They felt it in their teeth.
A pressure that crawled up through the stone and settled in the jaw, rattling bone against bone. It froze mid-rock, claws dug into the floor, breath caught half-formed in its throat.
The nest went still.
Fire did not flicker differently. The air did change. Nothing visible announced what had arrived.
But something advanced.
They did not see a man. They saw the end.
They felt the absence moving toward them—like a place where the world refused to sing, a hollow advancing through the chamber that swallowed rhythm and left only dread behind.
The Song was gone.
And hope was lost.
Sawyer saw bodies.
That was all.
Just flesh bent wrong by a will that had no concept of stopping. Entities that accepted the Song's embrace. Limbs shaped by repetition. Eyes dulled by inheritance. Movements learned, not chosen.
Things.
Corruption had made sure of that.
He did not feel anger as he looked at them. Rage had burned itself out already, leaving behind something colder and far more stable. What remained was clarity—clean, precise, unburdened by doubt.
These were not lives continuing forward.
They were moments looping forever.
He stepped into the chamber.
Stone accepted his weight without complaint. Firelight slid across his armor, across the dried blood at his hands, and revealed him fully to the nest. He did not slow. Did not rush. Each step was measured, inevitable.
The world tried to protest.
But he felt no resistance.
The Song was gone, and with it the lie that something here could still be saved.
They watched him.
Some shrank. Some pressed closer together. Some clutched scraps of cloth like talismans against an ending they could finally feel coming.
Sawyer's gaze passed over them without hesitation.
He did not count them.
He did not wonder how many deserved it.
That question no longer applied.
Mercy did not mean sparing suffering.
Mercy meant ending it.
They shifted in his path—too slow, too uncertain. Its body reacted before its mind could form intent, limbs lifting halfway in a gesture that was neither attack nor defense.
Sawyer did not flinch.
He moved.
The strike was efficient. Clean. Bone gave way with a sound that echoed briefly before being swallowed by the chamber's vastness. The body collapsed where it stood, limbs folding inward as if relieved to finally stop holding themselves together.
Sawyer stepped past it without looking back.
There was no thrill in the motion. No satisfaction. Only completion.
Another came at him—this one faster, driven by something that resembled courage but was really just the echo of need misfiring one last time. Sawyer adjusted his stance by inches, redirected the momentum, and ended it with the same economy of motion.
Still no resistance.
Still no Song.
Only gravity and flesh and finality.
He advanced deeper into the nest.
Cradles lined his path.
Sawyer did not look inside them.
He did not need to. He did not want to.
He already knew what they held—not futures, not beginnings, but continuations of a mistake the world had refused to correct. The Song had let it persist because persistence was movement, and movement was all it had ever valued.
He would not make the same error.
A tremor ran through the chamber—not from fear, but from understanding. They felt it collectively: this thing walking among them did not hunt, did not punish, did not negotiate.
It concluded.
Sawyer kept moving.
The nest broke.
Into chaos—into inevitability.
Those closest to him died first. Because they were nearer, because they were in the way. Movement toward him ended. Movement away from him ended. Movement at all became meaningless once he entered a space.
But they still tried.
He did not chase.
He did not herd.
He advanced.
Anything that reached for the Song—anything that resonated, clung, responded—registered to him as the same wrongness. The same stalled pattern. The same refusal to end.
Blades rose and fell with identical intent. Limbs stopped obeying. Bodies collapsed where purpose had once held them upright. He stepped over them, around them, through them, without adjustment to pace or posture.
Some tried to scream.
The sound carried nowhere.
Some clutched one another, pressing together in malformed imitations of warmth. Sawyer ended them where they knelt, not faster, not slower—exactly when they entered his reach.
Mercy was not a feeling.
It was a function.
Fires guttered as bodies fell too close. Smoke thickened. The chamber's echoes blurred into a single, continuous absence of sound as fewer and fewer voices remained to disturb it.
Sawyer did not breathe harder.
His hands did not shake.
He did not look back.
When something screamed resonance—begging, bargaining, praying for guidance that would never come—Sawyer turned without hesitation and ended them the same way.
He passed through the nest like a correction the world had delayed too long. Every step removed another loop. Another repetition. Another refusal to finish dying.
By the time he reached the far wall, the chamber no longer moved.
Nothing scraped stone.
Nothing breathed.
Sawyer wished for silence. But the world did not grant it.
He looked to the right and saw another entrance.
Again, he advanced.
He descended.
The passage sloped sharply downward, narrower than the nest above, the stone worn smooth by countless traversals. The air changed as he moved—heavier, warmer, layered with breath and oil and the dull, sour note of too many bodies kept too long in one place.
This place still slept.
The chamber opened slowly, ceiling low, walls close enough that firelight pressed flat against stone. Bedding lined the floor in rough clusters. Shapes lay tangled together—some small, some larger, some breathing shallow and uneven, some barely at all.
