The tunnel Silas had indicated was less a path and more a wound in the city's foundation. The air grew colder as James descended, the distant, rhythmic groan of Luminar's machinery fading into an unnerving silence. The faintly glowing moss of the upper Undercroft vanished, replaced by jagged crystalline growths that pulsed with a sick, irregular light, casting dancing, distorted shadows. The static in the air was so thick now he could feel it prickle his skin, a constant, nerve-wracking hum.
Sophia was a dead weight in his arms, her feverish murmurs the only familiar sound in this alien landscape. The obsidian needle of the null-compass spun lazily, no longer pointing in a clear direction but merely confirming what he already knew: the Great Pattern here was weak, frayed, and stretched thin.
He began to see signs that he wasn't alone. Not long into his descent, he found the carcass of a creature resembling a large, armored mole-rat. It hadn't been eaten. It had been meticulously disassembled, its tough carapace laid open and its organs arranged in a bizarre, almost ritualistic pattern. A little further on, strange symbols were scratched into the metallic walls. They seemed to shimmer and writhe at the edge of his vision, refusing to be seen clearly.
The feeling started subtly: a prickle on the back of his neck, the sense of a gaze he couldn't place. He would stop, listening, but hear only the drip of water and the faint hum of the city's dying enchantments. Yet, the feeling persisted, growing stronger. He was being watched. Hunted.
He caught a glimpse of it then—a flash of movement in a tangled nest of power conduits high above him. A silhouette, too fast and fluid to be human, vanished before he could get a clear look. He picked up his pace, his heart hammering against his ribs.
The compass needle suddenly jolted, pointing steadily for the first time in an hour towards a massive doorway on the far side of a cavernous, derelict chamber. It must have been a power station once; giant, silent turbines stood like forgotten gods in the gloom. This was it. A significant weakening. He was getting closer.
He stepped onto the wide metal walkway that spanned the chamber's floor. He was halfway across when he heard a sharp click from beneath his feet.
The grating gave way. It was a trap.
With a surge of adrenaline, he threw himself and Sophia forward, landing hard on the solid edge of the walkway as a ten-foot section of it crashed into the black abyss below. He skidded, scraping his hands, but Sophia was safe. The null-compass, however, flew from his grasp, clattering on the edge of the pit before falling silent.
Panting, he pushed himself up, his eyes scanning the darkness for the architect of his near-demise. A soft, chiming sound, like wind through broken glass, echoed from the ceiling.
A figure dropped from the rafters above, landing with a silence that was utterly inhuman.
It was a girl, perhaps his age, but that's where the similarity ended. Her clothes were a ragged patchwork of scavenged leather, wire, and cloth. Her limbs were thin but taut with wiry strength, and her movements were sharp and jerky, like a startled bird. Around her neck hung a string of the same pulsing crystals that grew on the walls, the source of the chiming.
But her eyes were what held him frozen. They seemed to gather the faint, ambient light, glowing with a soft, predatory phosphorescence.
She stood between him and the doorway, her head cocked at an unnatural angle. This was the watcher. The hunter. James instinctively tried to use his new sense, to find a flaw in her Pattern to exploit, a thread to pull. But there was nothing to grasp. Her entire being was a chaotic, shimmering blur of unstable energy, a constant flux of frayed ends and loose knots. She was a native of this broken place; its chaos was her camouflage.
The girl took a silent step forward, her glowing eyes not on James, but fixed intently on the sleeping form of his sister. Her gaze was one of pure, unnerving curiosity. She seemed to see the magical curse not as a disease, but as an object of fascination.
Finally, she spoke. Her voice wasn't a single sound, but a chorus of melodic, overlapping whispers that seemed to echo from the chamber's walls.
"It sings," the whispers chimed, her glowing eyes never leaving Sophia. "The broken song. So loud. So pretty."
She took another step, raising a hand. The air around her fingers distorted like a heat haze, the very fabric of space seeming to ripple.
"I want it."
James scrambled backwards, pulling Sophia with him, his mind racing. He was trapped between a pit and this creature whose intentions were terrifyingly alien. Did she want to help? Or did she want to tear the "broken song" from his sister's body like the organs of the dead creature he'd found? In this place where the rules of magic were dead, he had just met one of its children.