It started with the smell.
Copper. Ozone. Something fouler beneath it, like decay trying to sing.
The air shimmered red as we followed the trail through the broken undercatacombs beneath the ruined throne. Ancient stone arches stretched above us like ribcages. Runes pulsed in corrupted rhythm—syncopated, inverted. Wrong.
"Something's ahead," Kael said, voice like steel in fog.
Aeris hissed, his tail whipping like a warning flag. "That's not just Void magic," he growled, low and sharp. "That's Choir."
He was right.
I could feel it.
The hum beneath the world. The trembling in the walls. The heat in my spine. It was more than ritual. It was a summoning. A remembering.
Lyra stopped walking. "Aetherion," she said, quietly. "You're glowing again."
I looked down.
My palms shimmered with star-sickness. The veins beneath my skin traced constellations I didn't know—didn't remember—but the magic around us did.
Because it wasn't reacting to us like intruders.
It was welcoming me.
We crept toward the light.
It wasn't fire.
It was... chant. Sound made visible. Floating script spiraled through the chamber like smoke, coiling into a dome of flickering runes. Blood hovered midair in spheres—still warm, still spinning—as voices layered over one another in tones no throat should be able to make.
The Void Choir.
Six of them, hooded. Cloaked in midnight-thread robes etched with bone-thread symbols. One stood at the center, arms raised, face veiled by a crown of antlers.
She was singing in reverse.
And beneath her, etched in bleeding runes, a shape I knew too well.
A sigil.
One I'd carved into the bones of forgotten gods.
One I'd invented.
My legs locked.
My throat dried.
Because this spell—this ritual—this abomination...
…I wrote it.
In another life.
Flash.
A memory slammed into me.
Not a soft one. Not a whisper.
A scream.
I was older in it. Not old. Just... diminished. Thinner. Hungrier. My eyes like eclipsed suns.
I stood in a black hall, cloaked in the Choir's robes, dozens kneeling before me. I raised my hand, and they bled willingly, joyfully. My voice shattered mirrors. My name was not Aetherion.
It was Varnyx.
And I was High Cantor of the Choir.
I staggered.
Lyra caught me. "What is it? What did you see?"
I couldn't answer.
Because the song was changing.
The ritual was reaching its peak.
And I knew what it was about to summon.
Not a creature. Not a weapon.
A version of me.
Bound. Half-dead. Half-divine.
Still breathing in a prison of mirrors, waiting to be consumed and reborn by the spell I had written to escape death.
They weren't summoning a god.
They were summoning a soul-fragment.
One of mine.
"We have to stop it," I breathed.
Kael didn't need to be told twice. He drew his sword, and the air sang back.
Aeris launched toward the outer ring of chanting, a comet of fire and claw.
Seris vanished mid-step, and I felt the air tear as she ripped into shadow.
Eirin whispered a ward into my mind, "Do not kill the central cantor until the blood spiral breaks. Or the soul will collapse."
Noted.
I stepped forward—and every rune in the ritual pulsed brighter.
Not in alarm.
In recognition.
The spell saw me.
And smiled.
"Traitor-echo approaches," one of the cantors hissed, their voice a dozen at once.
The central priestess turned her head.
And though her face was veiled, I felt her eyes—deep, lunar, mad.
"You should not be here," she whispered.
"I invented this room," I said coldly. "And I'm here to burn it down."
The fight wasn't fair.
We were blades, they were symphonies. Every movement of theirs bled illusions and sound-shards. Every time they spoke, the walls vibrated with madness.
But they didn't expect me.
Didn't expect me to remember the counter-chants. The dispel fractures. The flaw I'd buried into the core of the spell—because even back then, in that darker life, some part of me knew this magic would turn on the world.
I reached the edge of the sigil and pressed my palm to the stone.
Spoke the true name of the rite.
The blood spiral faltered.
Aeris roared. Kael shattered two Cantors with one strike. Seris emerged from a glyph and drove a dagger between the ribs of a third.
The central cantor screamed.
And beneath the ritual—the floor cracked.
Something beneath it stirred.
A heartbeat.
No—a voice.
Familiar.
Faint.
Distant.
"I remember you…"
My head snapped back.
Because I heard it inside me.
The soul-fragment.
The shard.
The version of me they were trying to call forth.
It wasn't just alive.
It was aware.
And it wanted to come back.
The cantor laughed, blood running from her mouth like ink.
"You cannot stop this. The Sovereign remembers. And he wants out."
Her hands rose—
I stepped forward—
And I sang.
Not words.
Not song.
A command. Ancient. Flawed. Divine.
The ritual exploded.
Silence swallowed the chamber.
All six cantors were ash.
Only the central one remained, on her knees, laughing softly.
"You will be him again. You will kneel to yourself. And he will thank you."
She collapsed.
Dead.
But smiling
I stood at the center of the circle.
The stone still shimmered with after-runes.
A faint pulse echoed beneath my boots.
And from the depths below the catacombs, through rubble, dust, and time—I heard it again.
A voice.
My voice.
Begging.
Pleading.
Smiling.
"You finally remembered. I've been waiting."
A rune ignites beneath my feet.
A lock unseals.
And something begins to climb up from below.
Not a creature.
Not a monster.
A me.
Another me.
One that never forgot.