The Graveyard was aptly named. It was the westernmost edge of Silt, the oldest and most neglected part of the sprawling port town, a place where the town's failures were left to die. Kael and Ria journeyed through a treacherous, maze-like network of tilting platforms and corroded metal causeways. The skeletal remains of broken ships, their hulls cracked and their masts like shattered ribs, jutted out from the semi-solid black crust at odd angles. The entire district was slowly, inexorably sinking into the molten sea below, a process marked by the constant, groaning protest of stressed metal and stone.
The air here was thick with the smell of sulfur and something else, a sharp, briny scent from the strange minerals the sea dredged up. The crust was visibly thin and brittle, a fragile skin over the hellish heat beneath. Jets of super-heated, foul-smelling steam erupted without warning from fissures in the ground, hissing like angry serpents. This was not just a place of decay; it was an active, hostile environment.
Their journey through the Graveyard became a tense, intricate dance, a test of their combined, and very different, skills. Ria took the lead, her boots stepping with a practiced confidence. Every few meters, she would stop and use her sonic stability tester, planting its tripod on the corroded platform ahead and listening to the series of pings it sent back. "This way," she'd say, pointing to a path that looked no different from any other. "The shelf is thicker here. That section sounds hollow as an empty cask."
Kael, in turn, became their early warning system for a different kind of danger. He closed his eyes and let his Dissonant sense spread out, listening not just to the ground, but to the groaning structures around them. He could feel the resonant stress points in the decaying metal supports and crumbling rock foundations. "Wait," he'd whisper, holding out a hand. "That platform… the harmony in the main pylon is failing. It's about to go." Moments later, a massive, rusted pylon would buckle, sending a section of causeway crashing into the glowing magma below with a fiery splash.
They were forced to rely on each other completely, their uneasy alliance solidifying into a functional, if still largely unspoken, partnership. She was his eyes for the things that could be measured and analyzed; he was her ears for the things that could only be felt.
They found the workshop at the very edge of the Graveyard, on a relatively stable-looking bluff overlooking the roiling sea. It was a large, dome-like structure, stark and windowless, made of the same strange, dark, non-reflective metal Valerius had supposedly used for his ship. It stood miraculously intact while everything around it had crumbled into ruin.
The entrance was a massive, circular door, also made of the dark metal, with no visible handle or hinge. At its center was a complex resonant lock, a series of concentric, crystalline rings set around a central plate.
"Well, this is a problem," Ria muttered, pulling a set of intricate tools from her pack. "A master-grade Chorus lock. Probably keyed to his unique resonant signature." She knelt and began to work, using probes and resonant dampeners to try and trick the lock, to simulate the correct frequency. She worked for nearly an hour, her brow furrowed in intense concentration, but the lock remained stubbornly sealed.
"It's hopeless," she said finally, sitting back on her heels in frustration. "The internal tumblers are too complex. The harmonic sequence is probably a dozen layers deep. We'd need a full-spectrum resonator to even begin to map it."
Kael had been watching her work, a thought slowly forming in his mind. The lock was keyed to a complex harmony. He couldn't create harmony. But he had something that was saturated with it, a key he hadn't known he possessed.
"Let me try something," he said.
Ria gave him a skeptical look but moved aside. Kael knelt before the lock. He reached into his pack and carefully unwrapped the Healer's Tablet he had taken from the Shattered Lyre. The deep blue, sea-like crystal seemed to hum with a quiet, powerful energy in the sulfurous air.
He didn't know if this would work. It was a wild, desperate hunch. He placed one hand flat against the central plate of the resonant lock. With his other hand, he held the Healer's Tablet close, but not touching. He closed his eyes and listened.
He felt the lock's stubborn, complex song of security. He felt the tablet's deep, ancient, and impossibly intricate song of knowledge. And he reached out with his own Dissonance, not as a hammer, but as a bridge. He didn't try to create the harmony himself. He simply became a conduit, a channel for the tablet's song to flow through him and into the lock.
He opened his mouth and began to hum. The notes that came out were not his own grating, discordant tones. They were the complex, layered notes of the tablet's song, a melody from a forgotten age that he could not possibly understand but could now, somehow, perfectly replicate. The sound was beautiful, pure, and powerful.
With each new verse of the song he channeled, one of the crystalline rings on the lock glowed with a soft blue light and began to turn. Click. Click. Click. One by one, the tumblers aligned. With a final, resonant thrum that vibrated through the entire door, the lock disengaged. The massive circular door slid silently open.
Kael slumped back, panting, the effort leaving him dizzy.
Ria stared, her mouth slightly agape, her usual cynical composure completely shattered. Her tools, her technology, her pragmatic understanding of the world had failed. And this strange, broken boy had just opened one of the most complex locks in existence by singing it a song that was thousands of years old. She looked at him, then at the tablet he was carefully wrapping up, and she realized that the investment she had made was far stranger and more valuable than she had ever imagined.
They stepped into the workshop. It was like entering a tomb. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and the air was stale and still. The circular room was filled with strange schematics drawn on sheets of crystal, half-finished resonant devices, and star charts that didn't map the sky, but the deep, fiery currents of the molten sea.
And there, in the center of the vast workshop, resting in a dry-dock cradle, was a ship.
It was the Diver. It was smaller than Kael had imagined, sleek and shaped like a tapered teardrop. It was built from the same dark, seamless metal as the workshop itself. It was damaged—one side was scarred with a deep, molten-looking gash, and its core resonant engine, visible through a reinforced crystal viewport, was dark and fractured. But it was largely intact. It was real.
Pinned to a console near the ship's entrance ramp was a single, final log entry from Captain Valerius, written in a hurried script on a sheet of crystal-paper. Ria picked it up and read it aloud, her voice hushed in the silent, dusty workshop.
"The song led me true. Found the path to the Deeps. But the legends… they don't do it justice. The Guardians of Aethelburg are not a myth. Their dissonance… a song of pure, defensive shattering… it crippled my engine's harmony. The ship is dead. I am leaving it here. I will continue on foot. The world must hear the true song before it is too late."
Kael's blood ran cold. He looked at the bottom of the note. It was dated. Only a few weeks ago.
Valerius was not a ghost from a bygone era. He was alive. And he was already on his way to Aethelburg, on foot, across the most dangerous environment imaginable. They had found their ship, but its heart was broken, and its mad, brilliant captain had a suicidal head start.