There was no gate to Caldrin's Reach.
The city had broken open long ago, its perimeter shattered by a Choir-engine implosion that erased two-thirds of its name from history. Even the maps called it "The Reach" now—half-remembrance, half-warning.
To most, it was a ruin.
To Kairo and the Ashborn, it was a beacon.
They stood at the top of the ridge, looking down into the remnants of the city. The skyline leaned like toppled dominoes, glass bones and metal ribs rising from the earth. Strange lights flickered in the distance—signals, maybe, or ghosts.
"The Song's faint," Lira said, shielding her eyes from the rising ash wind. "Like someone's trying to call back… but doesn't know how."
"He's confused," Theren added. "Unbalanced."
Kairo nodded. "But still alive."
They descended.
The Reach was haunted.
Not by spirits—but by sound.
Each step echoed with voices that didn't match their owners. A child's laughter drifted out of an empty canister. A woman's scream echoed from the body of a tree. A hymn hummed itself from a broken window, cycling endlessly on a verse no one remembered.
"Memory's unspooled here," Aeska muttered, blades drawn. "Like the city's trying to reassemble itself… and failing."
"It's fractured," Yui whispered. "Like the Ashborn we're tracking."
Kairo's mark pulsed.
He turned sharply down a ruined corridor of tilted buildings and broken tracks.
The song was growing stronger.
They found him—the fourth—inside a half-buried theater.
He stood alone on a stage that had long since caved inward, the sky visible through its fractured dome. The rows of seats were empty, but spectral figures flickered in and out of view—an audience of echoes.
The boy on stage was no older than thirteen.
Barefoot. Thin. Wrapped in a patchwork of performance robes and scavenged cloaks.
He was humming.
Kairo stepped into the aisle. "We've come for you."
The boy didn't stop humming.
Not until Kairo reached the edge of the stage.
Then he raised his eyes—pale gray, glassy—and said, "Are you real?"
Lira stepped forward. "We are. You're like us."
"I'm not like anyone," the boy replied. "I'm pieces. Songs that don't fit. Words that don't end."
Kairo slowly offered his hand. "What's your name?"
The boy flinched. "They took it."
"Then we'll help you remember it."
The boy reached forward—
—and the moment their hands touched, the dome above shattered.
She had arrived.
Cantor Nythe descended in complete silence, her chains wrapped in shimmering stillness. No footstep. No breath. No sound.
But her presence was deafening.
The Ashborn staggered, their Songs sputtering, as if all air had been sucked from the world.
Yui collapsed, hands over her ears, though there was no noise.
Lira dropped to her knees, trying to summon fire that would not come.
Theren roared, but the flames sputtered mid-air, snuffed before they reached their mark.
Kairo held the boy close, shielding him.
And then she unwrapped her face.
Silver cloth fell away, revealing a mouth of black smoke. From it came no scream, no chant, no magic word.
Only absence.
It washed over the theater in waves.
And the Ashborn began to forget—
Who they were.
Where they had come from.
What they were fighting for.
Kairo's grip on the boy loosened.
His own name began to slip from his tongue.
But just before he lost it completely…
The boy sang.
A perfect, broken, impossible note.
So raw it cut the air.
So flawed it shattered the silence.
Kairo gasped.
The Ashborn woke.
And Nythe staggered for the first time.
A crack appeared at the base of her mask.
The boy's voice cracked again.
This time with a word:
"My name is Solen."
And with that name, his mark ignited.
The fourth Ashborn had remembered himself.