The city's darkened streets whispered their judgment as Kallum moved through shadowed lanes, the confrontation with Solen a fresh, burning wound.
He felt eyes upon him – unseen watchers cloaked in deep alleys, silent gazes tracking him from behind shuttered windows.
He knew the Order's agents, alerted by Solen's fear or their own insidious network of spies hidden among Ildaren's wretched and faithful alike, would already be searching.
Father Solen's face – haunted, guilt-ridden, horrified – lingered in Kallum's mind, etched there like another scar upon his soul.
He needed refuge, sanctuary from the Order's inevitable hunt, a quiet moment to decipher the whispers emanating from the shard in his satchel. He craved somewhere untouched by the suffocating doctrines and watchful eyes that permeated the city's heart.
Instinct, honed by years navigating both Ildaren's alleys and the treacherous paths below, guided him away from the main thoroughfares. He stuck to the shadows of lesser streets, passages choked with refuse and the ghosts of forgotten commerce.
Every distant shout, every clatter of a closing shutter, sent jolts of adrenaline through him, tightening his grip on the concealed dagger beneath his cloak. He felt unseen eyes tracking his progress, spectral remnants of the Order's pervasive network, or perhaps just the inherent paranoia of the hunted.
As he moved towards the periphery, the architecture began to fray. Grand facades gave way to crumbling tenements leaning drunkenly against each other. The air grew heavier, thick with the smell of mildew, stagnant water, and decay.
Here, the city's pulse waned, the distant chanting replaced by the mournful sigh of wind whistling through broken eaves and skeletal window frames. Neglected shrines, dedicated to gods Solen had once assured him were powerless superstitions, huddled beneath suffocating shrouds of ivy, their offering bowls filled with rainwater and dead leaves.
Empty plazas, cracked paving stones surrendering to weeds, stretched out like barren wounds under the indifferent moon. Time itself seemed to pool here, stagnant and uncaring. It felt like the edge of the world, a fitting reflection of his own isolation.
He recognized the area – a dilapidated quarter he'd explored in his restless youth, seeking escape from the rigid structure of the priesthood even then. An abandoned cloister, swallowed by the surrounding decay, came into view. Its outer walls were stained black with grime, breached in places where stone had crumbled away.
Kallum slipped through a collapsed section of the wall, the air inside instantly cooler, carrying the scent of dust thick as velvet and something else – the faint, dry perfume of brittle paper and forgotten prayers.
Inside, moonlight struggled through high, cracked windows, illuminating a scene of utter neglect. Tattered tapestries, depicting serene saints whose faces had long peeled away into blank ovals, clung to the damp stone like shed skin. Dust carpeted the marble floor in thick drifts, muffling his footsteps.
He moved towards the center of the ruined sanctuary, finding a measure of solace beneath a large, shattered statue – perhaps one of the very saints depicted on the walls, now headless and forgotten. Only here, surrounded by decay and silence, did he feel safe enough.
Sitting with his back against the statue's cold base, Kallum carefully withdrew the Vestige.
The shard hummed faintly in his palm, a low thrum that vibrated up his arm, resonating disturbingly with the scar hidden beneath his sleeve. Within the swirling obsidian depths, distorted visions seemed to twist and coil, layered beneath impenetrable shadow.
It felt cold. Hungry. Alive.
As he stared, trying to focus his intent, whispers slithered against the edges of his consciousness. Not words, precisely, but impressions – a language older than thought, dripping with ancient sorrow and an unbearable, consuming longing.
"Tell me," he breathed softly, his voice barely audible above the shard's low hum. "Show me the truth."
The Vestige pulsed gently, and suddenly the world twisted, reality unspooling around him into ribbons of memory and shadow. Kallum found himself standing on a precipice again—deep within the Abyss.
Before him sprawled endless darkness, yet within it countless lights shimmered like trapped stars – lost souls, forgotten songs, fragments of devoured worlds caught forever in the rift's unending, mournful chorus.
The scar seared upon his skin then, resonating painfully with the Abyssal vista, flaring with a raw agony that tore a gasp from him and brought him crashing to his knees on the dusty floor.
