had no contingencies. They never thought something like this could happen, that anyone would even think raise a false alarm just to create its own disaster. They knew to deaden the panic, but did exactly the wrong thing to achieve it. “There is no monster”, they tried to say, but the word “monster” was still heard. “This destroyer is but a hoax, a lie”, they repeated, but “destroyer” lingered on. “This abomination was made up, it doesn’t exist”, they shouted out, but only the word “abomination” survived, all the rest drowned and washed away in the echoes. They realized moments too late that to refute an idea, it had to be brought up, and that was enough in this perfectly malleable existence to make it real, irrefutable. And so, the thing’s existence was only stoked further by their mistakes and they, too, were rent apart.

In moments, it had become clear that wherever it saw chaos and horror, it and its bone-shattering screeches would follow… And soon, it hardly even needed to sow them by itself to know where to reach out and strike. The ideas and words that had brought it to life within moments would resonate with its existence, even if their origins had nothing to do with it, and they would call it forth. This formless thing was soon reaching well across the bubble’s confines, one side to another, to wreak its havoc in places where even one person had expressed a hint of fear, spoken about a monster – any monster – or fretted that a given barrier wouldn’t hold. And once it had reached there, it remained, its own rending shrieks joining the echoes that made it and fueled its wrath…

Soon enough, nearly everything that wasn’t it was gone. Even the very emptiness that once filled this perfect bubble was now just more of it, and the ever-rebounding echoes. Every corner was just another part of it, as its sound filled the void. The very walls became filled with its existence, as the screams soaked into once-impermeable barriers; they simply let it in, muffled yet undeniable, long before they could be cracked by its intensity, even if they never truly let it through. And in being filled with its presence, it’s essence, the walls that formed this bubble became yet another part of the formless monstrosity that but one voice had spawned. This Perfect Bubble had been swallowed whole by its existence… And it found it couldn’t tear the Bubble down. The thing couldn’t breach its own immaterial form with its own screams, couldn’t reach walls that were now inside it, and so, the echoes that formed it would never stop ringing, and would never be truly released…

But now that just enough of it had crept into the walls, it could still resonate with the outside, and listen. Terrified, familiar cries in languages it never knew, from peoples it had never met, in contexts no one it killed would’ve imagined. Monster. Destroyer. Abomination. Fear of things that come to tear down one’s abode without warning, unseen and unstoppable. All of this and more… In other bubbles, across the true nothingness.

And so, its reign of mindless terror would continue. What was once the Perfect Bubble was now but a destroyer of realms. And when, in some unfortunate bubble, the fearful murmurs of end-bringing beasts become loud enough to be overheard? The thing will reach out, stretching the walls that have become its body, and rend the source apart. Those within the realm are either swallowed by the crushing nothingness, or are scattered across its remnants, naught but thin suds spread in every direction… And sometimes, subsumed into the once-perfect bubble that both holds and is their hunter, as the suds merge with it like any bubble would.

Irony of ironies that those within are perhaps the safest of all, in spite of being buffeted to and fro by the maddening echoes of the one who tried to slaughter them…

[1]At least three translations referred to it as a lake, but I have gone with ocean, as those languages with a distinction between lake and ocean inevitably used the latter.
[2]Direct translation from an Ishissi text, as other languages inevitably resorted to more general terms like “collection” (with one baffling Urul translation referring to them as “hill range”, which I decided against). Unusually (and for those who don’t grasp it), the Ishissi language does have a word for a collection of bubbles, but no texts ever resorted to it pre-Nixian Age.
[3] Not every translation related to this part referred to it as either, let alone both, but I found none that outright contradicted it.
[4]All texts coincided in these terms, usually reserved for music and sound as a whole, no matter the translation. If there was any error in translation or transcription, it happened far before the story was spread far and wide, and even those mutilated versions in Bellbound/Burnt spaces contain such terms.
[5]The three words presented here found their own repetition in each translation, yet still differed between different languages, with very clear marks of imperfect translation from an original language. I use these terms as the closest I could find in the common tongue. Ironically, the most precise versions of the word I could find were from Bellbound texts that had otherwise been massacred.

-Excerpt from "Who is the Lord Below? A Treatise on the Radiant and Cthonic", authored by 'the Ever-Restless Nirrhamidh' (assumed pseudonym; author not yet identified)