Arin's POV
The sky had forgotten how to be blue.
Every sunrise bled out in silver ash, the light filtering through clouds that pulsed like tired hearts. The air itself hummed with residue an echo of the Choir that had once screamed across the world.
Arin trudged through the hollow streets of Veyrn, the soles of his boots whispering over dust that glittered faintly, as though it remembered stars. Behind him, the city groaned metal settling, stone sighing, ghosts breathing in unison. Nothing was truly still anymore. Even silence had texture.
He stopped at the edge of a broken plaza where the marble had folded in on itself like paper. A cracked statue of the Twelve lay face-down, its once-divine visage eroded to anonymity.
He almost missed when the wind changed soft, low, and shaped like a voice.
"Do you hear them?"
Liora's reflection shimmered on the air beside him before her body resolved light bending around her frame as she stepped out of a mirage. Her hair floated with the faint luminescence of the Siren's curse. She looked the same as before, but her eyes carried the shimmer of something more ancient.
"They're still singing," she said. "Beneath the rubble. Beneath us."
Arin tightened his grip on his weapon its edge dulled, but still humming faintly with his Aura.
"Let them sing," he muttered. "It's the living we need to hear from."
Liora knelt, placing her hand on the fractured ground. The dust rippled outward in concentric circles. For a heartbeat, the world bent buildings leaned toward her as though drawn by gravity that no longer belonged to this realm.
The Choir's Residue.A fragment of the Apostate's final act.
It still lingered, rewriting laws, birthing something new and dangerous in every corner of existence.
She felt it thrumming through her blood a promise and a threat.
"Something's taking shape," she whispered. "Something learned from the Choir."
"Then we stop it before it learns too much."
They moved through the ruins together. Shadows whispered names neither recognized. The wind carried fragments of memory, whole conversations caught between broken walls.
When they reached the riverbank, Arin froze.
The river no longer flowed. It breathed. Each rise and fall of the surface exhaled pale mist, carrying faint whispers that echoed in the mind more than the ear.
Among the fog stood figures pale, translucent, and half-real. The remnants of those touched by the Choir's first verse.
Liora took a hesitant step forward. One of the phantoms turned its face toward her, and though it had no features, she felt recognition.
"The Apostate lives in your pulse," it murmured. "He left you to finish the hymn."
Before Arin could speak, the world convulsed. The air fractured into sound low, resonant, like an organ dragging through thunder. And from the fog stepped a figure cloaked in crimson glass.
The first of the new enemy.
Its voice was many and one:
"The Lament awakens. The Choir was only the opening note."
Liora's eyes burned silver. Arin raised his blade. Around them, the city's ruins shuddered, and the dead river began to sing.
Arin's POV
The crimson figure moved first.
A ripple tore through the fog, scattering shards of sound. It didn't step it folded through space, appearing before them with a motion too fluid to belong to flesh.
Arin reacted on instinct.
His blade screamed as it met the entity's arm steel against something denser than metal, lighter than air. Sparks of fractured memory flared where they struck, brief images of the old world flashing and dying.
"Liora!"
She was already moving. A silver pulse burst from her hand, ribbons of light snapping like whips. The glow carved through the mist, tearing open brief windows to another realm the Aether Recess, where the Choir's echo still pulsed. Her control faltered; she'd never drawn this much energy before.
The crimson figure absorbed the light.
Every strike she unleashed bled into it, feeding the glow within its glass-like skin.
And then it spoke again, voice split between laughter and weeping:
"The Apostate's heirs… unfinished symphonies."
Its hand extended. The air distorted, pulling Arin off his feet.
He slammed into a column, ribs cracking, breath exploding from his lungs. His vision blurred but even through the haze, he saw the ground beneath them begin to move.
The city itself was remembering how to live.
Tiles shifted like scales. Streets pulsed in rhythm with the river's song. Every surface began to reflect the crimson light, like the entire ruin was turning into a mirror of their battle.
Arin spat blood and forced himself up.
"If you want a song" he growled, "then let's make it loud."
He ignited his blade with his Resonance Core, and the world around him distorted in response. The concept of sound became tangible.
Every step he took sent ripples through the air, bending physics like soft clay.
The weapon wasn't just steel now it was frequency, a weapon that sang back.
He lunged.
The impact split the square in half. Dust spiraled upward, turning into luminous ash.
Liora joined him—her light no longer silver, but a blinding white threaded with faint blue veins.
She tore open the veil between realities, channeling the Aether Recess directly. The world around them warped, buildings twisting upward into pillars of sound and light.
The crimson entity faltered for the first time.
"You… harmonize?"
"We adapt," Arin hissed.
He drove his blade through its chest. The sound exploded outward, a shockwave that cracked the mirrored streets.
Liora followed, placing her palm against its head—her power flaring as she whispered:
"Return to the silence you came from."
The entity shattered. Not in glass or blood, but in notes—a cascade of luminous glyphs that scattered into the mist. The sound that followed wasn't an explosion.
It was a chord.
A perfect, haunting tone that made the sky tremble.
And in that note, a whisper bloomed inside both their minds.
"The Lament is not an army. It is the song of the world trying to correct itself."
The mist collapsed.
The city fell still.
And in the distance, beneath the horizon, a massive structure began to rise—a cathedral of bone and glass, glowing faintly crimson.
Liora fell to her knees.
Arin stared, breathing hard.
Neither spoke, because they both felt it: the presence of something vast watching through the cracks of reality.
The Lament wasn't born to destroy.
It was born to rewrite.