The silence that followed the tunnel's collapse was heavy and absolute. James's ragged breathing and the faint, feverish sighs from Sophia were the only sounds. His pact with the strange girl hung in the air between them, a fragile and dangerous unknown.
"So," James said, his voice hoarse as he readjusted his grip on his sister. "You guide. I… let you listen. What does that mean?"
Nyx's glowing eyes fixed on him, her expression unreadable. She didn't answer with words. Instead, she knelt beside them on the dusty floor. Her movements were unnervingly deliberate. She gestured for him to set Sophia down. Wary, James gently propped his sister against the tunnel wall.
"Don't… hurt her," he warned.
Nyx ignored him. She closed her eyes to glowing slits, and the crystal shards around her neck began to hum, emitting a soft, multi-toned drone. She held her hand out, not touching Sophia, but letting her palm hover an inch above the creeping grey stone of her cursed hand.
The air between them warped. Using his own unraveling sense, James saw something far stranger than a simple spell. Nyx wasn't manipulating the Threads of the curse. Her own chaotic, unstable Pattern was beginning to vibrate, matching the dissonant frequency of Sophia's affliction. She was resonating with it, like a tuning fork matching a sound wave. It was an act of empathy so profound and alien it made the hairs on James's arms stand up.
"So many tangled notes…" Nyx's whispers echoed around them, seeming to come from her and from the walls themselves. "A lullaby of stillness. It is afraid."
"The curse is afraid?" James asked, baffled.
"No," Nyx chimed. "The singer. She is afraid of the quiet."
With that, the humming stopped, and Nyx stood up. The brief, intense connection was over. "This way," she whispered, turning to face the oppressive darkness of the tunnel. "The loud paths draw the Quiet Ones. We will walk the silent spots."
What followed was a journey through a world that obeyed none of the rules James knew. Nyx led them not through tunnels, but through the city's forgotten veins. She would press her hand against a solid-looking wall, her head tilted as if listening to something, then point. "Here. The Pattern is thin." James would have to use his power to unravel a small section of rock, creating a crawlspace into another, adjacent passage. She moved through the world by sensing its weaknesses, its absences.
They traversed corridors where gravity felt subtly lighter, making Sophia's weight easier to bear. They passed through caverns filled with strange, crystalline fungi that would shrink away from their body heat. The silence was their shield.
Hours bled into one another until they found a defensible alcove, lit by a cluster of gently glowing mushrooms. James finally had a chance to give Sophia a few sips from his dwindling water skin. He looked at Nyx, who was perched on a rock, watching them with her unnerving, luminous eyes.
"That creature back there," James asked, needing to understand. "What was it?"
"The Great Pattern has a song," Nyx explained in her cryptic way. "Weavers make it louder. Unravelers… you make it scream. The Quiet Ones hate all songs. They are born in the silence between notes. They come to eat the noise."
It was a terrifyingly simple explanation. His very power was a beacon for monsters that hunted magic itself. "And what are you?" he pressed.
She touched her chest with two fingers. "I am a listener," she whispered. "Born from a quiet song." She was a child of this broken place, as much a part of it as the pulsing crystals and the shifting gravity.
As they rested, Nyx approached again, her expression more focused this time. "The payment," she chimed softly. James nodded warily and let her kneel beside Sophia.
The ritual was the same, but this time, Nyx's humming was deeper, more intense. She leaned closer, her brow furrowed in concentration. The shimmering between her hand and Sophia's grew brighter. James felt a protective surge, but he held himself back. This was the deal.
"There is more to this song than stillness," Nyx's whispers sharpened. "There is a name. Woven into the heart of the knot."
James's blood ran cold. "A name? Whose name?"
"I cannot read it," she replied, pulling her hand back. The glow faded. "It is a silent thread. A thread of forgetting. It is… anchored."
The implications were staggering. Sophia's curse wasn't a random magical blight. It was a targeted, intelligent spell, an anchor designed to make something—or someone—be forgotten. And it was still connected to its source.
Before James could question her further, Nyx stood and pointed down the tunnel. "We are close."
They traveled for another ten minutes before the narrow passage opened onto a scene of breathtaking, desolate grandeur. They stood on a crumbling precipice overlooking a cavern so vast it seemed to have its own weather system. A faint, ethereal mist coiled through the darkness below, swirling around the colossal corpses of ancient buildings. Towers lay shattered on their sides, their tops lost in the gloom. Ornate bridges, once connecting spires, now hung broken, leading nowhere. Gravity in this place was a shattered suggestion.
This was it. A city's graveyard, buried in the bowels of the world. The Sinking Grades.
Nyx raised a thin arm, pointing towards the center of the cavern where the ruin of a massive, impossibly tall spire jutted up from the mist, a dark spear aimed at a heart that had long stopped beating. A faint, sick-purple energy seemed to pulse from its peak.
"The song is loudest there," her whispers echoed, carrying a new, ominous weight. "And… it is not the only one."
James strained his own senses, pushing his unraveling ability out into the vast emptiness. He couldn't discern the fine details Nyx could, but he felt it. A deep, dormant thrum of power from that central spire. A slow, rhythmic pulse of dissonance that felt ancient and malevolent.
The curse on his sister wasn't unique. They had followed its echo right into a nest.