His own blood seemed to surge in response, the pain coalescing into shapes behind his eyes—visions unfolding in fragmented glimpses, bitter flashes of memory disturbingly not his own.
A woman screaming as shadows consumed her body, leaving only an echoing silence.
A warrior striking down his comrades, eyes glassy with madness, weeping as he vanished into darkness.
An infant's laughter swallowed by emptiness, replaced by a grief so profound it felt like a physical weight.
These were the fragments bound into him, pieces of the abyss-song, the Dirge he never chose but was now irrevocably tied to. He clutched his forearm as if he could tear the cursed markings from his flesh, desperate to silence the agonizing visions, the echoes of suffering pouring into him.
"You feel them clearly, don't you?"
A voice spoke quietly from the gloom, shattering his pain-filled trance.
Kallum spun, phantom agony still echoing in his limbs as adrenaline surged anew. His hand snapped to the hilt of his concealed dagger, eyes narrowed, straining to pierce the oppressive shadows opposite him.
From the deepest darkness emerged a woman, her figure lithe and spectral in the dim light filtering through the cracked ceiling. Silver hair flowed like liquid moonlight over her shoulders. Her eyes were pale and piercing, reflecting a sorrowful knowingness that seemed ancient.
She wore the practical, dark garb of a Delver, tattered from journeys below—but no twisting Dirge marked her visible flesh.
"Who are you?" Kallum demanded, his voice rough, adrenaline still singing in his veins. The dagger remained firmly in his grip, its point angled implicitly towards the shadowed figure. "How did you find this place? How do you know my name?"
The last question was sharp, laced with a new, colder suspicion. Kallum Vire. Only the Order, and Solen, used his full name with such familiarity. Was she one of them? A new kind of hunter?
She tilted her head slightly, her calm unnerving, her pale eyes lingering on the throbbing scar on his arm before meeting his gaze. "I am Elyria," she said quietly, her voice a low murmur that seemed to absorb the silence rather than break it. "And we share a purpose, Kallum Vire."
Hearing his full name spoken so calmly by this stranger sent a chill crawling up his spine. It wasn't just knowledge; it felt like an assertion of intimacy, or power.
"You didn't answer my question," Kallum pressed, suspicion hardening his tone, though he didn't attack. Something in her stillness, her lack of overt threat, held him back.
"The Abyss remembers." Her voice softened further, taking on a resonance of ancient weariness that felt incongruous with her appearance. "And so do I. We met once before, Kallum. Briefly. Near the threshold of a deep descent. You were… eager."
A flicker of memory, elusive and sharp. Torchlight glinting on pale eyes, much like these. A hastily whispered caution – something about paths not meant to be trod, about listening too closely to the dark. A warning he, in his desperate grief and single-minded focus to find something, anything to save Elara, had arrogantly brushed aside.
"Pride," Elyria murmured, as if reading his flickering recollection, "or perhaps desperation, drove you onward."
The fragments coalesced. Recognition, unwelcome and unsettling. He had seen her. And ignored her.
He lowered the dagger a fraction, though his knuckles remained white on the hilt. "Why seek me out now? Years later?"
"Because the Vestige you carry is incomplete," Elyria replied, her gaze dropping pointedly to the obsidian shard Kallum still held, almost protectively. "It resonates strongly, even now. But it is only a fragment of something far greater. Something the Abyss itself fears."
Kallum tightened his grip on the shard instinctively. "Fears?" The word sounded absurd. "The Abyss devours worlds. It feeds on fear."
He thought of the weeping Echoes, the horrors in the Order's labs. What could possibly frighten such a force?
"And yet," Elyria murmured, taking a slow, deliberate step closer, her movements fluid and utterly silent on the dusty floor, "it sings in lamentation."
"A Threnody older than creation itself – an original sin bound within its deepest chasm. When you brought that shard back, Kallum, you awakened something profound. Its echo is spreading. Already, others begin to hear its call."
