It started after the brothers were gone.
The camp was quieter, but not calmer. The kind of quiet that didn't mean peace — it meant something was listening.
Nights bled into each other. The fire's smoke never rose straight; it twisted in lazy spirals, caught in a wind that didn't exist. The forest changed, too. Flowers that used to curl shut at dusk now bloomed when the moon rose, their petals glassy, slick with dew that smelled faintly of iron.
Even the insects had gone silent.
Ezra tried to tell himself it was nothing. The Trial liked to rearrange the rules whenever it got bored — this was just another trick of the place. But then Atlas started changing.
He'd always been quiet, but this was different.
At first, Ezra thought it was exhaustion — everyone here looked carved thin by hunger and sleeplessness. But Atlas had a different kind of tired to him. Not drained — tuned out. Like his head was somewhere else entirely.
He would sit by the fire long after the others had gone to sleep, murmuring to himself, pencil scratching faintly across scraps of parchment scavenged from the ruins.
Ezra had caught words once, carried in the flicker between the wind:
"…resonance off-balance… frequency distortion… no, it's harmonic…"
Sometimes he'd go still mid-sentence, tilt his head slightly — the way someone might when hearing something faint and far away. Then he'd write faster.
On the fourth night, when Ezra got up for water, he found Atlas standing by the outer ring of the camp, hand pressed against a stone outcrop.
The rock hummed.
Soft, low, like a cello being played somewhere underground.
Atlas didn't look away from it.
"The earth's still moving," he murmured. "You just have to listen at the right pitch."
Ezra had frowned. "What are you even—"
"Shh." Atlas's voice was calm, distant. "It's a song. The same one they paint into the walls of the city. I can feel it bleeding through the ground."
That was when Ezra noticed the sigils.
Circles — carved into the dirt with his boot heel. Neat, clean lines intersecting, repeating. Not random scribbles. A pattern.
Atlas must've been working on it for hours.
The air inside the circle shimmered faintly, like heat distortion.
Ezra took a step back. "What the hell is this?"
Atlas blinked, as if only now remembering he wasn't alone. His glasses caught the firelight; for a heartbeat Ezra swore the reflection behind them wasn't flame, but gold.
"It's… order," Atlas said. His tone was steady, but his eyes weren't. "There's resonance here. Faint, but pure. You feel it too, don't you? When the world breathes wrong?"
He looked almost hopeful.
Ezra hesitated. He wanted to say no — that he didn't feel anything, that this was just another symptom of starvation and stress. But he had felt something, in the back of his skull, like pressure building before a storm.
He didn't admit it.
Atlas smiled faintly, as if he already knew. "Don't worry. It's not dangerous. Yet."
Then he stepped out of the circle and brushed the dirt from his hands. The humming faded, replaced by the whisper of leaves.
Over the next few days, Atlas's behavior only deepened.
He stopped eating much. He'd go out before dawn and come back with dust on his boots and eyes rimmed red. When Ezra pressed him, he said he'd been mapping resonance fields.
Whatever that meant.
Even Rowan, who normally didn't interfere, started watching him closer. Once, Ezra caught Rowan glancing at Atlas the same way he had looked at Merrick before the fight — wary, calculating.
That was when the others started noticing the hum, too.
Small things. The sound of the fire crackling at the same rhythm as their heartbeats. The stones around the camp vibrating faintly when Atlas walked by.
One night, Rin jolted awake mid-dream and swore she'd heard someone singing under the ground.
Cassian joked that it was Atlas rehearsing lullabies for the dead. Nobody laughed.
Ezra tried to talk to him again a few nights later.
Atlas was kneeling near the perimeter, palms resting flat against the dirt, eyes closed. His breath came in even intervals. It looked like prayer.
Ezra crouched beside him. "You planning to dig through the planet or something?"
Atlas didn't open his eyes. "Shh."
"Don't 'shh' me. You've been acting weird since the brothers left."
At that, Atlas smiled faintly.
Ezra frowned. "You're not making sense."
Atlas finally looked up. "You don't hear it, do you?"
"Hear what?"
"The shift." He tapped his temple lightly. "It's getting louder. The Trial's changing pitch."
Ezra had no reply. Just a quiet unease settling in his chest like silt in still water.
Atlas stood, brushing off his knees. "When it breaks," he said softly, "you'll hear it too."
Then he walked back toward camp, leaving Ezra alone in the dark.
The wind moved through the trees. And just for a moment — a half-second, maybe less — Ezra swore he heard it:
A faint, deep vibration, crawling under his skin.
Like the forest itself was tuning.
It seemed the only one not unnerved by Atlas's behavior was Soren.
While the others flinched from the hum that had begun bleeding through the camp at night — faint vibrations crawling through the earth, rattling the bowls, whispering up through bone — Soren just listened.
And watched.
He'd traded hunting duty with Rowan a few days ago, saying little. Rowan didn't argue — maybe because everyone had already noticed how closely Soren's eyes tracked Atlas.
Not protectively.
More like… gravity.
Atlas had grown quieter since the forest began to change. His voice was almost gone, replaced by murmurs — fragments of patterns, sequences, vibrations that didn't sound human. Sometimes, when he touched the stones, they answered.
A hum, soft but exact, as though the world recognized him.
Ezra had seen it the first night. Atlas kneeling in the dirt, fingers spread wide, eyes unfocused. The resonance crawling from his hands into the rock like veins of light. His lips moving around a rhythm no one else could hear.
Then Soren's hand had come down on his shoulder. Firm. Commanding.
The light had stopped instantly.
No argument. No hesitation.
Atlas just exhaled and went still.
It wasn't submission. It was synchrony.
Like two halves of a circuit — one feeding power, the other deciding where it went.
Ezra couldn't tell if it scared him more that Soren knew how to stop him… or that no one else could.
By the fourth night, the hum was constant.
The stones around the camp shivered faintly when Atlas passed by.
Sometimes his gaze would fix on nothing — far, vacant — like he was staring through the world's skin.
And Soren would be there again, never more than an arm's reach away, eyes calm but alert, the way someone might watch a loaded weapon.
Ezra had caught bits of their conversations — if you could call them that.
Not words, really. Frequencies.
Atlas muttering a sequence of tones under his breath, Soren responding with a correction so subtle it barely counted as sound. They weren't speaking — they were tuning.
Rin had noticed too. "They creep me out," she'd muttered once, rubbing sleep from her eyes. "It's like he's dreaming with his eyes open, and Soren's the one holding the knife in case he doesn't wake up right."
Ezra didn't disagree.
He'd seen the way Soren looked at Atlas when the resonance built too loud — not pity, not fear. Something sharper. Something like reverence and exhaustion woven together.
A look that said you are everything terrible I've sworn to protect anyway.
Atlas barely ate anymore. Barely slept. He'd come out of trance with blood under his fingernails, eyes rimmed in violet, muttering about "the pattern under the pattern" — whatever that meant.
And when his knees buckled, Soren would catch him before he hit the ground. Every time. Like reflex.
The rest of them pretended not to see.
But Ezra couldn't stop watching.
Because when Atlas's gaze met his, even for a second, he could swear the hum grew louder — like the world was waiting for him to say the wrong thing and set something ancient free.