WebNovels

Chapter 39 - Chapter 39

By the time they made it back, the sky had already gone the color of bruised metal.

The forest pressed close, restless — the way it always got before the drums.

Rowan spotted them first, hand instinctively on his blade.

When he saw Nora's face, the tension in his shoulders didn't ease. "What happened?"

Ezra just said, "You'll see," and brushed past him.

They reached the clearing. The campfire was still alive, but barely — a low orange pulse under the wet air. Cassian looked up from where he'd been cleaning one of the bone knives. Soren stood by Atlas's tent, arms crossed.

Ezra didn't sit. Couldn't. The sight of those statues — those people — was still carved into the back of his eyelids.

Rin was the one who spoke first. "They're not just dying out there. They're being… turned."

Soren frowned. "Turned how?"

"Stone," Nora said, blunt. "Human, animal — all the same. Fresh."

The silence that followed felt like a physical weight. Even the fire seemed to quiet, the wood giving up its last crackles in apology.

Rowan rubbed a hand over his face. "You sure?"

Ezra's voice was low. "I touched one. It still hummed."

That got their attention. Soren's head lifted. "Hummed?"

Ezra nodded. "Like resonance. But wrong. Off-key."

Cassian swore under his breath. "So now the forest's killing by sound too. Great."

Rin's arms were folded tight. "It's not the forest. It's Her."

That name again.

It hung in the air like smoke.

Ezra looked up. "You've said that before."

Rin didn't meet his eyes. "You'll understand when you see the pyramid up close."

Rowan turned sharply. "We're not going near that place."

"Then we die here."

It was Atlas's voice — soft, hoarse.

Everyone turned.

He was sitting up. Somehow. His skin looked too pale, veins faintly blue under the surface like rivers under ice. His eyes were half-open, unfocused, but alive.

Soren moved fast, kneeling beside him. "Don't." His tone was sharp, too sharp, like the word itself might keep Atlas from breaking apart.

Atlas didn't listen. His gaze drifted past Soren to the rest of them. "The humming you heard — it's spreading. The frequency's changing."

Ezra crouched, still keeping a careful distance. "You mean the… resonance?"

Atlas's lips twitched into something not quite a smile. "Resonance, corruption, whatever name helps you sleep. It's traveling in waves. Everything's caught in it." His voice dropped, the words tumbling faster. "The stone is just what happens when you stop resisting."

Rowan's jaw tightened. "You're talking nonsense."

"No," Soren said quietly. "He's not."

They all turned. Soren's face was unreadable. "You didn't feel it last night? The air changed. The wind wasn't natural. Something's moving through the jungle. It's pushing everything toward that temple."

Nora stepped forward. "You think it's calling us?"

Atlas laughed once — dry, empty. "Calling, consuming, same thing."

Ezra caught the flicker of something in Atlas's eyes — faint light threading the irises, like static crawling under glass.

He asked, careful, "And what happens if we ignore it?"

Atlas's gaze focused on him for the first time. "You turn to stone."

That decided it.

Rowan tried to argue — of course he did. Said they'd held out here for weeks, that the camp was safe, that running toward the heart of the Trial was suicide. But even as he said it, Ezra could see the doubt creeping in behind his words.

Because the jungle was getting louder.

Not with sound — but with silence.

And then the drums started.

Low. Far off. A rhythm too steady to be wind, too deliberate to be thunder. It came from the direction of the pyramid.

Atlas's fingers twitched. His voice barely carried. "She's awake."

Soren stood. "We move."

Rowan snapped, "We're not—"

"We move," Soren repeated, voice hard enough to slice through the argument. "Before the forest moves on us."

No one spoke after that.

They packed fast. What little food they had left. The tools. The weapons. Nora doused the fire, watching the smoke curl into the gray sky like a final breath.

Ezra caught Rin's eyes across the clearing.

She didn't say it, but he knew what she was thinking.

The city. The pyramid. The Keeper.

Everything they'd escaped was waiting again ahead of them.

And still, she nodded once — small, certain.

Ezra adjusted his spear, glancing one last time at the camp that had pretended to be home.

"Guess we follow the drums," he muttered.

No one disagreed.

