Dawn was a frayed chord.
The bells tolled, but their voices staggered—east a breath too late, south dragging half a beat behind. The hymn still rose, catching on the throats of thousands, but the shimmer above the Choir City of Resona wavered like heat on stone. Kael stood at the western gate with the weight of silence pressed into his chest, his breath misting in the half-light, and felt the world lean toward fracture.
The boy had been peeled from him before the procession formed. One of the warders bent low, voice as flat as a blade, and said the child was no place for trial. The boy clutched Kael's sleeve until fingers whitened, until a guard's hands unlatched them one by one. No tears—only the blank stare of someone who had learned too young that mercy could be confiscated. Kael did not fight it. He only dipped his head and let the boy's touch fall away.
The Harmonium gathered like iron. Warders in throat-plates gleamed bronze in the dawn. Choir singers in gray linen whispered scales, weaving air-thin lines of harmony between their lips. Coran shouldered his pipe into a pouch and squared himself at Kael's side, one hand brushing the hilt of his short-sword as if a voice alone could not keep the world shut.
And there was the other. White-robed, lean, patient: the cultist observer. His hands folded neatly in front of him, his smile too polite to trust. His eyes tracked Kael like an abacus bead sliding from one column to the next.
"Walk," the priest ordered. Her voice cut across the hymn's outer wall like a stitch in torn cloth. The gate lifted. Air thinned. The expedition stepped beyond the shimmer.
⸻
The land outside the wards was the ruin left by old voices.
The air buzzed with fragments of chants that had long since lost their throats. Stones muttered half-syllables as wind combed them. A ditch whispered lullabies that curdled into sobs before they finished. Even silence was warped here, stretched thin across broken terrain until it trembled at the edge of hearing.
Kael walked at the rear, shadow tugging long across the dirt. Each step felt heavier. His chains lay coiled in the hollow of his chest, cold as iron dragged behind him. He touched them without touching, like someone testing a scar under clothes.
The singers marched in pairs, their notes thin but steady, weaving a small ward around the group. It shimmered in patches, enough to keep the stray whispers from blooming into claws. A single misstep, a crack in pitch, and the air could open. Kael kept his lips shut, the easiest command of his life.
Coran fell back once, muttering around the side of his mouth. "Don't watch their eyes, throatless. They want you to trip on them. Look at the ground. Stones don't ask questions."
Kael dipped his chin. The cultist ahead turned slightly, as if even silence carried meaning.
⸻
They reached the hollow before the sun cleared the horizon.
A scar in the ground, round as a wound. Inside, threads of broken hymn clung to the air like cobwebs, stretched taut and glimmering weakly. Something moved beneath them—slow, restless. A ripple of sound that was not sound, the promise of a shape.
"This is the remnant," the priest said, her throat-plate flashing with her breath. "A dirge-wolf. Bound here when a hymn snapped. Half-alive, half-loose. It will not stay contained."
The singers formed a ring at the hollow's rim, voices trembling into a low hum. The warders readied spears and staffs but did not descend. This was not their trial.
The cultist stepped closer, hands still folded. "If the boy fails," he murmured, "the wolf eats him. If he succeeds, he belongs to us."
Coran's jaw worked, but he said nothing.
Kael looked into the pit. The thing below stretched. Its body was long as a barrow, woven from funereal chants: verses bent into sinew, laments into bone. Its jaws dripped vowels like hot wax, steaming where they struck dirt. Eyes glowed with the strained brightness of notes held too long. The hymn-net quivered. Threads snapped one by one.
The dirge-wolf raised its head.
Kael descended.
⸻
The first howl nearly unmade him.
It was not heard so much as pressed into his ribs, a resonance that threatened to turn his bones to reed-pipes. One of the singers faltered; a thread of harmony broke. A warder choked blood into his throat-plate. The wolf surged, half out of the net, syllables dripping like saliva.
Kael's knees wavered. Silence swelled inside him, heavy, waiting. He remembered laughter collapsing into chains. He remembered the smell of dust and the boy's small hand clamped to his sleeve.
He opened himself to the hollow where a voice should live.
The chains answered.
They tore from him like breath too long withheld, black and weighty, not shadow but the second darkness that blooms behind closed eyes. They spilled from his hands, his ribs, his mouth that had no sound, wrapping the wolf mid-howl. The chains clanged like memory—like restraint remembered, like wrists bound long ago.
The dirge-wolf thrashed, its body splitting into fractured verses, each snapping like bone. The chains knotted them, twisted them, tightened. The beast writhed, tried to drag Kael inward—to the place his silence came from—but the chains held. His breath rasped though no sound came. Sweat blurred his sight. His arms shook as if he gripped the weight of the world.
Then, with a lurch like a snapped harp-string, the wolf collapsed. It folded into itself, syllables strangled, chant extinguished. Silence thudded outward, rippling the ground, and then there was nothing but the faint smell of smoke and the echo of absence.
Kael staggered. Coran was there, rough hands steadying him, pipe smoke clinging to his clothes.
"Easy," Coran muttered. "Easy, throatless."
⸻
The priest's face was carved from stone, unreadable but alive with calculation. "He lives," she said finally. "He belongs to Resona."
The cultist smiled, thin as a knife. "No. He does not bind. He devours. He belongs to absence."
The singers looked at Kael as if their notes would never be steady again. The warders shifted, uneasy. Coran's grip on his arm tightened, anchoring him like ballast.
Kael's chest burned. The chains sank back inside him, slow and heavy, like a tide returning to its black sea.
⸻
The expedition turned toward the city. The singers hummed their ward back into shape, though their voices trembled. The priest barked orders sharp as nails. The cultist walked a half-step behind Kael, hands folded, gaze never shifting.
Kael barely heard them.
Because beneath the ringing in his skull, beneath the ache in his bones, another sound stirred. Not Harmonium hymns. Not cult whispers. Not the weight of chains.
It was a voice. Deep. Patient. Older than the Choir Cities. It came from under the earth, under the world, a murmur shaped exactly to his hollow.
Kael.
His legs nearly buckled. He clenched his fists until nails bit blood. The priest shouted something. Coran steadied him. The cultist's thin smile widened, as if he had heard it too.
Kael swallowed hard against a throat that had never spoken.
The voice came again, quieter but clearer, threading itself into the silence inside him.
Mine.