Echo's fingers choked the pen, his grasp firm, but his hand worked lightly and deftly. The other students filed down the hall, their feet parading randomly, like music notes in staccato played to the wrong tempo. Echo's arm retracted from inside the desk, slipping the plastic utensil into his jacket sleeve. It lay cold against his forearm as Instructor Ryker and the remaining trade students slipped into the workroom, the doorway vomiting a variation of galling nine-year-olds. 

    Echo skirted past the swarm, making for the hall. 

    "Bathroom!" He shouted over his shoulder, the statement directed at the Instructor. Echo slid around the corner of the winding halls and surreptitiously inched the pen out of his cotton sleeve. It lay in his palm, all cerulean and glowing. It was perfect. Echo loved pens of all kind, and when Xenia held that glittering perfection of a pen above her head this morning, boasting about the damned thing, his hand twitched. 

    Turning the pen over in his hand, he began to imagine all of the wonderful stories he could write with such a lovely item. His fantasies just taking flight when a hand rested on his shoulder, and his smile froze midway, somewhere between a grimace and a snarl. He felt a chill, a physical chill press into his body. His mouth felt sour, the way it tastes when he drank juice right after brushing his teeth.

    "Now it's your turn," the body-less voice whispered. The words dripped through the air and landed at his feet. “Your turn to repeat the horrors of this world until a new one is chosen.”

    Echo sprinted for the classroom, throwing the pen to ground as he fled. His feet came to a halt at the threshold. The students were hunched over their workspaces, colored ink chalks in hand as they furiously scribbled. Instructor Ryker stood before them, her face fossilized in a moment of panic. Slowly, she turned to Echo, his heart charging like a jackrabbit. 

    She pointed a polished finger at him. "You did this," she said. "The Curse of Sisyphus. You have doomed us all."

    One by one, the students held up their diagrams. They were all the same. A brick building, bearing the name Ephyra Institute of Design, covered in smudges of crimson and orange. Stick figured bodies hung from the two dimensional windows, eyes crossed out like a cartoon depicting death.

            “I didn’t mean to!” Echo screeched, his face flushed and wet from tears now escaping his bulging eyes.

            “You did this,” the students chanted in unison. “You did this to us, Echo.”

    Echo screamed as the school of Ephyra burst into flames.