Ivar led the descent. Behind them, the surface's jubilation had grown thin—just torch-burn and trumpet echoes curling above like smoke. Now, it was breath by shallow breath, their lungs tightening as if the earth were remembering what they'd done.
Downward. Beneath the Seam, into a place that pulsed not with life, but with response.
The tunnel narrowed. Every footfall echoed, hushed again by flesh-lined walls. Ribbing lined the stone like frozen throat-cartilage. Each breath felt tasted.
Lysa moved not forward, but deeper. Her face was a half-mask: resolve on one side, and on the other, something she refused to examine too closely.
Rill's boots clacked against the floor—calcified lung-ribbing hardened like bone pews. The grooves beneath her soles hummed faintly, as if recalling how to tremble.
"Why here?" she asked, voice taut, not from fear, but from something adjacent.
"Because it remembers," Lysa murmured. She reached toward the wall. Pale fungal veins pulsed beneath her palm, then twisted and recoiled like a creature startled in its sleep. A tremor passed through the stone.
"It knows what we tried to bury."
From behind them, Fennel whispered: "The spirals—they're louder here."
His fingertip sank into a loop of bone, soft to the touch but breathing slow.
"Do you feel it?"
Rill scoffed. "Feel a fungus pulse? Sure. Want me to kiss it next?"
She twisted her blade free from its belt—not to use, but to hold. She gripped steel the way others might a prayer.
From the back, Trudge coughed—once, then again, louder. His breath rattled like bellows choked with gravel. "Place smells like a liar's lungs," he muttered. No one answered.
Ivar said nothing. He watched the light. Red bloomed beneath Lysa's hand. The fungal spirals beat slow and wrong. Bone caught torchlight like dry teeth. In the quiet of memory, he saw again the dissected frog from childhood, veins drawn open and mapped in charcoal. His hand had twitched then, just as it did now.
No mercy without reflection.
They passed under a rib arch thick enough to bear weight. The ceiling bowed, and the very air seemed to draw in.
The cathedral inhaled them.
Rill's breath caught. "We're not coming to bury it, are we?"
Lysa's jaw tightened—a flicker of a spasm, gone as fast as it came. "We're going to remember."
Before Rill could curse, Fennel answered: "Lungs remember breath. Even when buried."
Rill laughed—short, cracked. "And we'll what—tap it like a vein?"
Lysa didn't flinch. "They erased her once. We can't afford that again."
The chamber opened suddenly, as if the stone itself had learned to hollow.
At its heart was the altar—a disc of spiraled bone laced into the floor like a fossil wound. Each loop was carved deep into the living marrow-rock. Fungal bulbs marked the spirals, dimly glowing in rhythm with the walls. It pulsed.
A heartbeat. Or a wound trying to clot.
Rill edged forward. Moss squelched beneath her boots. "If this is the heart, why does it still bleed?"
"Because it was one," Lysa said.
Ivar stood beside her. The spirals were fractured—undercut by root, warped by pressure, half-choked with centuries of rot.
He traced a loop with the flat of his torch. "All Eelgrave remembers," he whispered. Then louder: "Keep clear of the edges."
Trudge had stopped at the archway, fidgeting with a leather strap across his chest. "Bad place," he muttered, spitting into the moss. "Too quiet."
At the altar's edge, two Threadlings, their eyes vacant with spore-induced rapture, knelt, weaving spore-lines into the bone, muttering twisted prayers to the Unbinding. A third, barely more than a babe, ran their fingers across the rust, trying to smooth it down like a beloved relic. They had been told of the Spine's awakening. And the blood they would unleash.
Rill raised her blade. "Step away from it!"
They didn't.
Then the construct's eyes opened.
Frost-blue. Dim as burial lights. They flicked, then bloomed.
It inhaled.
The voice was neither human nor machine—just a hush that grated.
"Containment breach. Truth exceeds bounds. The bone remembers what you have all done."
Then the air fractured.
