The inside of Valerius's workshop was a shrine to a forgotten faith. Dust motes danced in the single beams of light filtering through cracks in the dome, illuminating strange schematics and half-finished devices that hummed with a quiet, dormant energy. But all of Kael's attention, and all of Ria's, was focused on the magnificent, wounded beast that rested in the center of the room: the Diver.
They spent the next hour conducting a thorough, meticulous assessment of the vessel. Ria, in her element, moved with the focused precision of a master craftsman inspecting a flawed gem. She ran her hands over the ship's hull, a seamless, teardrop-shaped shell of the strange, dark metal that seemed to absorb both light and sound. "Incredible," she murmured, her cynicism momentarily forgotten in the face of superior engineering. "No seams, no rivets. It must have been grown, not built. The heat shielding properties would be off the charts." She found the gash on the ship's side, the scar from its encounter with the Guardians of Aethelburg. "Molten scoring, but the hull integrity is absolute. Valerius wasn't a madman; he was a genius."
Kael, meanwhile, was drawn to the ship's heart. Through a thick, reinforced crystal viewport on the vessel's flank, he could see the engine room. And in its center, housed in a complex cradle of brass and copper, was the Resonant Core. It was a massive, perfectly spherical crystal, easily the size of a man's torso. It should have been glowing with a steady, harmonious light, the source of the ship's power. Instead, it was dark, and its once-flawless surface was now a spiderweb of deep, ugly fractures that emanated from its very center. It was a dying star.
Ria eventually joined him at the viewport, her technical assessment complete. She peered inside, and the grim reality of their situation settled upon her. She found an emergency access panel near the engine cradle and, after a moment of wrestling with its strange locking mechanism, managed to pry it open. The air that hissed out was stale and cold.
She shone a concentrated beam of light from a tool on her wrist into the engine housing. The fractures in the core were even worse up close. They were not simple cracks; they were deep, black fissures that seemed to pulse with a faint, sick, dissonant energy.
"This is bad," Ria said, her voice flat, all traces of her earlier excitement gone. Her professional diagnosis was a death sentence. "This isn't just a broken part you can scavenge or replace. This is a Chorus-grade, master-tuned Resonant Core. I've only ever seen schematics for something like this. They don't make them anymore. The knowledge was lost, or suppressed."
She looked at Kael, her expression grim. "Even if, by some miracle, we found a replacement core just lying around in this Graveyard, which we won't, installing and tuning it would be impossible. It would take a Chorus Master a month of constant, focused harmony to align a new core with the ship's systems. Without that perfect tuning, the moment you try to power it up, it would either do nothing or it would shake itself apart." She ran a hand over the cool, dead metal of the hull. "The core powers everything. Life support, navigation, and most importantly, the resonant heat-shielding that keeps the Molten Sea from turning the ship into a puddle. This vessel is a dead shell. A magnificent, beautiful, useless coffin."
Kael stared at the fractured crystal, his mind racing. He saw the black, spiderwebbing fissures, felt the faint, sick hum of the alien dissonance that had poisoned it. He had seen this before. He had felt this before. In his own leg.
The ship wasn't dead. It was blighted.
"We don't need to replace it," he said, the idea forming on his lips, sounding insane even to him. "We need to heal it."
Ria turned to stare at him, her expression one of utter disbelief. "Heal it? Kael, that's a rock. A very complex, very expensive rock, but a rock nonetheless. You can't 'heal' it."
"It's the same as my leg," Kael insisted, his voice gaining conviction. He pointed at the core. "Look. The damage came from a Dissonant attack, from the Guardians' song. It's a blight. A wound. It's been poisoned with a frequency that's shattering it from the inside out." He looked from the broken core to Ria, his eyes intense. "I can use my own Dissonance to fight it. I can shatter the 'dead' fractured parts of the crystal, turn them to dust. If we can clean out the poison, maybe… maybe the healthy parts can be re-harmonized."
Ria stared at him for a long, silent moment. She looked at the impossible ship, then at the impossible boy standing next to her. "You want to fix a master-tuned harmonic engine… by screaming at it?" The idea was ludicrous. It violated every known law of resonance engineering. It was like trying to perform surgery with a sledgehammer.
But then she remembered the resonant lock on the workshop door, a lock her best tools couldn't bypass, which he had opened with a song from a forgotten age. She remembered the Salt-Scuttler he had shattered with a wave of his hand. His abilities, his very existence, were outside the known rules. Their situation was impossible. Maybe an impossible solution was the only kind that would work.
"Okay," she said finally, the single word a massive leap of faith. "Let's say you're right. Let's say you can 'clean' the core. We still can't do it here. To even attempt a re-harmonization, we'd need a massive, stable power source to jump-start the ship's secondary systems, and tools I don't have on me. We can't do it alone."
There was only one person in Silt who had the equipment, the power, and the skill. Bren.
They were forced to return to her workshop, their incredible discovery a secret they now had to carefully, partially, reveal. They didn't tell her about Aethelburg or the Shattered Lyre. They framed it as a pure salvage operation. They had found Valerius's legendary ship in the Graveyard. It was damaged, but they believed they could get it working again. They needed her help. They needed her workshop's powerful resonant generator to jump-start the Diver's systems, and they needed her expertise as a master mechanic to help re-harmonize the core if Kael could successfully perform his dissonant surgery.
Bren's reaction was a firestorm of disbelief, anger, and professional curiosity. She was furious that they had risked their lives in the structural chaos of the Graveyard. But the lure of the legend, the irresistible challenge of working on Valerius's mythical engine, was too strong for a master engineer like her to resist. After a tense negotiation, lubricated by a hefty promise of a majority share of whatever valuable Heart-Crystals the repaired ship could dredge up, she agreed.
The unlikely team of three was formed: the cynical Wayfinder, the one-armed Master Mechanic, and the broken boy who believed he could heal a dead god's heart with a broken song.