Echo was born a mountain nymph, an Oread, one of the female nature spirits who haunted the high places of Greece. Some said she was the daughter of Pan, the goat-foot god of Arcadia who played the panpipes and chased nymphs through the wild. Others said she was the daughter of Gaia, the broad-bosomed Earth, or that she was born from the air itself, a spirit without parents who simply existed as sound exists. She lived on Mount Cithaeron and Mount Helicon, the mountains of Boeotia, and she was famous for two things: her beauty and her tongue. She talked endlessly, chattering to the trees and the stones and the other nymphs, filling the forests with her voice until the gods themselves grew weary of it.

The trouble began with Zeus, the king of the gods who ruled from Mount Olympus with his thunderbolt. Zeus was always pursuing nymphs, and Hera, his wife and queen, was always watching him. Echo saw her chance to help the king of the gods. When Hera came near, searching for her husband among the mountain meadows, Echo would engage her in conversation, asking questions, telling stories, chattering so incessantly that Hera could not get a word in edgeways. While Echo held the queen's attention with her endless talk, Zeus slipped away to his latest conquest. Hera was not deceived for long. When she discovered that the nymph had been distracting her on purpose, her rage was terrible. She did not kill Echo, for nymphs are hard to kill, but she took from her the power of independent speech. From that day forward, Echo could only repeat the last words that someone else had spoken. She could not initiate a conversation, could not tell a story, could not say "I love you" unless someone else had said it first.

For a time, Echo wandered the mountains in silence, her voice a prisoner inside her own throat. Then she saw Narcissus, the most beautiful youth in Greece, the son of the river god Cephisus and the nymph Liriope, whose face was so lovely that everyone who saw him desired him. Narcissus was hunting in the forests of Boeotia, his hounds running before him, his bow in his hand, and Echo fell in love with him at first sight. She followed him through the trees, staying hidden in the undergrowth, watching him from behind rocks and tree trunks. She longed to call out to him, to tell him who she was, to beg him to love her back, but the curse of Hera held her silent. She could only wait for him to speak and then throw his words back to him.

One day, Narcissus became separated from his companions and found himself alone in a clearing. He called out, "Is anyone here?" and Echo answered from the trees, "Here!" He looked around and saw no one. He called again, "Come to me!" and she answered, "To me!" He walked toward the sound, but she fled before him, staying always just out of sight, her heart breaking with every step. At last he stopped and said, "We must meet," and she answered with all the longing in her soul, "Meet!" But when she ran to him and threw her arms around his neck, he shoved her away in disgust. He did not want her. He did not want anyone. He told her to keep her hands off him, and she could only repeat his last words back to him, "Off me," as he turned and walked away.

Echo hid in the caves after that, her shame so deep that she could not bear the light. She wasted away day by day, her body growing thin, her skin turning grey, until only her bones remained, and then even the bones turned to stone. But her voice could not die. It lingered in the hollow places of the earth, in the caves and the canyons and the deep forests, and it still answers every shout that enters those spaces. When Narcissus later fell in love with his own reflection and died beside the pool, Echo was there in the rocks, and she answered his last cries with her own, throwing back his words of grief until there was no one left to speak. In later ages, the Greeks and Romans heard her voice in every reverberation. She became the explanation for the echo itself, the sound that returns when you shout into a canyon or a cave. Her story was told by poets and painters across the ancient world, and it became one of the most famous tales of unrequited love in all of literature. In the modern age, her name is still the word for the reflection of sound, and every time a voice comes back from the dark, it carries something of the nymph who could only repeat what others said, who loved the most beautiful boy in Greece and was rejected, and who lives on as the answer that never comes from the one who called.