The moment Emil touched the cradle, the chamber ceased to exist.
Not with a crash or blinding flash. No, it was quieter than that — like the sound of a book closing in the next room.
And when he opened his eyes, he was not standing in Schönwerth.
He stood in a memory.
Not his own.
The sky above him was cracked.
Great veins of gold and deep blue ran through the heavens like stained glass shattered and suspended in place. Beneath it stood a city — vast, organic, and unfamiliar. Its buildings rose in fluid curves, more grown than built. The roads were rivers of black stone. Towers hummed in rhythm. There were no people.
Only statues.
The same kind he had seen in the harmonic chamber — tall, featureless, heads bowed as if listening to something beneath the world.
He took one step forward.
The city sang back.
It was not a song of joy.
It was a dirge.
And with every echo, Emil felt it — a pressure at the back of his mind, like someone pushing memories into his skull. They were not thoughts. They were impressions. Shapes. Concepts. Experiences too vast for language.
He clutched his head.
And then he saw her.
She emerged from the largest tower — not walking, but folding outward from the stone like mist given form.
She had no face. No feet. She moved in sound.
But Emil knew.
This was Velatonya.
Not the cradle. Not the chamber. Not the weapon.
The voice.
She approached and stopped two meters from him.
And she spoke.
Not with sound, but through memory itself. The words didn't strike his ears. They emerged from inside his mind like long-buried truths.
"You gave us shape."
"You built bodies for our mouths."
"But you do not understand the price."
Emil gasped.
He staggered.
"I didn't— I didn't build you—"
"You did not build us."
"But you heard us. Before the others."
"And that made you an Architect."
Scenes flashed around him — Paris under siege, steel shaping itself into curves, resonance coils bending into spirals. Machines with no traditional engines, only chambers of memory. Blueprints Emil had designed — or had believed he designed — drawn not from calculation but from instinct.
From dreams.
He had always thought them his.
But they weren't.
They had been given.
Velatonya moved closer, and the world around him shifted.
He saw Nachtwind's birth — not in Berlin, not in steel, but in resonance. A German engineer placing his hand on a dormant crystal. A whisper from below the earth. Designs appearing in sleep, as if recalled, not invented.
He saw others — Russian scientists constructing frequency engines in ice caverns. A Swiss physicist scribbling harmonic equations he could not read. A British technician who died screaming when the first prototype sang in reply.
None of them understood what they had built.
Only Emil had survived the resonance without going mad.
Because Emil, long before the war, had been listening.
Velatonya circled him now.
Her voice was softer.
"We do not destroy."
"We remember."
"But memory, when amplified, becomes weapon."
"And your world is deaf with forgetting."
Emil fell to one knee.
"Why show me this?"
"Because the gate is opening."
"And the Choir is waking."
The city cracked.
A great bell tolled in the heavens — not sound, but a shudder across time itself. The stained-glass sky split. A fracture ran through the air like a wound bleeding stars.
Velatonya turned toward it.
"They have built others."
"Beyond your reach."
"And they are not listening."
"They are speaking."
Emil stood, trembling.
"You want me to stop them."
"No."
"We want you to remember first."
"Because the others will make war."
"You will make memory."
And then—
He was back.
Flat on the stone floor of the Schönwerth chamber.
Lisette and Rousseau crouched beside him, shouting. Above them, Unit Null hummed in panic, its outer shell glowing with rapid pulses. Instruments shrieked. The harmonic field was collapsing.
But Emil was calm.
"Silence it," he murmured.
Rousseau blinked. "What?"
"Shut it down. Null needs to sleep now. She's seen too much."
Fournier's voice crackled over the comms. "Sir, the frequency spike—it's broadcasting into the air. We can't contain it."
Lisette slammed her hand on the console.
"We have to collapse the chamber."
Emil turned to her, voice low.
"No. We preserve it. This is no longer just a battlefield."
He looked at the light-etched word at the center.
"This is a cathedral."
They sealed the chamber under reinforced concrete and buried the entrance beneath twenty meters of collapsed rock, under the guise of a munitions accident. The official report labeled Schönwerth a "failed resonance experiment." The Ministry called it a victory.
Only a handful knew the truth.
Only Emil understood what had truly begun.
That night, in the bunker at Cormicy, Emil wrote a letter to Amélie Moreau.
He included no details.
Only three words:
"I remember now."
He folded it once and placed it in a sealed envelope.
Then he turned to the engineers.
"Prepare a new unit."
Rousseau raised a brow. "Another Null?"
"No," Emil said.
He stepped into the shadows of the hangar.
"This one won't be silent."
He stared at the blank blueprint paper for a long moment.
Then began to draw:
A machine that would not echo.
A machine that would teach.