The silence in the cavern after the Echo faded was no longer oppressive. It was expectant. Reverent. The subsonic heartbeat of the Anvil slowed to a final, deep thrum and then ceased altogether. The glowing veins in the rock dimmed, their work done. The God-Engine's Core lay cool and heavy in Lyra's hands, its impossible geometry seeming to shift subtly when not directly observed, like a thought lingering at the edge of memory.
She felt no sudden surge of power. Instead, she felt a deep, resonant alignment. The chaotic, reactive storm of her magic—the rust-touch, the entropy—was quiet. Not gone, but listening. The Core in her hands was a tuning fork struck for a harmony that included decay as a necessary rest, not a flaw.
"Lyra?" Elara's voice was hushed, her face lit by the Core's soft, internal luminescence. "Are you… you?"
Lyra took a breath. The air felt different. She could taste its composition—the faint metallic ions, the ancient dust, the slow exhalation of the dying stone. "I'm here," she said, and her own voice sounded more grounded, more certain. "It's… showing me. Not telling. Showing." She looked at the obsidian floor. With a thought that was less a command and more an observation—this space is meant to be clear—the layer of ten-thousand-year dust at their feet silently dissolved into a fine, grey mist that settled, leaving a perfect circle of gleaming black. It was effortless. Controlled.
Elara let out a low whistle. "Okay. That's new. Good new. Scary new." She shouldered her pack, her pragmatic nature reasserting itself. "The Foundry is going dormant. We need to move before the way out decides to seal itself permanently."
The ascent through the silent, darkening halls felt like walking through a giant exhaling its last breath. The Garden of Gears was no longer frozen; a faint, almost imperceptible trembling had taken hold. A crystalline fern shed a single, tinkling leaf. It was not collapse, but a gentle sigh of release. They moved quickly, Lyra's newfound clarity allowing her to sense the integrity of the paths, choosing the ones that still held stability.
When they finally emerged from the tear in the cliff face, blinking in the muted grey light of the Scar, the ground trembled once, definitively, behind them. A cascade of rock sealed the entrance with finality. The Silent Foundry was truly silent now, its last memory passed on.
They made camp a safe distance away, in the lee of a vitrified dune. Elara busied herself with practicalities—checking supplies, purifying water. Lyra sat, the Core cradled in her lap. She closed her eyes and let her awareness sink into it.
It wasn't like reading. It was like remembering a dream upon waking. Fragments of the Song came to her: a soaring melody of tectonic stability; a complex rhythm of ley-line confluence; a deep, thrumming bass note of growth. And woven through it all, like the spaces between stars, were the notes of ending—the crisp decay of autumn leaves, the gentle erosion of a riverbank, the silent oxidation that strengthened a metal's skin. They weren't discordant. They were the punctuation that gave the sentence meaning.
She saw, with horrifying clarity, what Skyreach was doing. The Heart of Aethel was like a singer clamping their hands over their ears and screaming one sustained, piercing note to drown out all others. It was forcing stability by denying the natural cycles of decay and renewal. It was creating a world of perfect, fragile crystal, doomed to shatter.
"We can't just bring this back and plug it in," Lyra said, opening her eyes. The Core's light painted Elara's concerned face in shades of blue and grey. "The Convocation's entire system is built to reject it. To reject me. They'd see this as a weapon, or a blasphemy. They'd try to control it, and it would break them."
Elara sat down opposite her. "So what's the plan, Keeper of the Last Song? Do we build a new city down here? Start a rust-and-resonance revolution?"
A faint, grim smile touched Lyra's lips. "No. The song is for the whole world. Skyreach is part of that world, even if it's hiding from it." She looked up at the perpetual cloud layer, imagining the floating city far above. "We have to make them hear. We have to show them that their note is killing the symphony. And to do that… we have to go back up."
The thought sent a chill through her that had nothing to do with the cold air. Going back meant facing Expungement, contempt, and the full, hostile authority of the Convocation. But the Core's quiet pulse in her hands was a responsibility heavier than any fear.
"They won't listen willingly," Elara said. "You're an Expunged. I'm a thief and a deserter in their eyes."
"Then we won't ask for permission," Lyra said, her voice hardening with a resolve forged in the Foundry's depths. "We'll demonstrate. We'll find a way to show the harmony. To prove that decay isn't the enemy—it's the partner of creation." She looked at her friend. "But I can't do it alone. The Song… it needs more than one voice. It needs an engineer."
Elara's grin was swift and fierce. "You've got one. But we're going to need a lot more than goodwill and a pretty rock. We need a stage. And we need to get back up there without being shot out of the sky."
Lyra nodded, her mind already working, the Core's latent knowledge suggesting possibilities at the edge of thought. "The way up… the old stories say the God-Engine didn't just harmonize. It connected. Skyreach was once physically linked to the ground, wasn't it? By great conduits."
Elara's eyes widened. "The Sky-Spines. The theory is they were like… roots or umbilical cords. They were severed during the Ascent. The Convocation purged all records, called them 'unclean ligatures.'" She pulled out her tattered maps. "If any stump of one still exists, it would be here, in the deepest part of the Scar, near the old world's ley-line nexus." She pointed to a region even more bleakly labeled than the Foundry's.
"A way up they can't control," Lyra said. "A path rooted in the old world. It's our best chance."
As they broke camp at first light, Lyra took one last look at the sealed cliff face. She was no longer just a fugitive carrying a secret. She was a courier carrying a cure to a disease the patient didn't believe it had. The journey back would be harder than the journey in. They were not just fighting the Rotting World now; they were fighting time, gravity, and the entrenched fear of an entire civilization.
The Core's weight in her pack was a constant reminder. It wasn't just a physical burden. It was the weight of a world's forgotten song, and the terrifying hope of teaching it to sing again.