They walked. That was the new, fragile reality. Kaelan, his mind aching from the constant effort of reading the world's resonance instead of seizing it. Morwen, a silent, hollowed-out ghost a dozen paces behind him, her presence a cold void in the periphery of his new senses.
The partnership was dead. What remained was a ceasefire between two prisoners of the same war, sharing a path for lack of any other direction. Kaelan led, not because he had a destination, but because motion was the only alternative to lying down and becoming another echo. Morwen followed, because his footsteps were a pattern to mimic, a simple algorithm to stave off the howling nothingness inside her.
They reached the foothills of the purple mountains. The air grew thin and sharp. The whispering silver grass gave way to hard, black scree that clattered underfoot. The resonance here was sharp, mineral, old. It was easier for Kaelan to parse than the chaotic hum of the plains. He could feel the deep, slow pulse of the mountain itself, a bass note beneath the sharper frequencies of the wind and the skittering things in the rocks.
He was so focused on maintaining this delicate, exhausting awareness that he almost missed it.
A new note.
It was wrong.
It wasn't the pure, guiding tone of the Library, nor was it the chaotic, wild energy of a predator or a raw memory. This was a deliberate, grinding dissonance. A sustained, psychic screech that felt like fingers on the chalkboard of his soul. It was the same energy the Reavers had used, but orders of magnitude more powerful, more organized.
He stopped, holding up a hand. Behind him, Morwen's footsteps ceased. She didn't ask why. She simply stopped.
"Do you feel that?" he whispered, his eyes scanning the jagged cliffs above.
Morwen was silent for a long moment. Her Weaver's senses, once so sharp, were likely still dulled by her catatonia. But the dissonance was too strong to ignore completely.
"...Yes," her voice was a rusty gate. "A scarring. A deliberate scarring of the local resonance." A flicker of the old professional assessment surfaced through the numbness. "It's not natural. It's… architectural."
Architectural. The word sent a chill through him. This wasn't a creature. This was something built.
They rounded a massive outcrop of purple rock and saw the source.
The mountain pass ahead was no longer a natural formation. The walls of the canyon had been… altered. Great, rib-like structures of a black, obsidian-like material arched across the narrow gap, pulsing with a sickly, internal green light. The structures were covered in the same chaotic, disruptive grooves the Reavers had worn on their masks, but these were vast, precise, and terrifyingly permanent. They hummed with that same grating dissonance, weaving a net of wrongness across the only path forward.
It was a gate. A barricade.
And standing before it, flanked by two hulking, masked Reavers whose dissonant fields made the air waver, was a man.
He was not dressed in scavenged leathers. He wore a long, tailored coat of a grey that seemed to drink the light. His face was uncovered, sharp and intelligent, with cold, calculating eyes that held no fanaticism, only a calm, absolute authority. He held no weapon. He didn't need one. The air around him obeyed him, bending into subtle, painful harmonics that made Kaelan's teeth ache.
This was no simple Reaver. This was their master.
The man's eyes—a flat, soulless grey—passed over Kaelan and locked onto Morwen. A faint, cold smile touched his lips.
"Morwen," he said, and his voice was the dissonance given words, a vibration that crawled over the skin. "The little Weaver who thinks she can play with forces she doesn't understand. I heard you were poking around my Meridian. I heard you had a new pet." His gaze flicked to Kaelan, and the smile widened. "Ah. The blank thing. The Scribe. I've been so looking forward to meeting you."
Morwen said nothing. She just stared, a deer frozen before a wolf.
Kaelan's mind raced. Fight was impossible. Flight was blocked. His old instinct screamed to find a memory, any memory, to Record and unleash, to pay whatever Tax was demanded.
No. Read. Understand.
He forced himself to reach out with his senses, to feel the man's resonance. It was like touching a live wire. The man's personal frequency was a masterful, controlled distortion, a standing wave of arrogance and absolute control. He was a Weaver, like Morwen, but where she bent resonance, he broken it and remade it in his own image.
"You have something I want, little Scribe," the man said, taking a step forward. The dissonance from the gate amplified, pressing down on them. "A talent. A unique ability to access… foundational truths. You will come with me. You will be my master key."
Kaelan stood his ground, his heart hammering. "Who are you?"
