The cavern convulsed as their splintered voices collided with the Unborn’s choir. The sound was no longer harmony nor discord but sothing jagged, sothing raw—every wound, every scar, every scream torn free and given shape. The walls quaked as if the hollow body of the beast recoiled from being made to feel.
Kael swung his blade in rhythm with the broken song. Each strike cracked the fog, his fractured steel singing in protest but refusing silence. Every wound on his body pulsed in ti with his blade, each scar a note, each ache a defiance.
Elara clutched the boy close, whispering her chant into his ear until he stirred. The child’s glow flared again—uneven, fevered, but alive. His broken syllables rose, threaded through with silence, and the fragnts of the hollow doubles shrieked as though their marrow were unraveling.
The widow dragged herself upright, blood painting her chin, and forced another jagged scream. It was short, cracked, ugly—but hers. The fragnts stitched from her reflection quivered, their mouthless faces tearing down the middle as though her sound had carved a wound in them.
The scarred woman slamd her spear into the ground and bled louder, every drop another verse. The fragnts tried to mirror her wounds, but they faltered, for her scars had aning and theirs were empty echoes. “Hollow flesh breaks first,” she hissed, driving her spear through a cluster of writhing echoes that burst into black sound and vanished.
The farr’s drum beat steadily now, slower and slower, like the slowing of a colossal heart. His rhythm beca a counterweight to the cavern’s chaos, an anchor pulling them from collapse. The fragnts staggered under the simplicity of it, their forms unable to imitate what was alive and imperfect.
The maw pulsed violently, its rift widening until the fog scread as it was drawn back into the darkness. From within poured not just voices but faces—countless faces of the lost, screaming, singing, begging, accusing. The hollow choir tried to drown them all:
“You cannot wound what has no flesh. You cannot silence what is already the world’s breath.”
Kael roared back, his voice tearing his throat raw. “Then choke on what you fed us!” He drove his blade into the stone beneath him, the crack racing toward the maw like a scar carved into the beast itself.
The boy’s chant peaked, his glow jagged and fierce. He sang not smoothly, but in fractured bursts, each silence between words as sharp as the sound itself. The cavern convulsed, its veins flaring white-hot, the maw splitting wider.
And then—cracks appeared in the darkness. Not light, not shadow, but sothing older, rawer, bleeding through the Unborn’s breath.
The survivors stood against the storm, their splintered song rising higher, tearing into the choir of hollows. For the first ti, the Unborn recoiled—not as predator, but as prey.
The maw scread.
And the Hollow Choir scread with it.
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