The Scar's heart was a place of profound wrongness. The vitrified ground gave way to a landscape of twisted, magnetic spires that hummed with a dissonant energy, defying their compasses. The air crackled with static, raising the hair on their arms. Jagged outcroppings of a glassy, black substance seemed to drink the light. This was not the gentle decay of the Rotting World; this was the scar tissue of a violent, magical amputation.
Lyra felt it viscerally. The Core in her pack seemed to grow heavier, its silent song thrumming with a note of profound grief. This was where the World-Song had been most brutally cut. The discord here was an old, festering wound.
"Ley-line nexus," Elara confirmed, consulting a jury-rigged device that spat erratic readings. "Or what's left of it. It's like a whirlpool of fractured energy. No wonder the Convocation severed the links. This would have been… unstable. Dangerous."
"Or vibrantly alive," Lyra murmured, her affinity sensing the chaotic, painful churn of energies that had once been harmonized. It was a scream frozen in the landscape. "They didn't fix the problem. They just cut off the limb."
Navigating was a nightmare. They had to move slowly, following paths of relative calm that Lyra could sense—eddies in the psychic storm. At one point, a sudden surge of warping energy caused the very space before them to ripple; a magnetic spire fifty feet away sheared off its base and floated upwards, spinning slowly before crashing down elsewhere.
After two days of tense, exhausting travel, they found it.
It rose from the center of a bowl-shaped depression: a stump. It was colossal, a circular formation of the same living metal as the Anvil, but dull, lusterless, and fused with raw stone at its base. It was easily three hundred feet in diameter. Its top was a nightmare of twisted, shredded filaments and frozen flows of metal, as if it had been torn, not cut. This was the base of a Sky-Spine, one of the great conduits that had once connected heaven and earth.
And it was dead. Not dormant. Dead.
Lyra approached, her heart sinking. She placed a hand on the cold, inert metal. There was no song here, not even a ghost. Just a hollow echo of absence. The Core in her pack was silent.
"It's gone," she said, despair clawing at her newfound certainty. "The connection is completely severed. There's nothing to resonate with, nothing to follow up."
Elara was already circling the stump, her Keeper's Key out, scanning. "The physical connection is gone, yes. But look at the energy readings." She held up her device. The chaotic whirlpool of the nexus wasn't random here; it flowed around the stump in a distinct pattern, like water circling a drain. "The ley-lines remember the path. The absence has a shape. It's a negative space."
Hope, fragile and thin, stirred in Lyra. A negative space. A silence shaped like a song. That, she understood.
"If the lines remember the path," she said slowly, thinking aloud, "could we… make a bridge? Not of matter, but of directed resonance? Use the Core to sing the old connection into being, just for a moment, and ride the harmonic back up?"
Elara stared at her, then at the chaotic sky. "You want to use the world's most powerful tuning fork to convince a bunch of fractured lightning to pretend to be an elevator. That is the most insane, brilliant, suicidal idea I have ever heard." A wild grin split her face. "I'll start calculating the resonance frequencies. You figure out how not to get us atomized."
They worked for a day and a night at the base of the dead stump. Elara, using every scrap of data from her devices and the Core's faint influence, mapped the turbulent flows of the nexus. She identified a potential stability point—a fleeting coincidence of harmonics that occurred as the chaotic energies pulsed.
Lyra's task was harder. She had to prepare to sing. Not with her voice, but with the Core, with her affinity, with her entire being. She had to project the specific, lost note of connection that this place had once known into that precise moment of stability. She had to fill the negative space with a ghost so convincing, the world would believe it was real, if only for a few seconds.
As the calculated moment approached, the air grew thick and heavy. The magnetic spires glowed. The ground vibrated.
"Now, Lyra!" Elara shouted over the rising howl of energies.
Lyra closed her eyes, holding the Core before her. She didn't reach for power. She reached for memory—the Echo's memory of the linked world. She found the note of the Sky-Spines, the deep, grounding chord that connected growth to sky, root to branch. She poured that note, amplified by the Core and focused by her will, into the dead stump.
For a second, nothing.
Then, the dull metal of the stump shimmered. Not with light, but with a sudden, impossible solidity of purpose. The chaotic energy swirling around it didn't calm; it snapped into alignment, flowing upwards in a sudden, coherent column of actinic light and singing force that tore through the cloud cover, a spear of temporary order in the chaos.
A pathway, ethereal and roaring with power, hung in the air above the stump.
"GO!" Elara screamed.
They ran forward, into the light. There was no physical staircase, only a torrent of harmonized energy. Lyra focused everything on maintaining the note, on being a conductor for the bridge. The world dissolved into blinding brilliance and a deafening, musical roar. They were not flying; they were being recognized by the world itself and pulled along a remembered path.
It lasted ten seconds.
The coherence shattered. The nexus, provoked, recoiled with a violent dissonance. The column of light collapsed in on itself with a thunderclap that hurled them forward.
Lyra tumbled onto hard, cold stone, the Core clutched to her chest, her senses shattered. The deafening roar was replaced by a familiar, sickly hum and the smell of ozone and polished marble.
She pushed herself up, Elara groaning beside her.
They were on a wide, deserted service balcony, part of Skyreach's under-structure. Above them, the underbelly of the floating city loomed. Below, through gaps in the cloud, she could see the distant, misty green of the Rotting World.
They had done it. They were back.
But as Lyra's hearing returned, she heard new sounds over the city's hum: distant alarms, and the shouts of patrols. Their dramatic entrance had not gone unnoticed. The spear of light tearing up from the Scar would have been visible for miles.
They were home. And they were already hunted.
Lyra looked at Elara, then at the gleaming, fragile spires of the city above. The final, most dangerous part of their journey was beginning. They had the Cure. Now they had to infiltrate the Hospital, and convince the doctors they were killing the patient.
The God-Engine's Core pulsed once against her, a steady, patient rhythm.
The song of ending and renewal was about to be sung in the heart of the silent, dying crystal