The Echo in the Forest
The Echo of the Steel Casket
“A Tale of Bonded Souls, a Guardians Song, and a catacomb's Heartbeat."
I. The Echo in the Forest
Rita looked like a child carved from moonlight and mischief, small and slight beneath her cascade of flame-red hair that seemed to burn even in darkness. Her oversized cloak, deep as midnight and soft as shadow, pooled around her diminutive frame like spilled ink. A single amber leaf—delicate as parchment, veined with silver—clung to her fox tail as it flicked restlessly behind her, each movement catching the moon's pale caress and scattering it in shades of burnished copper and liquid gold.
She was, after all, no ordinary girl. Twenty-seven years had passed since her transformation—twenty-seven years of walking between worlds, of tasting blood and starlight in equal measure. A vampire's immortal hunger coursed through her veins, while fox cunning sparkled in her eyes like trapped lightning. Rita bore within her the razor instincts of an apex predator, the ancient tricks of the wild, and—most dangerously of all—the boundless wonder of a child still eager for new worlds to unfold like origami roses in her palms.
Tonight, she was seeking something that sang to the deepest parts of her hybrid soul. Something old as the bones of the earth. Something humming just beneath the forest's verdant skin, like a heartbeat heard through a lover's chest.
