They left Vell'tara at first light, the sun a fractured disc behind layers of gray cloud and memory-laden wind. The land was still quiet, hushed like a city after thunder—recovering, waiting, unsure whether the storm had passed or merely paused.
The Accord had downsized for this expedition. Too many soldiers would draw attention. Too many scholars would slow them down.
It would be the five of them.
Haraza. Lirien. Brannock. Caela. Ryve.
Each carried not just weapons or tools, but questions. Unspoken doubts. A weight none could name, but all could feel. The Choir's song had left residue—not just in their ears, but in their souls.
They followed the ley-lines etched in ancient Accord maps, lines that pulsed subtly when Haraza drew close. He became a living compass, the Thirteenth glyph subtly tugging toward the north, toward Wyrdspire.
They passed through broken hamlets, forests half-turned to crystal, and riverbeds that ran upstream. The world near the Reach was already shifting.
Caela confirmed it one cold evening, huddled by a campfire beneath a ruined aqueduct.
("This isn't natural ley-warp,") she said, tracing her fingers through the firelight. ("It's harmonic. The land is resonating with an echo it doesn't remember how to forget.")
Brannock gave a grim chuckle. ("I liked this better when we were just punching warlocks.")
Lirien said nothing, her eyes scanning the distant mountain silhouettes. She hadn't spoken much since Vell'tara. Her blade was sharp, her steps precise—but something had changed in her. A silence Haraza recognized. One born of witnessing something older than fear.
By the fifth day, the mountains rose like jagged promises before them—blue-black against the pale sky, cloaked in perpetual mist.
Wyrdspire.
They stood at the edge of a vale that once housed a civilization of sky-chiselers—people who carved music into stone, echoing sounds only stars could hear. Now, the spires stood empty, cracked and open like husks.
("This is it,") Caela whispered. ("Wyrdspire Reach.")
Haraza's glyph flared without his will.
The Vault was close.
The path to the Vault was not a path at all—it was a labyrinth of forgotten trials, half-sentient mechanisms left behind by the civilization that once worshipped sound and silence as twin gods. The group moved slowly, every step a gamble.
First came the Harmonic Gate, a spiraling corridor of obsidian notes, each slab humming a single, dissonant tone. Step incorrectly, and the frequency would rupture bone.
Caela led them, fingers dancing through the air as she deciphered the tonal sequence. One note wrong, and—
Shhhhrip!
A stone near Ryve detonated into razor-dust as he jerked back, eyes wide.
("Sorry,") Caela muttered. ("That was almost D-flat.")
They made it through on the seventh attempt, breathless, alive.
Then came the Silent Fissure, a chasm of soundless void, where not even thoughts echoed. Here, Brannock's runed boots let him anchor lines across the black expanse, each piton sunk with a muttered prayer to the Old Forges. Haraza went last, feeling his glyph flicker in confusion. The silence down there wasn't absence—it was memory consumption. The more time spent in the chasm, the more of yourself it erased.
They didn't speak for hours after.
Too shaken by what they couldn't recall.
Finally, on the eighth night, they reached it.
The Resonant Vault.
It was alive.
Not with movement—but with memory.
A stone monolith half-submerged in the cliffside, carved in spirals upon spirals, impossible architecture folding in on itself. Notes hovered in the air—visible, crystalline, floating on strands of starlight. The Vault sang, but not in any audible way.
Haraza stepped forward.
The glyph on his arm ignited.
The doors of the Vault responded.
They opened with no sound, only pressure. A sudden shift in gravity, direction, truth.
Inside was not darkness—but kaleidoscopic mist, patterns folding inward as if they stood within the throat of a sleeping god.
And in the center—
—a pedestal.
Upon which rested an object both fragile and terrifying.
A tuning fork made of light and shadow.
Caela gasped. ("That's… that's not an instrument. That's a keystone.")
Brannock blinked.( "A what?")
She didn't look away. ("A key that doesn't unlock doors. It aligns realities. This… this could re-tune the world.")
Haraza stepped toward it.
The glyph on his arm reached out, threads of light weaving into the air.
The fork responded.
Not by sound.
By memory.
Visions crashed through them all—lives lived, songs sung, stars birthed. A world before the Rift. A song that bound existence like a covenant. Then the shattering. The Disharmony. The Rift.
And the Choir.
Not its creators.
But its consequence.
Haraza dropped to one knee.
The truth was clear now.
The Choir wasn't trying to awaken something.
They were trying to repair something—wrongly.
The original Harmony had been fractured, and in trying to reforge it with broken voices, they risked rewriting the world into madness.
And this?
This keystone?
It was the original pitch.
The true frequency of the world.
If Haraza could learn it—if he could attune—
Then he could stop them.
But the glyph warned him.
The cost would be steep.
No song comes without sacrifice.