The Church's response did not come as an army marching on the Echo Hold. That would have been too direct, too easily framed as persecution. Instead, the avalanche began with a single, silent snowflake: a decree.
It was announced from every pulpit in the city of Ain and disseminated to every town under the Church's sway. The "Cult of the Final Note" was officially declared a "Sect of Existential Apostasy."
The term was carefully chosen, cold and theological. It meant they were not merely heretics but a group whose very existence was a denial of divine order. The decree mandated that any person found to be aiding, harboring, or even failing to report a member of the sect was guilty of the same apostasy. The punishment was "cleansing" – a term that left little to the imagination.
It was a masterstroke of bureaucratic terror. They were not just outlawing Kaelen's followers; they were turning every neighbor, every family, into a potential informant.
The first reports trickled in within days. A farmer who had secretly traded with the Hold was dragged from his fields by his own neighbors, too terrified of the collective punishment to remain silent. A network of sympathizers in a nearby town simply vanished overnight. The world outside the Hold's territory was freezing over, a layer of fear solidifying over the nascent hope.
Then came the second wave. The Church deployed its most effective peacekeeping tool: economic sanctification. Any guild, merchant, or noble house that continued to engage with the "Apostates" would be cut off from the Church's immense financial and magical resources. Their goods would be deemed "unclean," their trade routes revoked, their access to elemental forges and healing denied.
The noble who had offered a pact sent a terse, apologetic message. The trade guild envoys were recalled. The Echo Hold was being strategically isolated, its lifeblood of information and supplies slowly choked off.
"They're not trying to crush us," Anya summarized, her face grim as she pointed at a map now dotted with reports of vanished contacts. "They're building a prison around us. They'll let us starve here, surrounded by a population too scared to even look in our direction."
Morwen, her face looking older than ever, nodded. "The whispers from the gutter have gone silent. Even the rats are afraid to speak."
A deep sense of claustrophobia began to seep into the very stones of the Hold. The grand cavern, once a symbol of open possibility, started to feel like a gilded cage. The music practiced by the lake began to sound strained, the notes echoing with a new desperation.
Kaelen felt the walls closing in. This was a battle his power was useless against. How do you decay a decree? How do you age an idea born of fear?
He found Elara by the lake, not conducting or planning, but simply staring into the depths, her shoulders slumped. The brilliant Conductor was facing a problem that couldn't be solved with a clever song or a strategic performance.
"They've learned," she said softly, without turning. "They saw that they couldn't defeat our idea with force, so they're smothering it with silence. They're making us irrelevant."
For the first time, Kaelen saw a crack in her unwavering confidence. It frightened him more than any Hound. He moved to stand beside her.
"An idea doesn't need trade routes to survive," he said, echoing her own teachings back to her. "It just needs a single person to remember it."
She looked at him, a sad smile touching her lips. "And how do we find that person when everyone is too afraid to listen?"
It was Wisp who brought the spark that cracked the ice. He faded into the council chamber, his small face pale but his eyes blazing with excitement. "They're using the river!" he blurted out. "The big river, the Aven! Church boats, with big bells on them. They're sailing up and down, and priests on the boats are preaching the decree to every village along the banks. They're using the water to carry their words everywhere!"
Anya scowled. "So? We can't attack boats. It would be a massacre, and it would prove their point that we're monsters."
But Elara was suddenly very still. She looked from Wisp to Kaelen, and the familiar, calculating glint returned to her eyes.
"The water..." she whispered. "They're using the water to spread their message." A slow, triumphant smile spread across her face. "But water... can carry more than one song."
She turned to the group, her energy restored. "They think they can silence us by building walls of fear on land. But they've forgotten the rivers. They've given us a highway straight into the heart of the territories they're trying to turn against us."
The plan that formed was the most dangerous yet. It wouldn't be a performance for a single garrison. It would be a broadcast. A message in a bottle thrown into the central artery of the region.
It relied on Lyra's deepening connection to water and Kaelen's most subtle, precise work yet. Not on stone, but on sound itself. The idea was to encode a message, a single, simple, calming melody—a lullaby of resistance—into the very flow of the river Aven. A song that would hum along the banks, seep into the wells, and whisper to the people in their sleep, a counterpoint to the Church's bells of fear.
It was a gamble of monumental proportions. If it worked, it would be a miracle. If it failed, or if they were caught, it would be the end.
But as Kaelen looked at Elara, now ablaze with purpose again, he knew they had no choice. The Church had started an avalanche of fear. They would answer with a river of hope. The silence would not hold.