The darkness down here had weight. It pressed against Kallum's lungs like water.
He lay half-submerged in a pool of stagnant muck. The stench was a physical assault. Ancient sewage and the copper tang of rusted iron. The smell of a city that had died and been left to rot in its own filth.
He coughed. A wet, jagged sound. Pain radiated from his ribs. The fall had cracked something deep inside his chest, a distant echo compared to the fire in his arm.
The brand had gone silent. The ochre light faded, leaving numbness in its wake. His left arm felt like a block of ice grafted to his shoulder. He tried to flex his fingers. They responded sluggishly, like dead wood.
He dragged himself from the water, boots scraping on slick, moss-covered stone.
A tunnel. Not the uniform brick of the modern sewers, but the bones of Virenhold itself. Rough granite walls rose around him, and the ceiling formed a chaotic jumble of collapsed beams and masonry from the city above.
Kallum shivered. The Undercity's cold was different from the winter chill above. A damp thing that seeped into the marrow.
He checked his satchel. The leather was soaked, but the lead-lined pouch held. The obsidian shard was safe.
It vibrated against his hip. A subtle tremor, like a purring cat. The Vestige was awake. It sensed the depth. It sensed the proximity to the earth's wounds.
Kallum stood, swaying as he used the damp wall to steady himself, and began to walk.
He didn't know where he was going, only that he had to go deeper. He had to find a place where the silence was total.
The tunnel opened into a vast, flooded cavern. The nave of a sunken cathedral. Columns of rot-resistant stone rose from black water to support a ceiling lost in shadow. The air was thick with mist.
Then he heard it.
Not a voice. A hum. A low, discordant vibration that set his teeth on edge, like a bow drawn across a string of raw nerve endings.
Hmmmmmmmm...
Kallum froze, crouching behind a fallen pillar's bulk.
Lights bobbed in the distance. Not the warm orange of torches, but pale, chemical spheres of glowing fungus that drifted over the water.
Figures moved beneath the lights: humanoid, but only barely. They waded through waist-deep sludge with a disturbing, gliding grace. Their skin had the color of a bruise. Translucent and slick with mucus. Their limbs were too long, their joints bent at angles that defied anatomy.
The Chorus of the Deep.
The Order taught that they were heretics. Kallum looked at the creature nearest to him. He saw the way its jaw unhinged. He saw the way its eyes were sealed shut by fleshy, scar-like growths. They weren't heretics. They were something else entirely. Biology rewriting itself to survive the void.
The creature paused and tilted its head. No ears. Only gill-like slits along its neck that flared and shivered.
It was listening. Not to sound, but to the song.
The Vestige in Kallum's bag pulsed. A sharp, psychic spike. A beacon.
The creature hissed, snapping its head toward the pillar where Kallum hid. The other lights in the cavern stopped moving and turned.
Kallum's heart hammered against his ribs. He pressed his hand over his satchel, trying to muffle the signal with his own flesh.
The nearest cultist lunged, moving with terrifying speed. It splashed through the water on all fours like a spider, its long wet fingers grasping at the air. It let out a wet, gurgling shriek that sounded like drowning.
Kallum scrambled back, slipping on the slime and falling hard onto his hip.
He couldn't fight. He was exhausted. If he used the Dirge again, the cold would reach his heart and stop it.
He looked around frantically. To his right, a section of the cavern wall had collapsed to reveal a narrow fissure, barely wide enough for a man.
The cultist was twenty feet away. It opened its mouth. Rows of needle-like, transparent teeth glinted in the pale light.
Kallum threw himself at the crack in the wall.
His boot slipped on the slime-slicked stone. He went down hard, his chest smacking against the rock. The cultist was on him in an instant. Wet fingers closed around his ankle like a vise. The grip was iron. He was being dragged backward, inch by inch, toward the black water and the waiting chorus of lights.
Kallum clawed at the stone, his nails breaking against the unyielding rock. The cultist's mouth opened wide, those needle teeth poised to strike. He knew. This was how he died. Not in the light, not fighting, but dragged into the dark by something that had once been human.
