[Lyra]
The relay tower moaned in the ash wind. Its ribs were cedar and old iron, its throat a ladder of bronze chimes that sang when the gusts turned mean. Lyra tightened the leather tie on her hair and leaned over the listening dish - a shallow bowl of fired clay, rim wound with copper, gut-strings stretched across like a spider web. Each vibration plucked a faint tone into the crystal lodged at its base.
Storm grit stung her cheeks. Below, Rivermere's scar wore a crown of smoke. Fields nearest the black river lay dead and salted, grain collapsed into gray straw. Someone had carved a warning into the road with wagon wheels days ago: TURN BACK. No one had. Hunger didn't turn.
Marek steadied the mast. "Hold it there."
"I am." Lyra spoke without looking up. The pattern had returned - soft and regular through the ash hum. Three beats, pause, two beats, pause, three again. Not thunder. Not the volcanic teeth still worrying the range. This was lower, steadier, an animal heartbeat carried through the mountain's bones.
Marek frowned. "Still say it's geothermal chatter."
Lyra traced the line of scratches on her slate. "Geothermal doesn't sing in prime intervals." She tapped the crystal. It answered with a faint glow, then dulled. "And it doesn't answer when you ask."
"Ask?"
She hummed, low in her throat, and brushed the gut-strings. The dish fed the hum into the crystal. The tower's chimes fell quiet as if listening with them. A heartbeat later, the ground through the mast gave a muted reply - the same interval, one tone brighter, as if some far chamber had echoed with a bowl of its own.
Marek's fingers slipped on the mast rope. "By the stones."
Lyra almost smiled. "Hello to you too."
They marked time for a while, not talking. The pattern repeated, drifted, returned. It was never loud. If the wind rose, it vanished under the chime-clatter. If a wagon rattled the road, it hid in the wheel-song. But when the ash calmed and the chimes stilled, the hum was always there.
"This puts us on a Guild rope," Marek said at last. "If the Council hears you're answering ghosts under a live caldera, they'll seize the tower for 'safety' and chain the dish under ten laws."
Lyra tied the log closed with waxed thread. "Then we give the Council nothing. We give the right people a path."
"Which people?"
"The ones who still remember what the Ward songs were for."
He stared at the black river, jaw tight. "I remember."
"Then help me tune."
[Forum - World Noise]
[RivermereWatch]: "Caravan 41 reports two bridges down, one rebuilt with ash-bricks. Trade time doubled. Bring your own water."
[GreenwardGrrl]: "Rot cure v2 works on four fields out of seven. Don't overboil tools. You're cooking the medicine."
[AshenGlass]: "Kilns stabilized at half fuel. Prices down a little. Now stop haggling over shards in my DMs."
[GuildClerk]: "Reminder: unauthorized divination towers near active fault lines will be dismantled. Report violators."
[WatcherCircle]: "Harmonic anomalies persist in Propervy band. Not natural. Not random."
[IronFist88]: "Went hunting. Bandits wearing plague masks now. Cowards."
[Nocti]: "Rumor: someone slowed infection spread in one sector. Not dev magic. Find the mechanism."
[Lyra]
They broke for water at dusk. Cinders drifted from the west like tired snow. At the base of the tower, a child waited with a copper kettle. Kesh lived in the relay huts and knew how to dodge Guild inspectors better than most grown smugglers. He grinned gap-toothed when Lyra tousled his hair.
"Any messages?" Lyra asked.
Kesh dug in his satchel and handed over a folded piece of gray paper sealed with blue wax. No Guild crest. A rivulet's curl - the old mark of the river priests who kept memory when city laws forgot.
Lyra cracked the seal. One line only: HEARD IT TOO. SAME INTERVAL. NORTHERN HARP CONFIRMS. HOLD THE CHOIR.
Marek read over her shoulder. "So it's spread."
"No," Lyra said, listening to the wind. "It's waking."
They climbed again. She tuned the dish, lowered her hum, and let the crystal drink the note. The reply came quicker this time - a ripple that made the bronze chimes murmur without a gust. Then another - from farther east, fainter - a different cadence, like a second singer finding the line.
Marek's brows rose. "Two?"
Lyra nodded. "Maybe three if we hold through night."
"And if the Guild scouts circle?"
She grimaced. "Then we look like bored lovers singing to keep warm, and you look like a fool who carved a harp out of a whale's rib and stuck it on a stick."
