They emerged from the Throat like survivors of a myth.
Dust clung to them. Shadows chased their heels. But they were not broken.
Callan stepped out first, eyes narrowed at the horizon. The sky had shifted. Colors bled wrong through the clouds. The sun no longer moved in clean arcs. Something had changed while they were below.
Or perhaps, they had changed—and now the world could no longer pretend.
Vale spread her wings, testing the wind.
"We were gone too long."
Solenne shaded her eyes. "No... the world spun too fast."
Callan said nothing.
But deep in his chest, he felt it—the pull of the Choir still inside him. Not voices. Not pain.
Just a hum.
A single, eternal note.
Waiting to be played.
They didn't return to the capital.
They went west—toward the Red Groves, where flamewood trees whispered of blood and betrayal. That's where the next rift had opened, the place where sound had begun to rot.
A village lay at its edge. Or what remained of one.
Children wandered barefoot in circles, singing lullabies that repeated endlessly. Elders wept silent tears, their mouths sewn shut—not with thread, but with fear.
A melody hung in the air.
Beautiful.
Deadly.
Unending.
"They've been looped," Solenne said, her voice brittle. "Trapped in a harmonic loop. They'll die like this."
"No," Callan said. "They'll become something else. Something worse."
He drew Ashendrix and stepped into the circle.
The air thickened.
The loop resisted.
But the blade sang back.
And the melody shattered.
Children collapsed. Screamed. Woke.
The spell was broken—but not cleanly.
A woman crawled from the center of the grove. Her skin glistened like oil. Her eyes were mirrors.
And her voice was not her own.
"You carry the stolen note," she hissed.
Callan stepped forward. "Then come take it."
She laughed.
And her mouth opened too wide.
From her throat came not words, but instruments—trumpets and drums and violins twisted into a mockery of sound. The ground cracked beneath her voice.
Vale leapt first—slicing through the discord.
Solenne followed, weaving shields of silence.
But the woman's form bent impossibly, warping through chords no human should withstand.
Then Callan sang.
Not like Vale.
Not like the Choir.
A new note.
Ashendrix lit with fire and memory.
He thrust the blade into the melody itself.
And the world winced.
The woman's body contorted, screamed, and finally collapsed—her voice unraveling like thread pulled from a wound.
Only the echo remained.
And in that echo: a message.
"You are not unbound, Zareth-Kal.""You are the final verse."
Silence returned.
The children slept.
The elders wept.
But the sky remained wrong.
Vale landed beside Callan. "They know you've changed the key."
"They'll try to rewrite me," he said.
Solenne looked around. "What do we do next?"
Callan gripped Ashendrix.
"We find the original Song. The one before the Choir. The one they tried to erase."
Lysander, exhausted, groaned. "And how the hell do we do that?"
Callan turned his eyes westward, toward the Shattered Conservatory.
"We go where the music died."