In the eternal sea of nothingness, where light and darkness had not yet chosen sides, where silence breathed heavier than sound, there existed an echo.
It was not a voice, nor a thought, but the residue of something that had once been whole. A resonance — neither angelic hymn nor devil's lament — drifting between the shattered fragments of a forgotten epoch.
They called it many names across different ages.
The First Choir, sung before the descent.
The Tenth Cataclysm, whispered of in abyssal prisons.
But the most accurate name was also the least known:
The Ninth Choir.
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When the Creator withdrew His gaze from the world, the Choirs of Heaven were left incomplete. Eight resplendent orders of angels aligned with the divine will, each resonating with the Sefiroth of the upper realms. Yet, in the shadow of that brilliance, something lingered — a resonance that did not rise, nor fall.
It was not rebellion.
It was not obedience.
It was the bridge.
The Ninth Choir was born of contradiction: an echo of Heaven and Hell both, forged from the fragments of mercy and judgment, of radiant hymn and infernal lament. It carried within it the authority of Balance, the law that even gods must face.
But such a force was too dangerous.
When the Cataclysm of the Second Epoch drowned continents, the Choir was sealed beneath layers of myths. The surviving deities and angels colluded, scattering its essence across two mirrors of creation: the radiant heavens above and the burning abyss below. Each side told only half the truth, and so, in the long ages that followed, mortals forgot.
Forgot, but did not erase.
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Somewhere, hidden deeper than even the Forsaken Land of the Gods, there lies a Sefirah Fragment unlike the others. Neither purely divine nor purely abyssal, it manifests as a Ladder of Duality — ten rungs, each representing the ascent through Heaven and the descent through Hell. The midpoint rung, broken and incomplete, bleeds contradictions into the void.
It is said that whoever finds the Ladder's Shadow shall glimpse the Ninth Choir.
And whoever dares to climb, either upward or downward, must hear both the hymn and the lament until their soul is either reforged… or utterly destroyed.
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Yet history remembers faint traces.
The Church of the Eternal Blazing Sun once declared heresy upon a sect that claimed angels could "fall and rise in the same breath." The records were burned.
The Aurora Order, in their twisted scriptures, muttered about "the lost balance," but never found the pathway to it.
Even the Secret Order of Zaratul spoke once — in a dream journal never published — about a hidden Choir that "waits in silence until the world burns again."
None succeeded.
None even reached the Ladder.
But destiny is cruel.
The Apocalypse that awaits — the fall of walls between worlds, the unveiling of gods' contingency plans, the invasion of ancient horrors — will demand something beyond mere gods and kings. It will demand one who can stand in the overlap, where Heaven's mercy and Hell's judgment are the same blade.
And so, the Ninth Choir waits.
Silent. Patient. Hungry.
Waiting for the one who will step into its shadow and ascend — or descend — to claim it.
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The bells of Backlund toll faintly in the distance.
Gas lamps flicker under fog.
And somewhere in the veins of the city, where destiny entwines with forgotten truths, a mortal soul begins to hear a faint echo.
The hymn.
The lament.
The silence between both.
The Ninth Choir stirs.