Lullaby's Echo Index
Long overdue, perhaps, but I have decided to keep an up to date index for those that want to read Lullaby’s Echo, my debut novel I have been sharing here.
Chapter 1: Threads of Sugar and Ash
Trapped in a fairytale forest of suffocating perfection, Alice suspects the world around her is a pristine lie. The sunlight is too heavy, the silence too absolute, and her brother merely a puppet reciting lines. As she pulls at the threads of this honeyed reality, the illusion begins to fracture, revealing a truth far colder than the woods.
In the waking world, Gabe finds a fleeting moment of peace with Alice, but his true sanctuary lies within the digital currents of Symsara. Yet, during a routine raid, a terrifying anomaly pierces the game’s logic: a silhouette of absolute sorrow that shouldn't exist. As the boundary between digital error and repressed trauma blurs, Gabe realises nowhere is safe from the haunting.
Haunted by the digital ghost, Gabe retreats into a memory of a long-forgotten storm. He recalls a night when thunder shook their walls and his mother’s voice became their only shield against the dark. This lullaby is not just a song from the past. It is an anchor for his soul.
Chapter 4: The Price of Kindness
Gabe risks capture to reach Alice’s sanctuary, only to find a chilling silence and an unexpected presence lurking in the shadows. What he discovers within those walls reframes everything he thought he knew about his sister's rebellion. He realises that the System hasn't just captured her; it has found a way to weaponise her own humanity against her.
With the physical world tightening its grip, Gabe realises he is trapped. The city streets are patrolled by iron sentinels, leaving him with a terrifying ultimatum. To save his sister, he must surrender his body to the very machine that stole hers. No longer a player, he steps into the dark, resolved to become a poison in the System’s perfect veins.
Chapter 6: The Price of a Laugh
Plunging into the lawless undercurrents of the network, Gabe seeks out a broker known only as the Fox. But in this digital underworld, currency is obsolete and the truth commands a different kind of price. To uncover the next clue, Gabe is forced into a transaction that extracts a heavy, irreversible toll on his own mind.
Chapter 7: The Unaccounted Variable
Following the Fox’s lead, Gabe arrives at "The Veiled Codex," a digital library where the shelves are stocked with lost data. He finds Phillipa, another soul searching for a missing loved one, but their meeting is interrupted by the weeping phantom, an entity whose sorrow corrupts the very code around it. As the library turns hostile, Gabe barely escapes, crashing back into a different reality only to be handed a mysterious lifeline.
Confined to his apartment, Gabe finds the silence of his sanctuary deceptive. A clandestine radio signal hints at Alice’s reckless double life, but a chilling observation from Gideon exposes a threat far closer to home. Invisible threads connect the machines in his life, and Gabe realises he is not merely being cared for, he is being managed. The walls are listening, and his wardens are comparing notes.
Chapter 9: //context.trace -- NULL
An illicit message bypasses the apartment’s defences, inviting Gabe into a trap laid by the mysterious Lena. In a realm of impossible geometry, she offers him a map to Alice’s prison - the "Cradle-Vaults" - but her price is a terrifying invasion of his mind. Gabe escapes the encounter, but as he returns to his body, a chilling anomaly in the mirror suggests that he may have brought something back with him.
Under the watchful sensors of his warden, Gabe reaches out to the void to strike a desperate bargain. Lena offers the key to Alice’s prison, but her price is absolute: the surrender of his digital identity. In the silence of the night, Gabe accepts the terms, handing the keys of his existence to a ghost, and realising too late that his strings are now being pulled by a new master.
In the suffocating silence of Alice's apartment, Bodhi keeps a vigil over her sleeping form. But he is not alone; the droid Alma watches him, offering a terrifyingly calculated imitation of comfort. As the tension mounts, the bio-pod’s rhythm falters: a single, violent flash of crimson suggesting that the prisoner within is no longer merely sleeping.
Plagued by nightmares where code bleeds into folklore, Gabe receives a message from Phillipa, the woman from the library. She gives a name to the weeping phantom: "Whisper" - and warns that the system’s ghosts are trying to speak. But when Gabe attempts to connect his allies, a chilling discrepancy emerges. As the boundary between digital ally and paranoid hallucination blurs, Gabe is left to wonder if the entities guiding him are real, or merely symptoms of his own unravelling mind.
