EMPTY IS AWARE

Ossevaal hears the dead. Not ghosts. Not whispers from some spirit world. Something worse — something real. Deep beneath the continent's bone-white plateau, in mines where temperatures could cook a man alive, thousands of workers break rock that remembers. The mineral they extract — vossite, arterial-red and warm as a living body — captures the minds of everyone who touches it. Their fears. Their songs. The jokes they tell in the dark to keep from breaking. All of it, pressed into crystal like fingerprints in wet clay. Ossevaal is a twenty-three-year-old apprentice in a workshop that refines these crystals into weapons. He's never set foot in the mines. He shouldn't be able to hear any of it. But every night, four thousand voices flood his bones — a choir of suffering that arrives not through his ears but through his skeleton, vibrating in the calcium of his ribs and jaw like a tuning fork struck by something the size of the world. And the voices are getting louder. Because the crystals aren't just singing to him anymore. They're singing at him.