Echo Cut Into the Throat

DC brought Jonah to the body. The victim had been a warforged farmer, a refurbished construct with calloused palms and a body built for work rather than war. That made the murder feel even colder. This was not a battlefield body. This was someone who had been walking into a morning and was turned into evidence. The throat carried the message. Ten carved lines marked it like a ledger, each stroke part of the Tallyman's arithmetic. Beside them, in Abyssal script, one word had been cut into the neck. Echo. Jonah used Speak with Dead. The spirit that rose was faint in a way that mattered. The forged portions did not shine like flesh would. What remained of the soul glimmered thinly around the living or once-living parts, enough to answer but not enough to make the boundary comfortable. The dead farmer had seen small hands. He had heard the Tallyman say ten. Then the soul faded back into the silence DC and Kyle had already been documenting. The evidence gave the party its first real shape of the Stormcall murders: not random violence, not ordinary anti-construct vandalism, but ritualized counting, Abyssal language, and a killer who treated each victim like part of a ledger only she could balance. Point Pringle had ended with unresolved threats. Stormcall began with a number carved into the dead.