They left as the wind picked up, carrying with it the faintest whisper —

a woman's voice, soft and almost sweet.

"Come closer."

It took them two days to reach the base of the ridge.

Two days of walking through air that no longer felt like air — heavy, humming, thick with something that breathed beneath the skin of the world. Every step seemed guided, as if the ground itself was nudging them toward the same place, no matter how often they tried to turn away.

They carried what they could. Food. Water. Weapons that still had an edge. Anything else, they abandoned to rot.

Ezra walked near the middle of the line, spear in hand, eyes moving from face to face. The closer they came to the pyramid, the more he saw it — the quiet between footsteps. The tightening of jaws. The unspoken sense that the closer they got, the less the world belonged to them.

Atlas muttered as he walked. Not words — vibrations, low and strange, making the air tremble in a way that made Ezra's skin crawl. Sometimes, the sound seemed to echo back, like the world was answering. His eyes stayed half-lidded, pale and unfocused, thin veins of blue still glowing faintly beneath his skin.

Rin walked a few paces behind him, silent. Her hand rested near the whistle at her throat, thumb brushing the carved bone out of habit. The circles beneath her eyes were darker than before, her movements stiff. She hadn't used her resonance since the fight in the city — and Ezra wasn't sure if that was because she couldn't or because she was afraid to.

Rowan led the group. Every so often he'd look back, counting heads, the weight in his gaze saying more than his words ever did. His blade was never sheathed for long. Something in him had hardened since the fight with the brothers — a cold, restrained fury that hadn't left his face since.

Cassian kept a few paces behind Rowan, quiet as ever. Ezra had tried to read him, once. Still couldn't. Cassian didn't argue, didn't complain. He worked. He cooked. He watched. There was a steadiness in him that was almost comforting, except for the times Ezra caught his shadow moving wrong — just a fraction too slow, too still, as if it didn't quite belong to him.

They stopped when the pyramid finally came into view.

It rose out of the jungle like a scar the earth had tried and failed to heal. Black stone slick with moss, steps that disappeared into the clouds. The air around it was motionless, thick with a pressure that made the inside of Ezra's chest hum.

"Camp here," Rowan said, voice rough. "We move at dawn."

No one argued.

They found a patch of flat ground beside a crooked tree and lit a fire no higher than Ezra's knee. The light only reached a few feet before it was swallowed by the dark.

Ezra sat near the flames, rolling the shard — the compass bone — between his fingers. It pulsed faintly, like it was listening to something only it could hear.

Seer.

That was what Atlas had called it. The binding frequency. The oldest one. The resonance that tied all others together — the one the world itself might still hum to, if you were foolish enough to listen.

Ezra didn't know if he believed that.

He didn't know what to believe anymore. His light wasn't divine, wasn't holy. It was survival — sharp, brutal, imperfect. If it kept him alive, that was enough.

He looked around the camp. Rowan sharpening his blade, firelight sliding across the scars on his knuckles. Rin leaning back against the tree roots, eyes half-shut but never truly asleep. Nora crouched by the fire, tracing something into the dirt — a pattern, a map, maybe a prayer. Atlas sat hunched, muttering again, his words shaping the air, the fire quivering with every breath he exhaled.

Cassian stayed on the outskirts. Watching. Always watching. His knife rested across his knees, edge glinting whenever the flames flared.

Ezra exhaled and stretched out beside the fire, the heat kissing his face. He wasn't sure if this was peace or exhaustion. Maybe both.

He knew the age differences only because he'd once cared enough to ask. Asli, Silas, and himself — the youngest of the Academy's batch. Soren and Rowan were older by a few years. Rin and Cassian were somewhere in between. Nora sat neatly between Rin and Soren, closer to the middle of it all. He remembered thinking that back then, age had meant something. Now it didn't matter. The Trial didn't care about years.

He closed his eyes.

The hum that had followed them from the forest had never really gone away. It was still there, faint but constant — like the world breathing through its teeth. But now it grew louder, sharper, until it felt like it was pressing against the inside of his skull.

He opened his eyes.

The fire was gone.

The camp was gone.

Only the pyramid remained — massive, endless, bleeding red light from the seams between its stones.

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