There had always been voices.

When she was a child, she'd hear the refrain of a lullaby cutting through the fog of nightmare; she'd hear her sister calmly guiding her back home when she'd wandered a little too far into the woods; she'd hear her father whisper "all clear" from a distant ridge after some trespassing animal had set off the perimeter alarms.

She'd never been entirely alone in her head and had never been quite sure what it would sound like if she was.

Long ago, she'd asked her sister, Senya, about what she thought it would be like if the voices ceased.

Senya thought it would be like sitting inside a great cave — the kind you found hidden in the way high or along the tide cliffs — all emptiness and echo. "It would be a loud silence. You'd gradually hear the waves, the wind, the calling of the wolves. The whole world would rush in to fill the void. It would be hard to tell where it ended and you began."

The memory came easily, she could hear the words spoken as if Senya stood before her, telling her again. But it had a density to it, an otherworldly heaviness, everything past that she could call forth was the same — the green gleam of the pasture behind their cottage, the smell of fresh-cut spring fields.

Yet when she returned to her true senses, all she could see was gray and all she could smell was a strange hot scent that tugged at the threads of her body, threatening to unravel her. She could not be sure if her eyes were open or shut. She could not be sure if the light that she sensed in her periphery came from a glowing fire, a tiny window, or from the edges of her mind itself. It could be the sun setting or rising behind the high vistas of the mountains, it could be the hall light flickering just beyond the cracked door of her childhood bedroom.

It could be nothing.

With the escape of her senses, so went her sense of time. It could be any day of the week, any time of day. All external voices had quieted leaving her feeling hot and empty, trying to stay above the echo in the empty rooms of her mind. Truthfully, it was not unlike what Senya had described.

She had convinced herself early on that if she kept things loud, she'd keep her sanity. So, she continued to loop memories, to fill the emptiness of her external world with the internal. And so it would play as if her mind was a stage, drawing all of her attention to it until the recollection had cycled through. She was not sure if she was choosing the thoughts or if they just rushed forward in a maniacal crush trying to catch the eye of her mind.

Then, she was recalling a long-ago hunting trip with her father. Her legs looked like kindling beneath her, buried in soft layers of hide and weave.

The sun was setting in her memory, they had built a makeshift shelter as they always did on such trips but there was something amiss. The figure of her father was alive with a soft flicker of routine thoughts — the steps to processing the rabbits and birds he'd snared. He thought of how the smoke would cure them, how he'd bury them in the salt boxes they'd brought along with them. Though his thoughts were ordinary and ordered and existed in the quiet hum of his remembered consciousness. But he was the only one she sensed. Her sister was not there, cracking jokes and filling her head with nonsense. Her mother was not huddled over the fire, her mind dancing with the hum of her voice as she stirred her cauldron as regular as if she was keeping time.

Her father settled in across from her — his thick-fingered hand cradling a green, flickering glass ball they used to catch fireflies. He stared into it and continued his thoughts of the work there was to do. He looked different, his eyes seemed as if they'd sunk deeper into his face, hooded by shadow; his mouth seemed to slouch to one side.

He reached his free hand up to pull off his cap and run his fingers through the long strands of his black hair. But as he did, it seemed as if the hair melted from his scalp, decaying instantly and turning into an ashy substance that slipped through the pads of his fingers.

His bare head wrinkled as he reached back to the glass ball and released the fireflies into the night. With a flick of his hand, a flutter of glow burst through the canopy around them and dissipated. The dark rushed in and huddled around their little clearing despite the robust glow of the fire pressing out into the gray.

Panic surged through her, replacing the quiet repetition of her father's thoughts — I will remove the skin, the offal, the bones, I will carve the flesh and rinse it with salt water, I will lay it into the smoke basket. It was a growing thing. It bodied itself, replacing his voice, the hum of his consciousness, the wind in the trees, the distant stumbling of field mice across the forest floor. The panic took her wholly, scorching her nerves, as her eyes adjusted to the dimming dark and she realized she was alone.

Where her father had been was only a formless lump of flesh and when she looked down at her own body, her tiny limbs had grown — overlong and misshapen in the low light.

Evara opened her mouth to scream and felt the flutter of wings in her throat, pushing the air back into her. And she realized it was she that was full of quiet, full of nothing. There were no murmuring waves or winds. It was nothing, a big nothing, an echo that stole away all of the memories she desperately wished she could conjure in its place.

Heat had taken the sky and nausea replaced the skins that had separated her body from the ground. In the dreary distance, she heard her mother crying though she could not feel the comforting hum of her awareness. The orphan noise drew her deeper into the abyss of fear, igniting the edges of her nerves as if they were the wicks of tallow candles.

Was it a new memory emerging? She still could not place the last. In fact, as the last scene faded it was almost as if she'd melted into it, had become the silence, the heat, the sickness.

Then, in the glowing darkness of the clearing, she saw her mother's face as if it had been made of found things — seaweed, grains of dirt, a rock that jutted out of the middle of the vision.

The lips were pine branches and behind them something burned, sparks played between the needles. Her seafoam eyes blinked to life and her smoldering lips parted and fire burst forth from the effigy of her body.

Evara watched as the branches that held the shelter's roof caught fire, the rock that was her father burned violently and lit up the open ground. The heat was constant, inescapable, it came equally from the silent wood, the firepit, and the flaming lean-to.

And then, somewhere beyond the screaming fire, the howling wind, all the noise that had come in to fill the quiet — she heard her mother's voice.

It was tinny and soft, couched in a hum as if it had come from a faraway speaker.

It said: "055-7426B, Greenblade, Evara J, vitals stable, temperature elevated, passing three days since admission.

A voice answered but she could not hear what was said.