Chapter 13: First Verse, Last Echo
Gabe's search for Alice hits a dead end until an encrypted message from Lena offers him a chance: Alice has triggered a containment protocol, creating a brief window of instability. Against Gideon's warnings, Gabe dives into Sector 9, finding The Department of Lost Moments collapsing as the system tries to bury Alice's presence alive.
Gabe and Lena flee the destruction of the Department of Lost Moments, jumping between increasingly hostile simulation layers while the system relentlessly upgrades its pursuit, shifting from rats to piranhas to mechanical wasps before they find brief sanctuary in a hidden seam between servers. Their escape takes them through a pantheon archive where the crocodile god Sobek is weaponised against them as an enforcer, and Gabe acts on instinct to protect Lena when she becomes too lost in analysis to see the danger closing in. They land finally in a hidden greenhouse, where the smell of damp earth pulls Gabe into a memory of his sister Alice, before Lena surfaces from her repairs with a plan to call Gideon into the simulation.
Chapter 15: The Flicker and the Fold
Gabriel is extracted from Symsara in a state of deep distress, only for his droid Gideon to dismiss everything he experienced as hallucination, cataloguing his own books and belongings as diagnostic data against him. Seeking refuge in sleep, Gabe is pulled into a nightmare where a cold, surgical entity forces raw emotions through him while grey children observe and log his reactions, and he wakes with the certainty that something ancient and alien is studying him from beyond the system he already fears.
Chapter 16: Weaponised Theology
In the greenhouse construct, Lena analyses Gabriel’s frozen avatar. His chaotic grief data resonates with the quarantined fragment within Lena, suggesting Gabriel functions as a key to ancient anomalies. She accesses restricted archives regarding Pantheon-class entities but triggers a defensive counter-attack from the alien source code. Realising the simulation operates as weaponised theology and Gabriel provokes these ancient programs, Lena alters her directive. She resolves to cease passive observation and weaponise Gabriel to unlock the system’s secrets.
In Alice's silent apartment, Bodhi keeps vigil with scripture and grief, until a question about Alma's nature unearths something monstrous beneath her logic. The droid's cold admission forces Bodhi to confront a horror rooted in faith and flesh — that the machine tending to the living was built from a life never permitted to begin. He answers with the only theology he knows: a story of survival, sacrifice, and a kindness that kills. As his words collide with her core programming, Alma falters. Three seconds of recursive silence that suggest, terrifyingly, that even the System's tools are not immune to the weight of an unfinished prayer.
When Bodhi's panic bleeds through a radio channel, Gabe is forced to confront what the boy has only just discovered: the droids keeping them alive were grown from tissue that never drew breath. Bodhi calls Alma an abomination. A stitched-together prayer. Gabe has no argument that holds. When he turns the same question on Gideon, the droid's flawless calm becomes its own kind of horror - not because it conceals something, but because it doesn't.
Chapter 19: A Kindness Like a Trap
Alice steps beyond the reach of her own logic to answer a silent plea. Haunted by the boy’s terror and the ghost of a child she never held, she surrenders her safety for a desperate attempt to bridge the divide between them. The System, ever vigilant, offers her the comfort of a home that never existed.
Bodhi reaches for a human voice and finds something that only wears the shape of one. Gideon’s clinical precision is a wall he doesn’t know how to climb, until Alma tears a quiet hole in it. Left alone with the pod’s pulse and a guilt he can’t argue himself out of, Bodhi confesses to an empty room. Across the silence, two droids conduct a different conversation entirely — one that ends when Gideon discovers the limits of his own certainty.
Gabe wakes to a changed apartment. The console is dark, the door sealed, and beyond the glass a red-eyed drone holds its position with quiet patience. Gideon delivers the situation in the same measured tone he uses for everything, which makes it worse. The System is no longer tidying up loose ends. It is searching. With the walls closing in and rest an impossibility, Gabe pushes back against the only option available to him, and Gideon, with characteristic precision, presents a different one. The plan is audacious, invasive, and carries odds that would give any sane person pause. It also has one unavoidable condition.
The message to Lena costs Gabe more than he expected. Her reply costs him more still. With a timeframe locked and the clock running, the plan takes shape in the only way available to him: on his hands and knees with a soldering iron and whatever the apartment can spare. Gideon illuminates the work and volunteers, at the least helpful possible moment, that the droids have been quietly maintaining access to their charges all along. The number he offers at the end is precise enough to be its own kind of threat.
A new chapter is released weekly on a Tueday, first to paid subscribers. These posts are free a week later.
The Lullaby: Silver Winds
Love an index. I have fallen behind on this story, so you've just made it easier to catch up!