There is music that heals, and music that binds.
And then, there are the notes not meant to be heard—sung only in the shadow between creation and unraveling.
The Choirs that should not sing… had begun to hum.
---
Somewhere in the Gray Between—the thinning veil that separates the living world from what lies beneath it—an unmarked temple stirred. No doors. No windows. No origin. It simply was, and always had been. The monks of Ashmount called it Ylhara's Breach, but even they had never dared to seek it out.
Tonight, it sang.
And the song was wrong.
Not dissonant. Not even malevolent.
But impossible.
It moved sideways through time, backwards through memory, forward through consequence. It echoed through no ears, but every soul that had been touched by silence flinched. Even gods paused.
At the center of the temple, where the floor should have been, was a void—shaped like a mouth. It did not move. But it breathed.
---
Lazhar watched.
Not through eyes. Not through the Tongueless One's body. But through mirrors that did not exist, reflections that could not reflect. He danced like flame over water, watching the cracks in reality deepen.
"They've heard us," he whispered gleefully. "The choirs that were sealed in the beginning. Poor things… all that eternity, gagged by mercy and drowned in divine order."
The boy, sitting on broken stone somewhere between Cael'Belen and nowhere, did not move. He was silent—but now his silence echoed.
The Shard of Silence pulsed inside him. Not an object. Not a gem. A concept—broken and embedded in his being. He felt the edges of it carving meaning from stillness, forcing the world to listen when he spoke not.
And the Mirror of Futures—its truth yet obscured—had been glimpsed.
In his dreams, time had unfolded like a bleeding scroll. He had seen the heavens kneel. He had seen himself unmade and made again, wearing a thousand faces. He had seen the sun weep.
But the boy was no prophet. He had no words. He had only direction.
And he walked now, barefoot, toward the east.
---
Telvar, the blind monk, sat alone before the cracked fountain of Ashmount's sanctuary. The water no longer flowed—hadn't in years—but tonight, it whispered.
His fingers danced over prayer beads, but he did not pray.
He listened.
The sound—the impossible music—spoke through the bones of the world. It made his teeth ache. His mind reeled against it, as though trying to remember a word in a language he'd never learned but once knew deeply.
"They've breached the second layer," he murmured.
A voice—low, feminine, ancient—rose from behind him.
"Only the second?"
Telvar didn't flinch. "You came."
The being behind him did not walk. She floated, her form translucent and made of shifting scripture. A Seraph once, or something close, but long fallen from heaven's graces.
"I am bound to the sound," she said simply. "When it stirs, I stir. When it sings, I sing. When it devours, I bear witness."
She stepped into the moonlight. Her name had been lost, but mortals had called her Iyrena, the Lamenting Archive.
She was the only one who had ever survived the Choirs' first whisper.
"You taught them not to sing," Telvar said.
"No. I begged the gods to make them forget the melody." Her eyes, endless voids of ink, scanned the night. "But now the melody sings itself."
---
Deep in the Hollow of Aram—a ruined sanctuary where angels once practiced music as worship—a statue crumbled.
The statue had no face. Only wings and hands raised to the sky.
As the last of it fell, a note sounded. Just one. Pure. Long. And it made reality twitch.
The Choirs remembered.
---
Lazhar, now more present than ever, whispered directly into the Tongueless One's ear. "Do you know what they are, little herald?"
The boy paused at the edge of a nameless ravine, one foot hovering above darkness.
"They are not songs," Lazhar continued. "They are statements. Utterances older than reason. Carved into the bones of gods. The Choirs do not sing—they reveal. And the thing about truth, my dear vessel…"
He grinned.
"…is that it does not care who it shatters."
The boy stepped into the abyss.
And the abyss… stepped into him.
---
In Tharel, the sky cracked.
Not visibly. Not to mortal eyes. But Eliara—the Seraph of Mercy—felt it.
She dropped to her knees as the sigils on her arms flared and burned white-hot. The sword at her side—the one forged from fragments of a fallen star—began to hum in agony.
The Choirs were awakening.
"I wasn't ready," she gasped. "He's not ready."
Visions filled her. The boy—standing among silent judges. The Mirror reflecting no light. The Shard piercing a throne not yet broken. And above it all…
A song with her name in it.
She looked to the west.
And began to run.
---
The Temple of Broken Vows, buried beneath oceans and time, shifted.
Its doors—never meant to open again—began to weep blood.
One by one, unseen entities opened their mouths.
And the world tilted, just slightly, on its axis.
The Choirs had not yet sung.
But they were clearing their throats.