Haraza stood frozen in the pulsing chamber beneath the ruins of Vell'tara, the glyph on his arm burning with heatless fire. Before him stood the woman called Voice, surrounded by dozens of the Ash-Woken, all swaying in rhythm to a melody that should not exist—one that existed outside sound, outside comprehension, outside time.
They were humming not with their mouths, but their very presence. The air shimmered with resonance, like vibrating crystal just before it shatters.
Voice stepped forward, her movements fluid, deliberate, her expression neither cruel nor kind—merely inevitable.
("You bear the Breath's blessing,") she said. ("You stepped into the Spiral and left marked. You've tasted the Before. Few survive it.")
("What are you doing here?") Haraza asked. His hand hovered near the hilt of the curved dagger at his belt, but he didn't draw it. Yet.
Voice tilted her head. ("You feel it, don't you? The pressure of unspoken memory. This world isn't dying—it's awakening. We are simply... answering.")
("By hollowing out a city?") he spat. ("By burning lives from the inside out?")
Her smile didn't waver. ("You still see fire. We see purification. The Choir does not burn. It reveals. These souls were offered the first stanza of the Final Harmony.")
("They didn't choose this,") he growled. ("You took them.")
("They heard the Song,") she said simply. ("And they followed.")
Haraza's glyph thrummed with tension. The Thirteenth was stirring more violently now, its layered script unraveling, twisting through languages he had no name for.
("What do you want?") he asked. ("Why gather here? Why Vell'tara?")
Voice gestured to the glowing pit that circled the chamber like a halo turned inward.
("Vell'tara was built atop one of the original Singspires,") she said. ("Back when the world still remembered the First Tongue. The Accord sealed it, long ago. Thought it could be silenced. But Songs that old do not die. They wait.")
She began to hum.
And the air changed.
Haraza felt his bones vibrate. The glyph on his arm rippled. Memories that weren't his flooded forward—a forest made of mirrors, a city in the belly of a leviathan, a tower where people read fate in the movement of shadows.
All places he'd never seen.
Yet had.
The Choir's song was awakening something within him—something ancient and buried.
("Stop,") he whispered. ("You're trying to rewrite the world.")
Voice nodded, as if he'd finally caught up.
("Yes. Not by sword or spell—but by chord.")
He took a step back. ("You'll unmake everything.")
She didn't flinch. ("No. We'll tune it.")
And then—
A scream. Real. Raw. Echoing from above.
Haraza spun just as Lirien descended into the chamber with Brannock and Caela flanking her. Ryve dropped from the shadows above, twin daggers in hand.
("Don't let them finish the Verse!") Caela shouted.
Voice raised a hand—and the Choir shifted pitch.
The room became a weapon.
Pain bloomed in Haraza's skull as the song hit a new register. He staggered, clutching his head, as reality twisted around him. Shapes fractured. Light distorted. The glyph on his arm surged forward, trying to shield him from a harmony that sang of entropy and rebirth.
Brannock charged first, his runed hammer glowing with counterspell glyphs. With a roar, he brought it down on the edge of the sigil-circle, cracking the floor and breaking a segment of the harmonic line.
The melody faltered.
The Choir screamed—not in fear, but defiance.
Lirien danced through their ranks, her twin blades weaving arcs of nulllight. Each cut disrupted a singer's flow, rendering their voice inert. She moved like a ghost among flames, graceful and relentless.
Caela knelt by the edge of the pit, her Codex open, whispering counter-chants into a prism. ("The glyphs are resonant—we need to break the sequence at the spine node!")
("I'll get to it!") Haraza shouted, eyes locked on Voice.
She advanced on him, palms raised, glyphs spiraling across her skin.
("Your Breath can shield you, Haraza Genso,") she said, ("but not from what you are becoming.")
He met her eyes. ("Then let's see who finishes their song first.")
He pressed his palm to the Thirteenth glyph.
The world broke open.
Not with sound—but meaning.
Symbols erupted from his skin, forming a helix of words in a tongue older than the Rift. Each syllable carried weight. Each shape bent the air around it.
Voice recoiled, stunned. ("You unlocked a Verse of Origin...!")
Haraza strode forward, the glyphs floating around him like blades of thought.
("You wanted the Breath's legacy,") he said. ("Now you'll hear it.")
He spoke.
One word.
And the Choir collapsed.
Not dead.
Not wounded.
But silenced.
Every singer dropped to their knees, voices stilled by the counter-syllable Haraza had drawn from the Spiral.
Only Voice remained standing.
She gritted her teeth, drawing a blade etched with glyphs too fast to follow. ("This isn't over.")
("No,") Haraza agreed. ("It's just beginning.")
They clashed.
Steel against will.
Her blade struck his arm, but the Thirteenth shifted, absorbing the impact and answering with a burst of resonant force that threw her back.
She landed hard but did not rise.
The Choir lay unconscious—or in deep fugue. The song was broken.
But the damage had been done.
Later, above ground, as the sun finally pierced the ash-laden sky, the Accord stood together in the ruins of Vell'tara's amphitheater.
Caela gently touched one of the silent Choir members. ("They're still alive. Most of them. But their minds... they've been rewritten. Not erased—realigned.")
Brannock spit into the rubble. ("And the Rift bastards behind this?")
("Still out there,") Lirien said. ("If Voice was any indication, they're organized. More than we thought.")
Ryve nodded. ("And they're not working with warlocks or cults. They're working with glyphs. Ancient ones.")
Haraza stood apart from them, staring into the pit.
The Thirteenth glyph on his arm no longer glowed. It shimmered quietly, like a sleeping eye.
Voice's last words echoed in his memory.
("You are becoming.")
He didn't know what it meant yet.
But something had changed inside him.
He could feel it.
The Breath had given him more than a key.
It had started to open him.
And when that opening finished...
He wasn't sure what would come through.