There were Cantors.
And then there was her.
In the deepest sanctum of the Ardent Choir—a spire known as the Stillspire, where even echoes refused to linger—she walked barefoot across the mosaic of chained tongues, each tile etched with the names of those silenced in centuries past.
She was called Cantor Nythe.
She wore chains instead of robes—coiled around her arms, ankles, and throat. Not to bind her—but to hold her power back. Her mouth was covered with silver cloth, sewn not shut, but wrapped with runes that pulsed like veins.
She had never spoken.
She didn't need to.
When she sang, entire cities had forgotten their names.
And now, she had been awakened.
She knelt before the High Cantors.
Veiss, still reeling from the loss of three Choirbinders and the breach of the Vault, raised his staff with trembling fingers. "The Song is rising. The Ashborn multiply. We must contain it."
Nythe didn't answer.
She simply lifted her hand—and from the ceiling fell a sphere of bone and crystal.
It cracked open.
Inside it, a chained soul screamed, soundlessly.
Nythe pressed one finger to its chest.
The screaming stopped.
Veiss bowed his head. "Then it begins. The Hunt of Silence."
Far across the broken world, under a night sky thick with stars, Kairo awoke with the sense that someone had just screamed his name inside his skull.
He sat up, sweat beading his forehead. The fire beside him was low. Yui, Lira, Aeska, and Theren were still sleeping, scattered around their makeshift camp.
But something had shifted.
He looked to the north.
"What is it?" Lira stirred beside him, already sensing the weight in the air.
Kairo's voice was hoarse. "Someone just… erased a soul."
Aeska was instantly on her feet. "Choir?"
Kairo nodded. "No… worse. Someone deeper. Someone older."
Yui blinked the sleep from her eyes. "You saw it?"
"No," Kairo said, "I felt it. Like part of the Song just went missing."
Theren stepped from the shadows, arms crossed. "They've sent their strongest. I've heard the stories. One they keep beneath the ground—chained, cloaked, fed silence and grief."
"The Cantor of Chains," Aeska said grimly. "They send her when they don't want you killed. They send her when they want you forgotten."
Yui swallowed. "Can she take our voices?"
"She can take everything," Kairo said. "Even our names."
Lira lit a small flickering flame in her hand. "Then what do we do?"
Kairo looked around the group—his flame, his light, his dagger, his thunder.
"We sing louder."
By morning, the Ashborn had left the Scorched Ring behind and were heading east, toward the fractured city of Caldrin's Reach, where Choir control was weakest—and where whispers of another Ashborn had surfaced.
But in the sky above them, runes began to form.
Not in light.
In absence.
Sigils carved from pure silence, visible only because they consumed the stars behind them.
Cantor Nythe was already watching.
And she would strike soon.