"Accurate," he said dryly.
[Greenward - Mill Town Perch]
The mill roofs wore a skin of spores. Wards painted in old plant dyes ringed doors and cracked like dry leaves. Down on the river bend, a new quarantine line glowed faint green over the water if you squinted. People pretended they could not see it. Seeing made things real.
Old Mother Jun leaned on her staff under the town bell and spat into the dust. In front of her, the Greenward guildmaster explained calmly why the new levy on herbs would be good for morale. Jun listened. When he finished, she pointed at the bell's crack.
"Morale breaks like that," she rasped. "Quiet until the day it drops on your head. Tell the god-counter in his tower that if he reaches for my sap again, I'll feed him to the river and call it a blessing."
Laughter rolled under the eaves. Not because it was funny, but because it felt like a breath.
A boy ran up with a slip of bark. Jun held it to the light and squinted. Three scratches, pause, two, pause, three.
"What's that then," the guildmaster sniffed.
Jun smiled with half her teeth. "It's the sound of old friends remembering the road."
She sent the bark north on the herb carts and told them to listen to the ground when they camped. If the earth answered, they were to answer back. Not with words. With hum and heartbeat.
[Rivermere - Caravan Road]
The road east of the ash fields was not a road anymore. It was a memory with ruts. Kasha walked point on Caravan 41 and sang under her breath as she set pace - an old river cadence that kept feet from forgetting they were a team. In the second cart, a steelleaf crate rattled - glass from Ashenfolk kilns, paid in advance, to be delivered to a Greenward healer who could make lenses to read fungus veins. In the rear cart, two boys coughed again and again until the driver sprinkled mint on their tongues to fool their lungs.
At sundown, they made camp near a broken bridge. The river there was too thick to drink and too thin to plow. Kasha knelt and pressed her ear to the ground.
"Hum," she told the youngest guard. "If the earth is kind, it will sing back and tell you where not to die."
He looked embarrassed. "It's dirt."
"It's old," she corrected, and hummed low. The guard blinked when the bridge stones answered with a faint tremor, as if polite.
They passed a cup of stew around and spoke of ordinary things - a new foal in the northern stalls, a stew recipe that made bone feel like meat, the price of ash-bricks. No one told ghost stories. In bad years, you respected the dark.
[Lyra]
Near midnight the wind died. The tower became a needle. The relay dish rang once like a wet finger on a wineglass and then fell still. The crystal pulsed faintly blue.
Lyra sang one steady note and let it fade. The reply came fast and layered - three-beat, two-beat, three - and underneath, a low bed of tone that was not from any tower.
Marek's eyes widened. "That's a Ward."
She nodded, throat tight. "And it's bound."
"How do you know?"
"You can hear the blood in it."
He stared at her as if she'd traded her face with a legend. "Then the Ghost is real."
"Or real enough," she said, and scribbled the time.
A lantern wobble showed on the road below. Two riders. Guild blue. Lyra pinched the dish strings silent and slid a canvas over the chimes. The tower became only a dark rib against a darker sky.
The riders reined in by the toll post. One lifted a speaking-horn. "Relay 7. By law of the Council, declare your purpose."
Marek lifted his own horn and pitched his voice bored. "Windwatch. Counting storm teeth."
"Windwatch is suspended within three leagues of a live fault."
"Storms do not read your notices," Marek said mildly.
Lyra held her breath. The riders muttered. Leather creaked. Hooves turned. They rode on.
Marek exhaled. "They will circle back."
"Then we finish before they remember how to think," Lyra said.
She tuned the final sequence slowly, not to draw attention. When the last note left the strings, the ground answered with a soft, unmistakable thrum that traveled up her bones and sat behind her eyes. She tasted salt and iron for a heartbeat, like biting her tongue.
"Alive," she whispered.
Marek reached for the cord that held the tower's little bell - their private signal to the next relay south. "We pass it?"
Lyra touched his wrist. "We start the choir."
[System]
World Event - The Choir Wakes
Effect: A loose network of low-tech harmonic relays has begun echoing the Subterranean Ward signal. Infection drift slowed a further small amount across connected regions.
Visibility: Low. Detection requires proximity and intent.
[Lyra]
By dawn, voices hummed from three perches and two caravan camps. One old river priest in the marshlands tuned a reed flute to the pulse. A glassmaker in Ashenfolk hills set three cooling rods to ring at the intervals, just to see if the tone would change the way the glass set.
