They wore no robes. They carried no relics. But their voices—Gods, their voices—carried across the city like wind across graves.
The Hollow Choir did not preach.
They sang.
It began near the riverbanks. People claimed to hear melodies rising from the old flood tunnels—discordant lullabies that echoed through the sewers at dusk. Then came the disappearances. Entire families, neighbors said, walked into the woods behind their homes and never came out. Some left notes written in an unknown language that vanished when touched by light.
Lucas found the first body on the twelfth day.
A boy, no older than ten, his eyes plucked out, but smiling. Mouth stitched into a perfect O.
Carved into the wall above him, in jagged syllables that made Lucas's ears bleed when he read them, were three words:
SING OR FADE.
Malgros stirred in his chest. "They are drones. Instruments. Ephraal doesn't control them—it plays them."
Lucas knelt beside the boy's body, tracing the sigil branded into his skin. It wasn't demonic. It was alien. Like a language never meant to be written, only felt.
He took the boy's hand, still warm.
"I'll bury you," Lucas whispered. "Then I'll find whoever sang your name into silence."
He burned the sigil from the wall before leaving. Not out of mercy.
Out of fear it might remember him.
The next night, he found them.
A circle of figures beneath an abandoned overpass, draped in mismatched clothing—wedding veils, graduation robes, infant swaddles. All remnants of identity, stitched together like patchwork.
One stepped forward, face covered in a mask made of human teeth.
"We are the forgotten," they said in unison. "We are the Choir. Will you sing?"
Lucas said nothing.
They raised their hands in perfect synchronization, mouths gaping. No sound.
Just absence.
And then—song.
But not music. Not rhythm or melody. The Choir sang in concepts—the sound of drowning in a memory you never made, the grief of a mother who outlives all timelines where her child survived.
Lucas staggered, ears bleeding, vision warping.
Then fire surged.
Malgros took over.
The scream that tore from Lucas's throat was not his. It was the wrath of a demon born of the first inferno. Flame twisted like serpents, shadows bent and screamed. The Choir faltered. One caught fire—silently. Another crumbled into a statue of salt.
The rest scattered.
Lucas collapsed afterward, vision dim, skin steaming.
And from the dark, a voice spoke.
"You're late, Thorne."