The Raven's Message
The raven spiraled down through blackened skies, its wings stiff with ash. As it descended, the world around it seemed to quiet — no wind, no echo, just a suffocating stillness.
Jack stood at the cliff's edge, overlooking the dying forest of Nhal. He caught the raven as it landed on his shoulder. Its eyes — twin voids — stared into his own.
The message was not written.
It was carved into absence.
Jack flinched as the silence invaded his mind — a voice without sound, a scream without air. A symbol formed in his thoughts: a shattered eye wreathed in flame, the mark of the Null Choir.
A location followed: Eldenfall.
He dropped the raven. It turned to dust before hitting the ground.
"I guess we're not done," Jack muttered.
---
Eldenfall's Warning
Eldenfall was a dead city beneath a sleeping volcano. Its towers were hollowed out by time, its people long abandoned to myth. But deep beneath its catacombs lay something ancient — a shard of the divine, buried during the War of Crowns.
Jack walked its streets in silence.
No footsteps echoed. No birds cried. The air was too still.
Then he saw her.
A woman — tall, elegant, silver hair falling like silk — leaned against the remnants of a statue. Her face was half-covered by a porcelain mask shaped like a broken harp.
Sable Wren.
Operative of the Null Choir.
"You came," she said.
Jack didn't answer.
"I've read your sins," she said softly. "Do you know what echoes louder than a scream?"
Jack's fist lit with fire.
She smiled beneath the mask.
"Silence."
---
Voice of the Choir
The air around her warped — glyphs made of negative space spread like disease, swallowing light. Jack felt his heartbeat falter. Something unnatural stirred in his chest.
Sable stepped forward. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "The Choir does not want your death, Jack. They want your correction."
"I'm not broken."
"No," she said. "You're unfinished."
She flicked her fingers. The ground beneath Jack cracked — and from the fissure rose a construct of nulllight: a beast stitched from shadows and broken prayers.
Jack summoned a storm.
Fire. Blood. Bone.
The creature tore through his flames like silk.
Sable walked into the darkness as the beast lunged. "You can't fight the Choir, Jack. You speak in roars. We answer with silence."
---
The Shard
Jack crushed the beast's skull in his bare hands — but the damage was done. His right arm pulsed with black veins. Void-touched. Poisoned by proximity.
Still, he moved forward.
He descended into the ruins of Eldenfall — toward the shard buried beneath layers of glass and forgotten gods.
It pulsed with golden light.
He reached out.
The moment his hand touched it, everything fractured.
He saw Heaven. He saw the Devil. He saw Ashen Vox standing in a chamber of mirrors, blindfolded, surrounded by a choir of the voiceless.
And he saw himself — wearing a crown made of thorns and smoke, ruling over a world of silence.
Jack screamed.
The shard responded — bending toward his will, reshaping.
When he opened his eyes, the shard was gone.
Replaced by a brand on his chest: a burning eye surrounded by silence.
---
A Choice in the Dark
Sable Wren watched from the rooftops as Jack emerged from the ruins.
"You've taken the shard," she whispered. "And now you carry the silence."
Jack didn't stop walking.
"I'm not your weapon."
"You're not ours yet," she said. "But soon. Heaven has abandoned its throne. Hell has no king. The world needs a choir."
He turned once, eyes cold.
"Then let them sing while they still have tongues."
Lightning cracked.
Sable vanished into dust.
---
Ashen Vox Listens
In a chamber beyond time, where echoes had no source, Ashen Vox stood before a circle of empty thrones.
The mirrors pulsed.
"He has the shard," Sable's voice echoed from nowhere.
Ashen didn't move.
"He carries our brand, but he resists the song."
Ashen spoke, barely above a breath. "He will listen."
The thrones vibrated with unheard tones.
Ashen stepped into the void between mirrors, each reflecting a future undone.
The Silence She Chose
Before she was Sable Wren, she was called Thalara — a priestess of the Starlit Oath, born under a sky that never blinked.
She once sang to gods.
She once bled for them.
But when the Heavenly Concord fell, and the celestial war scorched the firmament, Thalara watched her temple burn — not from enemy fire, but from the wrath of the very god she worshiped.
She cried out for mercy.
None came.
Only silence answered.
And in that silence, something else stirred.
The Null Choir found her beneath the bones of her god. They did not offer salvation. They offered understanding. They showed her that divinity was just noise — and that silence was truth.