It did. The pane cleared without bubbles. He swore softly and made a note to try again when no one watched.
Lyra wrapped her scarf and doused the tower lantern. Kesh slept curled under a blanket near the mast. She brushed ash from his hair. "Home," she said. "Before the blue coats think to ask a child a question."
Marek shouldered the crystal case. "If this is real, we've placed a target on our backs."
"Everything that matters is a target now," she said. "At least this sings."
They walked the ridge path toward the relay huts, boots white with ash by the second turn. Halfway down, the ground under the toe of Lyra's boot buzzed - one soft note, then silence.
Marek felt it too. "Reply?"
She smiled despite the ash sting. "Greeting."
[Cass]
The Ward's pulse braided with the work songs until the cavern felt like a drum. Cass slowed his breath to match the wave and let his palm rest on the resin curve. There - a faint external beat, warmer than the rock hum, lighter than their chants. Not stone. People.
He did not know their names. They did not know his. That was safer for all of them. But the sound moved through him like a promise: the world above had not collapsed into claws and hunger alone. Some still built. Some still listened.
"Someone heard us," Rilka whispered, eyes bright in the glow.
"Better," Cass said softly. "Someone answered."
Eshna stood in the arch with bandages draped over one arm, listening with her head tilted. "If they can hear us, they can follow the path back."
"They would find rock," Cass said. "And a dead road."
Her gaze cut to him. "And if the Guild listens?"
"Then the Guild will find songs without doors," he said. "Keep the choir small. Keep the doors closed."
She nodded once. "We keep children alive. We keep the ward alive. We keep the world at a distance."
Cass glanced at the sealed tunnels. Dust drifted in thin threads where hot air tried to rise and could not. He had dreamed of this - a wall between him and the rest of the shard. Now that he had it, he understood the cost line by line.
He laid a hand on the Ward and bowed his head. "Hold."
[Forum - World Noise]
[CaravanCarl]: "New chant spreading on the roads. Keeps pace. Folks swear stew tastes less like rust when someone hums it."
[GlassRush]: "Trialed a hum in the cooling hall as a joke. Batch came out clean. Doing it again but this time I'll pretend it was science."
[GuildClerk]: "Report any unauthorized sonic practices that may destabilize public order."
[MapTactician]: "Updated the ash-fault overlay. Two new safe lanes north. You're welcome."
[BloodPrinceTV]: "Arena tomorrow. If your god is a hum, I'll sing you to the floor."
[WatcherCircle]: "Choir nodes confirmed at six sites. Keep it quiet. Keep it kind."
[Lyra]
She tucked her day's notes in a clay sleeve and slid it under a floorboard no one checked. The Guild liked loud truths that could be taxed. Quiet ones that healed were dangerous.
A handbell chimed near the door. Marek glanced through the peephole and swore. Blue coats again. This time with a clerk, ink under his nails and a law-book hugged to his belly like a shield.
Lyra drew one long breath, tasting ash and something cleaner under it - the resonance still thinning in the air. She opened the door with a pleasant face learned in better years.
"Good morning, sirs. We counted fourteen storm teeth and one stubborn cloud."
The clerk sniffed. "By the Council's order, relay activities within a fault league are to be inventoried for safety."
"Inventory my kettle," Lyra said, stepping aside. "It sings when it boils, very dangerous."
Marek coughed a laugh into his sleeve. The clerk blushed and read his list as if it were armor. The guards poked at harmless things and missed the only one that mattered - a faint tone that made the nails in the doorframe hum when the wind dropped.
When they left, Marek sagged. "We cannot play this game forever."
Lyra watched the ash line on the horizon and felt the quiet beat under her heels. "We don't have to. We only have to play it long enough."
"For what?"
"For him to finish building."
[Cass]
He walked the rebuilt bridge while the Warbles slept. The river wore the night like a cloak. Somewhere in the far caverns, water fell in a steady thread that could have been rain if you closed your eyes.
He did not sing now. He counted stone. He marked where a second ward could sit if they ever pried enough resin from the deep. He measured how many breaths a child took walking from the nursery to the infirmary when afraid. He set these numbers in his head beside the pulse of the Choir.
"Hidden is not the same as alone," he told the dark.
The dark, for once, agreed.
He turned toward the forge caverns where Karrek's hammer would be first to wake. Work waited. Songs waited. The world above would forget him until it was ready to remember.
Cass preferred it that way.