The man gave a slight, mocking bow. "I am Malachi. And I am the architect of the new Echoing. This world is a broken, chaotic mess. I intend to fix it. To re-tune it to a more… efficient frequency. You will help me."
"I won't," Kaelan said, the defiance feeling small and pathetic against the wall of wrongness.
Malachi's smile didn't falter. "You will. Or I will unmake your friend here, thread by thread, until her echo is nothing but static. And then I will take you anyway."
He raised a hand toward Morwen. The air around her began to twist, the resonant frequencies that made up her very being starting to fray.
Morwen gasped, a short, sharp sound of pure agony. She didn't fight. She didn't even try to weave a defense. She just closed her eyes, as if welcoming it.
Kaelan saw it. The total surrender. The desire for an end.
And something in him snapped.
He couldn't Record. He couldn't fight this monster on his own terms.
But the Librarian had shown him another way.
He looked at the gate. Not as a barrier, but as a thing. A structure of corrupted resonance. He reached out with his mind, not to fight its dissonance, but to understand it. He read its frequency, its pattern, its arrogant, imposed order.
And he found its flaw.
It was too perfect. Too controlled. It had no flexibility. It was a single, sustained, brutal note. And like any sustained note, it created a standing wave. It had nodes of relative quiet, points where the dissonance canceled itself out.
He couldn't break the note. But he could disrupt the harmony of its delivery.
He didn't have a weapon. He had a counterpoint.
He focused on the deep, slow, ancient pulse of the mountain itself—the steady, patient bass note he had felt beneath everything. It was the antithesis of Malachi' shrill, manufactured dissonance. It was real. It was true.
He didn't try to grab it. He couldn't. It was too vast. Instead, he did what he had done with the Grass-Hound. He amplified it. He focused all his will, all his straining mental energy, and gave the mountain's pulse a voice at the exact frequency that would interfere with the gate's standing wave.
It was not an attack. It was a correction.
A deep, sub-sonic thrum resonated through the pass, a sound so low it was felt rather than heard. It was the mountain itself, speaking through him.
The effect on the gate was instantaneous.
The sickly green light flickered violently. The grating dissonance wavered, splintered, and for a crucial half-second, fractured into a dozen clashing, chaotic frequencies. The carefully maintained standing wave collapsed.
The gate didn't shatter. It screamed. A psychic shriek of feedback and disrupted control that made Malachi stagger, his concentration broken.
The twisting air around Morwen released its hold.
Malachi whirled on Kaelan, his cold composure shattered, his face a mask of furious disbelief. "What did you DO?"
Kaelan didn't answer. He was on his knees, gasping, his nose bleeding from the mental effort. He had no strength left.
But he had bought a second.
He looked at Morwen, who was staring at him, her eyes wide with something other than numbness—with shock.
"RUN!" he screamed at her.
For a heartbeat, she remained frozen. Then, the survival instinct, buried deep under layers of grief, reasserted itself. She turned and fled back down the pass, her movements clumsy and desperate.
Malachi took a step toward Kaelan, his hand rising, raw, killing dissonance gathering around his fingers. "You insignificant—!"
He never finished.
From the now-unstable gate, a wave of uncontrolled resonant feedback lashed out like a whip. It wasn't aimed; it was a spasm. It caught Malachi across the chest, not with force, but with a transformative, unraveling energy.
He didn't cry out. He… glitched. His form flickered, his features distorting for a microsecond into something static and alien before snapping back into place. The impact threw him backward against the pulsing black ribs of his own gate.
He slumped to the ground, not unconscious, but stunned, his own creation's backlash having temporarily short-circuited his control.
Kaelan didn't wait. He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the fire in his mind, and ran.
He caught up to Morwen at the bottom of the pass. She was leaning against a rock, vomiting from the adrenaline and the residual dissonance. She looked up as he approached, her face pale, her eyes clear for the first time since the Library. The void in her had been filled, momentarily, with sheer, primal terror.
They looked at each other, not as Scribe and Weaver, not as tools or enemies.
They looked at each other as two people who had just stared into the abyss and seen it stare back with the face of a man named Malachi.
The silent ceasefire was over. They had a common enemy.
The game had just changed.