They took her voice.
They gave her purpose.
Her name was erased from all tongues. She became Sable Wren, the masked disciple of the Void Harp — a weapon of stillness in a world addicted to sound and fury.
Now, when she speaks, her voice is not hers.
It is the echo of a godless hymn.
And as she watches Jack descend into the dark, she remembers the last thing her god ever said before silence claimed it:
> "Even the stars must answer to the dark."
Beneath Eldenfall – Echoes Without Name
The stone groaned beneath Jack's boots as he stepped into the ancient ossuary beneath Eldenfall.
No light touched these corridors. Only the memory of screams remained.
The black shard pulsed faintly in his palm — reacting, guiding. As if the ruin remembered him.
But he wasn't alone.
Jack stopped.
He didn't turn, but he felt her — the pressure of presence without breath, silence without stillness.
"I know you're there," he said quietly.
From the veil of shadows, she emerged.
Sable Wren — her mask glinting like obsidian carved from midnight. Her cloak didn't ripple. Her steps didn't echo. She simply was.
Jack's eyes narrowed. "You followed me from the Cradle."
She tilted her head.
Not in confusion.
In recognition.
And then, with gloved fingers, she reached for the harp-shaped sigil on her belt — a weapon crafted from voidsong, taut with string that could cut both flesh and memory.
Still, she did not speak.
"You Null types always so shy?" Jack muttered, taking a half step back, letting the shard hum stronger in his grip. "Or did your voice drown in that pretty little Choir of yours?"
At that, her stance shifted. The temperature dropped. Silence deepened — not quiet, but cancellation. Jack's heartbeat slowed. His thoughts dragged.
Null-field.
He'd felt it before.
She moved.
Fast.
Jack barely deflected her first strike — her harp-string whip slicing the air where his throat had been. He rolled, sent a burst of blood-crafted spears flying. She caught them with a motion of her fingers, unraveling them in mid-air with a shimmer of voidlight.
She was efficient. Elegant.
And terrifying.
But something held her back. Jack saw it. A delay. A hitch in her attacks. Not fear. Not mercy.
Memory.
He surged forward, using Power Cancellation for a split second — enough to crack her null aura.
Their eyes locked.
And in that flash, Jack saw it — behind her mask, the flicker of a soul still bound by pain.
"You were divine once," he whispered, almost surprised.
Sable froze.
Just for a breath.
Then she vanished, slipping into silence like water through cracks.
The air returned. The darkness remained.
Jack stood alone again.
But now he understood.
They weren't just hunting him.
They were trying to reclaim something lost.
And she — Sable Wren — might be the only one left who remembered what they lost.
Voice of the Void
Above the ruin, a storm churned — not of thunder, but of silence.
Sable Wren stood atop a spire of obsidian stone outside Eldenfall, her mask turned toward the night. The winds did not touch her. Her cloak did not move.
She raised her left hand.
The air parted.
And Ashen Vox stepped through.
Tall. Hooded in gray smoke. A dozen null-runes floated around his body like broken moons in orbit. His face was featureless — not blank, but erased. A hymn of negation hummed in his wake.
"You faced him," Vox said, though no mouth moved. His voice arrived as thought pressed into her skull.
Sable nodded once.
"And?"
"He carries the shard," she said aloud — the only voice allowed in the Choir.
"Did he awaken it?"
"Not yet," Sable replied. Her voice was low, rough like stone soaked in rain. "But it's close. He fought with restraint… but it's fracturing."
Vox turned toward the horizon. The stars trembled faintly in the sky, like teeth clattering behind reality.
"The Devil watches," he murmured.
"And God stays absent."
There was silence.
And then, Vox spoke again.
"We must accelerate."
He raised a hand — and from the shadows of the ruined landscape, others emerged.
Seven figures.
Choir-hunters. Each cloaked in sigils of silence. Each bearing weapons forged to unmake miracles.
Sable did not look at them.
She looked at the scar in her palm — the place where her divinity had once been sealed away. Where Jack had nearly broken through.
"What of the boy?" she asked.
Vox tilted his head.
"Let him descend. Let him reach the shard's core. Then silence him — forever."
And as the Choir melted back into the darkness, Sable remained.
Watching the path Jack had taken.
And though no one heard it — though the sky did not crack and no god wept — something ancient stirred beneath Eldenfall.
A final wall was crumbling.
And the Devil smiled.