"Let him go."
The voice cut through the cavern like a blade of absolute zero.
The cultist froze. Its grip on Kallum's ankle loosened, then released. It turned its sealed-eye face toward the shadows, toward the voice that had spoken not with sound but with frequency. The creature shivered, a spasm of pure dread, then scrambled away into the water as if burned.
Kallum kicked himself free, lunging for the fissure.
He squeezed into the fissure. The rough stone scraped the skin from his shoulders as the tight space squeezed the breath from his lungs.
He pushed deeper, the rock pressing against his chest and back. He could hear the cultist screeching outside, the slap of wet flesh against the stone entrance. Long, webbed fingers scrabbled at the opening, clawing at his boots.
Kallum kicked out. His heel connected with something soft that crunched. The hand recoiled.
He shimmied sideways, forcing himself deeper into the rock as the fissure turned sharply away from the water and the humming.
He crawled for what felt like hours. The darkness was total, so he navigated by touch. His hands found only cold, dry stone. The air grew stale, tasting of dust and dead paper.
The passage widened. Kallum stumbled out into an open space.
He fell to his knees, gasping for air. The humidity was gone. The air here was bone-dry.
He fumbled in his belt pouch for a lumen-stone. He cracked the alchemical seal. A soft, blue light flooded the room.
A tomb of knowledge.
The room was circular, lined from floor to ceiling with towering shelves of dark, petrified wood. The shelves were packed with scrolls-leather-bound tomes falling apart, stone tablets etched with languages that hadn't been spoken in centuries.
Dust lay on everything, a thick grey blanket that muffled his movements.
A repository. An archive from the time before the Scouring. A place the Order had tried to bury.
Kallum stood up. His legs shook. He walked to the center of the room. A large table made of polished obsidian, covered in maps.
He reached out to touch a scroll. The parchment crumbled at his fingertip. It dissolved into powder.
Shea would have loved this place. All these secrets the Order had tried to bury. She'd died wanting to know what was kept from them. Now he was the one finding out.
"You are loud."
The voice came from the shadows on the room's far side. Calm. Feminine. It carried no fear.
Kallum spun around, drawing his dagger. His hand shook violently.
A figure stepped into the lumen-light's halo.
She was tall, wearing the fitted, practical leather of a Delver. Her cloak had the color of midnight, but it was her face that held him.
Her skin was pale, almost glowing in the gloom. Her hair was silver, falling straight and heavy to her waist. Her eyes had the color of ice. They watched him with an ancient sadness.
She pressed two fingers to her temple. A brief, practiced gesture, like adjusting a lens inside her skull.
She didn't look at the knife. She looked at the satchel at his hip.
"The shard is agitated." Her voice was a soft melody in the dead room. "It doesn't like being underground. It remembers the sky."
Kallum tightened his grip on the dagger.
"Who are you?" he rasped.
"I am Elyria." She didn't move closer. She stood with her hands open and empty. "And you have brought a very dangerous thing into my library."
Kallum looked at her eyes. He saw no madness there. No fanatical light of the Order. Only a terrifying clarity.
"The Chorus is hunting me." Kallum's voice was raw. "They can hear it."
"Of course they can." Elyria tilted her head, looking at the bandages on his arm. "Just as you can hear them. Just as you can feel the cold gnawing at your marrow."
She took a step forward.
"Put the knife away, Kallum Vire. If I wanted you dead, I would've let the Silt-Walkers drag you down."
Kallum hesitated, looking from the woman to the ancient books. He felt the Vestige's vibration slowing down. It was calming in her presence.
He lowered the knife.
"How do you know my name?"
Elyria smiled. A small, sad expression.
"The Abyss remembers names. Even the ones we try to forget."
She gestured to the obsidian table.
As her hand moved, the dust motes floating in the lumen-light swirled. They shifted in a pattern that defied the still air. A tiny vortex spinning once around her fingers before settling.
"Sit. You're bleeding on my floor. And we have much to discuss before the song gets any louder."