After what felt like an eternity spent in the mountain's gullet, Kael finally emerged from the far end of the Widow's Jaw. The narrow canyon walls fell away, and the oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere lifted. He stepped out into a vast, bowl-shaped valley, a hidden sanctuary or a secret prison nestled in the heart of the Obsidian Peaks.
The silence here was different. It was not the dead, sound-absorbing quiet of the pass. It was a waiting silence, a silence thick with a palpable, latent energy. A low-level, dissonant hum saturated the very air, a constant, almost subliminal vibration that made the hairs on his arms stand up. It wasn't just in the ground anymore; the entire valley was a resonant chamber of wrongness.
As the energy of the valley washed over him, he felt a strange, new sensation. The scar on his leg, which had been unnervingly silent since his deal with Vex, began to respond. It started as a faint, tentative thrum, a sleepy nerve waking from slumber. Then, as he took a few more steps into the valley, the hum grew in strength, resonating with the ambient dissonance around him. It felt like he had come home to a place he had never been, a native environment for the strange, new part of himself. The feeling was both comforting and deeply disturbing.
He scanned the valley. In the center, perched on a high, flat-topped plateau of black rock, he could see them. A cluster of broken, angular ruins, their forms stark against the hazy sky. They were ancient, their lines sharp and geometric, utterly unlike the flowing, grown structures of Lumina. That had to be it. The Shattered Lyre.
His goal was in sight. A surge of grim determination pushed back against his exhaustion. He began the long walk across the valley floor toward the plateau, his limp more pronounced on the uneven ground. The valley was a desolate place, littered with obsidian boulders and patches of the same tough, thorny crystal shrubs he had seen in the wastes. There was no sign of life, no movement, nothing but the wind whistling a mournful, tuneless song around the black rocks.
He was halfway there when the silence was torn apart.
It was a sound that was not a sound, a high-pitched, piercing shriek that seemed to bypass his ears and drill directly into his skull. It was the sound of tearing metal, of grinding glass, of a soul being ripped apart. Kael clapped his hands over his ears, a useless gesture, as the psychic scream assaulted him.
From behind a massive, house-sized obsidian boulder, a creature emerged. This was what Vex had warned him about. A Screaming Echo.
It might have once been a large, wolf-like creature, perhaps even a Jag-Wolf, but it was now a hideous, corrupted mockery of life. Its body was a chaotic, shambling jumble of shattered, mismatched crystal shards—some black obsidian, some milky quartz, some a sickly, veined green. The shards were not a solid form, but seemed to be held together by a shimmering, unstable energy, constantly shifting and grinding against each other. It had too many legs, six or seven of them, moving at unnatural, jerky angles, some bending the wrong way. Its head was a nightmare of broken facets and sharp, jutting points, and its mouth was a gaping, silent maw from which the terrible, piercing shriek seemed to originate, a sound that was both sonic and psychic.
Kael drew his Jag-Wolf fang, its familiar weight a small comfort against this new, unimaginable horror. He fell back into the defensive posture that had saved him before, ready for a charge, ready for a physical assault. But this fight was going to be different.
The creature's danger was not in its claws or teeth. It was in its very presence, its aura of pure chaos. The closer it shambled toward him, the more the dissonant shriek intensified, and the world around Kael began to warp and fray at the edges. The air shimmered as if with intense heat. The solid ground seemed to tilt and sway beneath his feet, and a profound sense of vertigo and nausea washed over him. His vision blurred, the colors of the desolate valley swirling together. The creature's attack was not on his body; it was an attack on his senses, on his perception of reality, on his very sanity.
He knew he had to act. He couldn't just shatter it—its body was already shattered. That was the source of its power. Trying to break it further would be like trying to put out a fire by throwing more fire at it.
He tried to find his own center, to summon his own Dissonance as a counter-frequency. He opened his mouth to hum, but the creature's psychic shriek was so powerful, so overwhelming, that it drowned out his own internal song. It was like trying to whisper in a hurricane. He couldn't find his frequency; he couldn't focus. The creature was a living embodiment of pure, uncontrolled chaos, and it was infecting the world around it with its madness.
It bore down on him, its shambling, uneven gait deceptively fast. The shriek reached a fever pitch, a needle of pure pain driving into the center of his brain. He stumbled backward, his vision swimming, his mind reeling. He was losing. He was being unmade by a sound.
And then, something new happened.
The silvery scars on his leg, which had been humming in sympathy with the valley's energy, suddenly erupted with light. It was not a faint glow, but a brilliant, pulsing, silver-white light that shone through his tattered trousers, a beacon in the gloomy valley. The light pulsed in time with the creature's horrifying shriek, a frantic, resonant beat.
He felt a strange, new power surge up from the scar, a jolt of energy so potent it made his leg tingle with a fiery, pins-and-needles sensation. It was a Dissonant power, but it felt different from his own. It was wilder, more primal, tinged with the cold, predatory hunger of the Jag-Wolf. It was a resonance that was both his and not his, an echo of the poison he had burned out, now awakened and amplified by the Screaming Echo's call.
He didn't know if this new, surging power was a weapon that could save him or a dormant venom, now roused, that would finally consume him from within. The Screaming Echo was almost upon him, its silent maw wide, ready to swallow him in its wave of insanity. He had no choice but to find out.