The heartbeat grew louder.
THOOM.
THOOM.
THOOM.
Each pulse rippled through the stone like a dying god coughing up blood.
Black water in the channel rose—thick as tar—climbing the walls in slow, deliberate fingers.
Veyra spat blood and laughed, the sound cracking halfway through.
"Finally," she rasped. "Something big enough to make the hurting stop."
Kael said nothing.
The shadows around him were utterly still—no hunger, no movement.
Just a cold, listening silence.
Like mourners at a grave.
Seraphine walked to the mouth of the deepest tunnel.
The black water parted for her bare feet, as if afraid to touch her.
"It has no name," she said—soft, lethal. "Names give shape. This one ate its shape a long time ago."
She turned.
Her eyes were voids—pure absence rimmed in violet fire.
"It's been waiting for three voices that match the song it lost when Illyria burned."
THOOM.
Closer.
The temperature plunged.
Every breath came out white and screaming.
Veyra rolled her neck.
Thorns erupted down her spine in a crimson cascade; chains uncoiled from her torso like hunting serpents.
"Song, schmong," she growled. "I just wanna see if it bleeds pretty."
Kael stepped forward until he stood beside Seraphine.
Shadows gathered at his feet—deeper than the tunnel itself.
"Will killing it quiet the Hunger?" he asked.
Seraphine's smile was ancient and unbearably sad.
"Nothing quiets the Hunger, shadow boy."
A beat.
"But some things scream louder."
The heartbeat stopped.
A silence so total it had weight.
Then the tunnel exhaled.
A wave of pure black rolled out—slow, inevitable, warm as a corpse.
Where it touched the saint bones, they dissolved into black butterflies that died before they could fly.
At its center walked something that had forgotten how to be anything.
No edges.
No center.
Just a hole wearing the memory of a body.
Where its face should've been was a mirror made of screaming mouths.
And all of them spoke the same three names, in voices stolen from the dead:
Kael. Veyra. Seraphine.
Kael. Veyra. Seraphine.
Kael. Veyra. Seraphine.
Veyra's grin finally slipped.
"…Shit."
The thing raised a hand that wasn't a hand.
Reality folded like wet parchment.
Kael moved first.
He stepped into the wave.
SHRRAAA—BOOM.
Shadows detonated from him in a sphere of absolute night—every tendril, every claw, every starving fragment he'd ever suppressed unleashed at once.
The wave slowed.
But did not stop.
Veyra roared and charged.
Wrathbinder ignited into a pink sun.
She swung—
KRSHHH
—carving a canyon of Sinfire straight through the dark.
The creature tilted its mirror-face.
Reality blinked.
The fire reversed mid-swing and smashed into Veyra instead.
She flew thirty feet, hit the wall hard enough to split stone, and slid down laughing blood.
"Again!" she shrieked, rising with thorns punching through her ribs to brace broken bones. "HIT ME HARDER!"
Seraphine just sighed.
She walked forward until she stood between the creature and the others.
Then she opened her arms.
"I'm sorry," she whispered—
to the creature,
to the child skeleton,
to the queen who once begged her to burn the world.
Black-white flame erupted from her in a perfect ring.
Where it touched the wave, existence cancelled itself out.
A circle of pure nothing opened—
ten meters,
twenty,
fifty—
eating stone, air, sound, memory.
The creature paused.
For the first time, the mouths stopped chanting.
Seraphine's voice carried on the silence like a lullaby made of razors.
"You waited for three voices," she said. "Here we are."
She glanced back at Kael and Veyra.
"Sing with me."
Kael felt it—the resonance.
The Abyss in his veins.
The thorns boiling in Veyra's blood.
The erased centuries behind Seraphine's eyes.
They were never random.
They were chords.
He stepped to her left.
His shadows rose—not to devour, but to weave.
Veyra limped to her right, dragging Wrathbinder like a wounded star.
Pink flame and black thorns braided together overhead.
Three powers.
Three curses.
Three broken children standing in the grave of saints.
The creature tilted its warped head, curious.
Then it opened its mirror-mouths wide—
—and sang back.
The sound was every scream Illyria never got to make.
The resonance hit them like a second Rift bursting open inside their bones.
Kael's vision fractured—Alcris smiling on a sunlit roof.
Veyra smelled her sister's hair catching fire.
Seraphine felt Queen Elyra's hand slip from hers as the flames took her.
And beneath all of it—
A small voice.
Soft.
Almost kind.
Come home.
The circle of nothing wavered.
Seraphine's arms began to unravel—threads of dress, of hair, of skin peeling away into her own void.
She was burning herself out to hold the song.
Kael felt the Hunger swell—not to feed…
but to answer.
He reached for Veyra's hand.
She let him take it—her palm warm, slick with blood, shaking.
Together they stepped into the circle.
Shadows, thorns, and erasure braided into a single, impossible chord.
They sang.
Not with words.
With everything they had lost.
The creature staggered.
The mirror-face cracked.
For one heartbeat—a single, impossible heartbeat—they saw what lay behind it:
A child.
Curled in absolute dark.
Crying.
Then the resonance peaked.
WHUM—
The circle imploded.
Light and shadow and silence collapsed into a point no larger than a heart.
When the dust finally settled, the chamber was empty.
The creature was gone.
The saint bones were gone.
The black water had receded.
Only three remained—kneeling in a triangle, hands still linked.
Seraphine's dress was in tatters, half her silver hair missing.
Veyra's thorns had retracted so violently they left bleeding craters.
Kael's left arm was pure shadow from elbow to fingertip—twitching with memories that weren't his.
None of them moved.
Finally, Veyra broke the silence.
"…Did we just adopt a god?"
Seraphine laughed—soft, crystalline, broken.
"No," she said. "We reminded it what loneliness feels like."
Kael stared where the creature had been.
Something glinted in the dust.
A single black feather.
He picked it up.
It weighed nothing.
And everything.
Far above, in the city that no longer had a cathedral, dawn touched the sky.
The song was over.
But the Hunger had learned a new note.
And somewhere, something that had forgotten how to hope…
…remembered.