One child—singing mid-carol—disintegrated. Not exploded. Not screamed. Simply unmade, her head replaced by drifting dust.
Rill stumbled forward, choking. Her voice caught in her throat as if the air had turned to soot.
Another child, younger, blinked once—then vanished. A ripple left in the dirt.
The third Threadling—no taller than Fennel—crumpled, exhaled once, and turned to ash.
Rill dropped to her knees. Her blade rang hollow on the stone. Her hands went to the dust, fingers shaking. "Why aren't you stopping it?"
Ivar stared at the residue of a child. Heat. Residue. Mass. The vectors calculated in milliseconds: Disintegration, not explosion, but… erasure. The variables flickered in his mind – the construct's activation sequence, the spore-lines connecting the Threadlings, the precise frequency of the emanating wave. Understanding bloomed – each component a single note in a symphony of annihilation. He knew how. He knew why. He couldn't stop it.
He didn't move. Couldn't.
Lysa lunged. Her nails, stained black with spore-rot, scrabbled at the rusted seams. Wood splintered, roots tore with wet snaps. The seams were fused together. Connected to HER. Her scream was born in bone—a desperate expulsion of pressure that tore the plate loose. The metal came free with a sucking sound, ripping at her flesh, leaving a web of bleeding filaments where it had been connected.
Then: the clack from above.
All heads turned.
A figure dropped. Silent, save for the rustle of robes stitched with bone-tassels. A whistle dangled from one hand, silvered like a blade. His mask was curved and expressionless, bone-polished.
"Ah," the figure said. "Music."
He walked as though the walls moved to accommodate him.
Eyes followed.
"The bone remembers what you've done."
Rill's hand twitched toward her knife. "And you are?"
"The Resonant."
He twirled the whistle in his fingers, never quite holding it still. "I harvest the silence that festers in marrow."
His voice was low, lyrical. A lullaby layered with rust.
Lysa stepped forward. "We're already asking."
He tilted his head. "Then you'll understand the answer: some silences are earned."
He raised the whistle. It sang—a long, hollow note, spiraling like dust caught in a dying breath.
The chamber trembled.
He nodded, almost gently. "Beware the silence that grows loud."
Then he stepped backward—and was swallowed by the shadow behind the altar.
The construct stirred.
Lysa moved again. Her fingers clawed into rusted seams, tearing at wood and root. Sparks leapt. She screamed—wordless—and ripped the plate from its socket.
The altar flared once. Then the machine collapsed, limbs folding inward like a dying insect.
Rill gasped, staggering back.
One Threadling remained. Its hand reached for Lysa—tiny, pale, fungal-slicked.
"Ly—"
Lysa's hands were shaking, slick with blood and spores. Her fingers hovered a breath from the child's face.
She stopped herself.
Her hand curled inward.
She watched—not moved—as the child crumbled into ash.
Only a tear touched the dust.
Rill dropped beside the altar. Her hand closed around a shard of bone. She carved into the wall with short, brutal strokes:
REMEMBER ME
Blood followed the lines, soaking into porous bone.
Fennel reached to steady her.
She shoved him back.
"Let the bones hear it," she hissed—or maybe sobbed.
Ivar knelt across from her. He pressed his forehead to the letters.
"We endure," he whispered.
Lysa slid down against the rib-wall. Her breath rasped.
Not sharp.
Wet. Like she'd inhaled seawater.
"They…" She gestured weakly toward the fallen construct, the fading spiral where the child had stood. "They erased hope."
She turned toward Rill. Her hand rose—touched the girl's cheek just once, gentle.
"We write it back."
Fennel stepped forward. He pressed a fungal bloom into the carved letters. The bloom pulsed once—alive. Listening.
Ivar watched it tremble.
He understood then: clarity was not peace.
It was cost.
Up above, where the light fractured—
Kael heard it.
A voice. Scarred with grief. Threaded in silence.
He inhaled.
And stepped down.