The place was intimate.
Here, it still lingered.
Not loud.
But to Sawyer it screamed the same message.
They must die.
He moved through the chamber the same way he had moved through the nest above—without acceleration, without hesitation. His presence woke nothing. Those who stirred did so only long enough to recognize what stood over them before motion ended.
Those nearest him fell where they lay, their bodies folding back into the earth. Others rose half-asleep, confused, reaching for a why. Sawyer answered.
Anything that carried it ended.
Anything that resonated ended.
Anything that had been shaped into part of the loop was concluded the same way.
He worked through the chamber in silence, stepping between bodies, over bedding, past walls marked with old scratches and newer stains. Firelight revealed closed eyes. Open mouths. Stillness settling in layers behind him.
His breathing remained steady.
His thoughts did not wander.
This was not rage. This was maintenance.
At the very end. Only one thing remained. Unlike the rest, the corruption was layered. More concentrated. A fresh Imbalance.
And just like the rest, it was struck down.
Then—
A scream.
Sharp.
Human.
Alive.
The sound cut through the chamber like a fracture in stone, too sudden, too real, too present.
Sawyer froze.
The scream came again—ragged, panicked, wrong in a place that had already finished ending. It echoed off the low ceiling, collapsing back on itself, refusing to be swallowed the way every other sound had.
Sawyer turned.
For the first time since descending, his gaze sharpened.
He saw her.
Not at once—not as a person—but as an anomaly. A shape that did not fit the completed stillness behind him. The stillness he wished to attain. A body that had not folded inward. A sound that had not ended when it should have.
She lay half-curled against the stone, one arm wrapped protectively around her middle, the other clawing uselessly at the ground as if it might anchor her to something that still existed. Her chest heaved in uneven spasms. Each breath scraped its way out of her throat with a wet, broken sound that did not resemble speech.
Sawyer took a step closer.
Firelight reached her face.
And memory struck.
She was the one.
The woman from the caravan. The one who got taken away. The one who had screamed his name without knowing it. The one who begged him—him, specifically—to protect her.
Please protect her.
He remembered the exact way her hands had shaken.
The way her eyes had locked onto his like he was something solid in a world that had already begun to give way.
Now those eyes found him again.
They widened—not in hope.
In recognition.
Her mouth opened.
Sound came out—but words did not.
Her throat had been crushed. Collapsed cartilage and muscle inward until the passage was no longer meant for language. What escaped her now was air forced through ruin. A raw, animal keening that carried pain, terror, and a single question it could no longer form.
Why?
She tried to crawl toward him.
Her body did not obey.
Sawyer stopped an arm's length away.
He looked down at her the same way he had looked at every other thing in this place—measuring presence, resonance, contamination.
There was Song in her.
A part she accepted. And another forced into her.
A thread tugged at his senses. Wrongness hummed beneath her skin. A loop clung to her like rot. She was brimming with it—through raw suffering, violated by the thing he had come to erase.
Alive. In pain.
Her hands reached weakly toward him, fingers trembling, scraping stone, leaving faint lines in the dust. Her mouth worked again, sound tearing free in broken bursts, her whole body convulsing with the effort to make meaning where meaning had been stolen.
Sawyer did not move.
For the first time since entering the abyss, the function faltered.
Not stopped.
Strained.
This was consequence that had survived his correction.
Her eyes searched his face desperately, as if trying to reconcile the thing that stood before her with the man she had begged hours ago. Her gaze dropped briefly—to his hands, to the blood dried there—then snapped back up, horror sharpening into something like understanding.
Her scream changed.
It was still wordless.
But now it carried accusation.
Sawyer felt something tighten behind his sternum.
Guilt.
Recognition.
He had sought to end the nest.
He had wished to end the Song's indulgence.
He had wanted to sever the loop.
And still—
This remained.
A body that had been tainted twice.
A human who had suffered great hardship.
A mother who had lost her child.
Mercy had not reached her.
It had passed her by.
Sawyer knelt.
Slowly. Deliberately.
The woman recoiled instinctively, dragging herself backward a few inches, terror overriding pain. Her breath hitched, collapsing into a strangled rasp as panic seized what little control her body had left.
Sawyer stayed where he was.
Close enough to see the tremor in her hands.
Close enough to hear the ruined shape of each breath.
Close enough to understand what remained could not be undone.
He did not reach for his blade.
He did not reach for her.
The clarity that had carried him through the nest still lingered—but it no longer pointed anywhere. It offered no correction. No completion. No clean ending.
This was not something to erase.
Not something to conclude.
This was what endured after mercy had finished passing through the world.
The woman's eyes searched his face—pleading, accusing, terrified—not asking for justice, not asking for understanding.
Only asking him to decide what would happen next.
Sawyer did not move.
And for the first time since he had silenced the Song,
he could not tell which stillness would hurt her less.