The falter lasted only a heartbeat.
Then the Unborn shifted its hymn.
Where once it sang despair, now it sang truths too sharp to deny. Kael’s knees buckled as the sound twisted into his bones. He saw himself standing over the corpses of his brothers-in-arms, blade slick with blood, their eyes staring at him with hollow betrayal. The voices ca not as accusation, but as his own thoughts: You left them. You lived when better n died. You are no savior—you are rot that clings to the living.
The lattice quivered. Chains dimd.
All around him, others staggered under the weight of their own mirrored voices. The widow scread, clutching her ears. “I let my children starve while I ate their share!” Her confession poured into the binding, infecting them all with guilt. The farr writhed, weeping. “I prayed for the plague to take my neighbor first.”
Each truth cracked the choir. Their harmony wavered, sliding toward discord. The Gate’s fissure widened, black smoke gushing upward like a tide of wings.
Elara held the boy close, her own tears streaming, but her voice cut through the cacophony, trembling yet fierce. “Do not mistake guilt for truth. He shows you the rot, but not the roots. You are more than your sha!”
But the scarred woman laughed bitterly, her voice jagged as glass. “More? We are nothing but our sha! That’s all he needs to own us.” Her thoughts lashed outward, magnifying the despair.
Kael’s vision blurred. His grip on the fused blade loosened as the Unborn’s hymn pressed harder, weaving every failure, every weakness into a single crushing note. The weight threatened to break him.
Then he heard it—a faint counterpoint. Not Elara, not the widow, not even the boy. His own voice.
But not the voice of guilt. The voice of every mont he had endured. Every breath he had dragged through pain. Every ti he had risen, even broken.
“Yes, I failed them. Yes, I lived when they did not. But I still stand. And as long as I stand, they are not forgotten.”
Kael roared into the binding, his defiance cracking through the hymn. The survivors felt it—his guilt, reshaped into strength. A soldier followed, screaming his own truth: “I fled the first battle—but I fight now!” Another joined: “I cursed the gods—but I still pray!”
Their confessions beca chords, discord reshaped into harmony, each fracture reforged into sothing stronger.
The boy’s glow surged, weaving the notes together. The lattice blazed brighter, each chain no longer perfect, but jagged, scarred, and unyielding.
The Unborn shrieked as its hymn t resistance, not of silence, but of a thousand imperfect voices united.
Kael lifted his blade high, his body burning, his voice carrying the choir. “We are not your song. We are ours!”
The fissure quaked, the shadow recoiling.
But the Unborn’s laughter returned, lower, darker. “Good. Sing louder. Sing longer. I will tear your hymn apart, note by note, until only my silence remains.”
The choir held. The Gate strained.
The war of voices had only begun.
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