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Myron Epimetheus
The little man rises as the boy looks to him and shuffles forward, his feet a few inches above the ground. The disappointed cast on the young man’s face provokes a change in the little man’s mutterings as his voice falls into the same language that this one called Larry Silverfall used but a short while earlier. “Así es con los jovenes – siempre sus sueños pesan más que sus manos pueden llevar.” Before the little man speaks his answer to the question of the ineffectiveness of the enchantment, however, another voice intervenes, a merry and mocking voice, a voice whose notes echo with malice.
Failure. Failure once again. Failure after failure after failure. A lifetime of failures. A failed life …… O! Yes! Such failure! Your friends imprisoned and abandoned. Your wife lost and gone. To fail even yourself …… So much failure in one small life. …… All this labor for nothing. These years lost and wasted. So many dead on your behalf and for what? Failure, sweet failure, O yes! Yes, yes, yes …… Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure.
The voice is at once familiar and strange, for the one named Larry knows well the sound of the Echo, a sound not all that unlike his own voice. But the mocking hatred in its words, this is something new. Mockery fills the young man’s ears and seizes his breathing, bitter and burning mockery and the echoed notes of the word failure gather each shred of guilt and doubt within him into a song of defeat and hopelessness.
“That will be enough!” There is strength in the little man’s words as his mutterings reach the conclusion of a very old, very terrible enchantment. The area around the tomb shakes violently and the body of the youth shudders as the mocking laughter is cast out of him and confined between the rune-scribed facets of a large emerald that the sage holds carefully with both hands.
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