Kallum felt a chill deeper than the night air, a cold dread that had nothing to do with the stone beneath him. This resonated with the whispers from the shard, the sense of immense, ancient power. "Others? Who?"
"The Order, seeking to control it," Elyria stated, her voice gaining a harder edge.
"Misguided cultists, drawn like moths to a flame they cannot comprehend."
"Rogue Delvers, hungry for power they can't handle."
"All chasing echoes, driven towards a reunion that would unravel everything."
The air grew thick with unspoken implications. "What happens," Kallum asked, his voice tight, "if the song... the Threnody... is completed?"
She met his gaze unflinchingly, the sorrow in her pale eyes deepening into something akin to horror.
"Everything sings." "Everything becomes the Abyss." "An end to all things, drowned in its eternal, sorrowful chorus."
The words hung between them, heavy as chains. Understanding dawned like a freezing, bleak sunrise.
He slowly, reluctantly, sheathed the dagger, though his hand remained resting on the pommel. "Then it must remain fractured," he breathed, the words feeling inadequate against the scale of the threat. "Broken."
"For now, yes." Elyria's voice tightened, a flicker of urgency finally showing beneath the calm facade. "Which means we must find the missing pieces before they do."
A partnership. Proposed by a woman who appeared from nowhere, knew his name, spoke of world-ending songs. Suspicion warred with the terrifying logic of her words.
"Why me?" Kallum demanded, the question raw, scraping against his ingrained distrust. "Why trust me with this?"
He hated the note of desperation he heard in his own voice, the vulnerability of needing something, even this cryptic alliance.
"Because you know the song intimately," she said softly, her gaze falling once more to the scar tissue visible beyond his glove. "It sings through your very being, Kallum Vire. Who better to comprehend the necessity of its silence?"
He glanced down at his forearm, at the place beneath the wraps where the scar pulsed with a faint, sickening rhythm, as if in response to her words.
It sings through your very being.
The Abyss had marked him, chosen him, violated him – not through malice, perhaps, but through the Order's own profane meddling and his own crushing grief. It was a brand of his failure, his loss, and the horrific truth he'd unearthed. Elyria spoke of silencing the song, but the song was now part of him. How could he silence it without silencing himself?
Distrust coiled in his gut, cold and sharp. After Solen, after the Order's betrayal, how could he trust this stranger who spoke so easily of the Abyss, yet bore no visible mark herself? Was this another manipulation, another layer of the nightmare?
Yet... what choice did he have?
He was hunted. He carried a shard of apocalyptic power he barely understood. His only 'weapon' was a curse that fed on his own agony. Elyria offered knowledge, a direction, a purpose beyond mere survival or blind vengeance. She spoke of the Abyss with a weary familiarity that suggested she, too, had paid a price.
Was this hope? Or merely the path of least resistance, the only hand offered in the crushing darkness? It felt less like trust, more like a desperate gamble – betting his life, perhaps the world, on the word of a ghost who knew his name.
The alternative was to wait for the Order to find him, to be dissected like the creatures in their labs, or to be consumed entirely by the agonizing song already echoing in his bones.
He looked up, meeting Elyria's steady, knowing gaze. The Abyss might have forged his path, but the direction was still his to choose, however limited the options.
"Then where," he asked, his voice low, resigned yet resolute, his hand still resting near his dagger, "do we begin?"
Elyria extended her hand, palm open in invitation, an island of pale calm in the dusty ruin.
"Deeper," she whispered, the word resonating with promises and threats alike.
"Always deeper."
Kallum hesitated only a moment, the weight of worlds pressing down. Then, he clasped her hand, feeling an odd, cool resonance pass between them—a shared burden, a sorrow understood without words, an unspoken promise hanging precariously in the ruins. Her grip was firm, real.
Together, they stepped from the crumbling cloister into a night pregnant with omens and the distant, unheard reverberations of the Threnody.
Behind them, hidden within shadowed corners, the Vestige shard murmured softly in Kallum's satchel, fragments of a song too ancient and terrible to name echoing faintly into the city's sleeping streets, waiting patiently for the chorus to swell.