The climb was a vertical battle against the storm. The black rock of the cliff was slick with rain and sea spray, offering few handholds. The wind threatened to peel me from the face of the stone with every gust. Here, there was no sand to command, only solid, unforgiving rock.
But the Library had taught me to listen.
I pressed myself flat against the cliff, seeking shelter in a shallow groove, and extended my senses. I wasn't searching for sand, but for its forgotten children: grit, sediment, tiny mineral deposits caught in the ancient cracks and fissures of the rock. I found them—a thin vein of quartz crystals here, a pocket of weathered granite there. They were faint, lonely notes in the overwhelming roar of the storm, but they were there.
My ascent became a slow, painstaking process. I would reach up, find a crack with my fingertips, and sing a tiny, focused harmony into the grit within it, asking it to solidify and cling to the surrounding rock. It would grant me a fragile, temporary handhold, just strong enough to pull myself up a few feet before I had to find the next. It was like climbing a ladder made of whispers.
After an eternity of fighting for every inch, I hauled myself over the final ledge and collapsed onto the flat, windswept top of the headland. I was there.
The Resonance Well stood before me, a crown of twisted black metal pillars humming with stolen power. The air around it crackled, and the sickly purple light pulsed in time with the storm's rhythm. Standing this close, I could feel its song of Dominion—a greedy, monotonous, demanding drone that vibrated in my teeth. It wasn't harmonizing with the storm; it was enslaving it, forcing its power into a channel it was never meant to follow.
Touching it would be suicide. Trying to break it with force would be like trying to shatter an anvil with a glass hammer.
I remembered Kael's words, the lesson of the bridge, the lesson of the silver sand. Stop trying to shout over it. Include its song in your own. But this was a song I didn't want to include. It was a song of violation.
So, I would give it a harmony it couldn't accept. I would not try to break the pillars; I would sing to them in a language they were not designed to understand.
I knelt on the wet rock, ignoring the lashing rain, and placed my palms flat on the stone just inches from the base of the central pillar. I closed my eyes and focused, shutting out the storm, shutting out the well's oppressive drone, and reached for the song of my home. I summoned the memory of the golden sand, the heat of two suns, the vast, clean, powerful chorus of the Expanse.
Then, I pushed that song—my song, the pure, undiluted song of the sand—into the black metal of the pillar.
The effect was instant and violent.
The metal, a thing of rigid, forced structure, had no way to process the fluid, harmonious, and utterly alien song of the sand. It could not bend. It could not harmonize. So, it vibrated.
A high-pitched, grating shriek tore through the air, overriding the sound of the storm. The monotonous hum of the well became a discordant scream of protest. The pillar before me began to tremble, fine cracks appearing on its dark surface. The purple light flickered erratically, shifting to a furious, unstable red.
I pushed harder, pouring all of my focus, all of my memory of home, into the dissonant attack. The other pillars began to vibrate in sympathy, their own structural integrity failing as they were subjected to a frequency they were never meant to endure.
With a final, deafening shriek, the central pillar shattered. Not with an explosion, but with a catastrophic structural failure. It crumbled into a million pieces of black dust. The stolen energy, suddenly released from its cage, erupted upwards in a massive, silent column of violet lightning that pierced the storm clouds above.
Then, silence.
The oppressive hum was gone. The unnatural purple glow vanished. The storm still raged, but it felt different now—cleaner. Its song was its own again.
Exhausted, I slumped to the ground. Below, in the sea cave, I saw a brief, bright flash—the signal from Kael's crystal. He had seen it. He knew I had succeeded.
But as I looked out across the churning sea toward the mainland, I saw another light. A series of bright, rhythmic flashes from the direction of Port Draconis. An alarm.
We had cut the root of the tree, but in doing so, we had just told the gardeners exactly where we were.