Chapter 6 – The Herald of Broken Songs
The memory storms faded with the dawn.
But their scars remained.
The village of Marn's Hollow lay silent under the pale morning light, a hollow echo of itself. Burned-out houses and twisted monuments to forgotten gods marred the streets. The people who survived moved like dreamers—awake, breathing, but not truly present.
Anterz stood on the roof of a half-collapsed tavern, watching the horizon.
The fires had spread.
Each blaze a fracture point.
Each point a song ready to be sung.
Each song a doorway left cracked open.
---
Below, Elaria gathered supplies into a ragged satchel: dried fruit, stitched bandages, whatever medicines hadn't rotted.
She moved stiffly, like every step cost her a little more belief in the world.
He didn't blame her.
Neither spoke of the thing they had seen descending through the rift.
Neither dared give it a name.
Naming gave power.
Naming made things real.
---
By mid-morning, they left Marn's Hollow behind.
No villagers stopped them.
No farewells were given.
The past had already taken root there—and it would bloom in silence.
---
The next three days passed in muted urgency.
The landscape grew stranger the further east they traveled.
Rivers flowed uphill.
Trees bent toward unseen winds, whispering in half-languages.
Stones bore carvings that shifted when glanced at sideways—memories bleeding through stone like ink through paper.
And above it all, the sun hung too low, too large, as if leaning close to witness the world unmaking itself.
---
On the fourth morning, they found the corpse.
It wasn't a villager.
It wasn't anything human.
---
The creature lay sprawled in the dust at the base of a withered tree. Its body was twisted, malformed—six arms, two too many joints in each limb. The head was vaguely human, but the mouth split up past the ears, filled with teeth that seemed half-formed, half-melted.
Its skin shimmered faintly—not with light, but with possibility.
As if it had been stitched from unfinished dreams.
Elaria gagged.
Anterz crouched beside it.
Valteris pulsed once, slow and heavy against his back.
> "This is not a god's remnant."
> "This is a fracture from something that never earned a world."
---
"What killed it?" Elaria whispered.
Anterz studied the wound—a deep slash running from clavicle to navel.
Not precise.
Not kind.
A wound made by rage and ritual both.
"There's another player," he said grimly. "Someone who hunts the fractures."
Elaria touched the creature's forehead.
For a moment, her body stiffened—eyes wide.
She snatched her hand back, trembling.
"It remembered being born wrong," she whispered.
"And it wanted to be corrected."
---
They burned the body before nightfall.
Not for ritual.
Not for respect.
For containment.
Even dead, the thing's memories writhed in the ash—whispers of a world that could have been, clawing at the edge of the real.
Anterz stood watch while Elaria slept uneasily beside the fire.
He listened to the night wind.
And in the distance—
He heard a song.
But not like the villagers' songs.
Not like the Pale Choir's songs.
This was something older.
Sharper.
A song of broken things dragging themselves back into motion.
He woke Elaria before dawn.
"We're not alone."
---
By midday, they saw the rider.
---
At first, it was just a silhouette—standing on the ridge above a cracked riverbed. Tall, wrapped in flowing black and gray, face hidden beneath a helm of cracked silver.
The horse—or what passed for one—was skeletal, its bones wrapped in translucent flesh that shimmered with glyphs.
Anterz and Elaria stayed hidden among the rocks.
The rider made no move to attack.
Just watched.
Waited.
Then, slowly, it raised a hand.
And pointed toward them.
---
Elaria's hand found Anterz's wrist.
She squeezed once, not in fear—but warning.
This wasn't a mad fracture-bearer.
This was something worse.
This was an envoy.
---
The rider spoke without moving.
The voice unfurled directly into their skulls—low, steady, inevitable.
> "The Choir King summons the Ruin-Bearer."
> "Come to the Cradle of Shards."
> "Bring the Key that Sleeps."
Anterz felt a cold pressure against his chest.
Not from Valteris.
From himself.
From the name he had chosen to abandon.
---
Elaria hissed, "I'm not a key."
The rider tilted its helm.
> "You are the lock that memory cannot break."
> "The King would unmake you kindly."
---
Anterz stepped forward, Valteris unsheathed but lowered.
"I don't answer to kings."
The rider's skeletal horse pawed the dirt, impatient.
> "You will."
Then it turned and rode into the east.
---
They didn't follow.
Not immediately.
Not until the second storm came.
---
That night, the sky bled silver.
The stars did not move.
Instead, they spun inward, collapsing into a single, blinding eye that opened over the eastern mountains.
From it poured voices.
Not in language.
Not in sound.
In memory.
Whole villages rewritten overnight.
Forests turning into glass gardens overnight.
Beasts twisted into things dreamed by dead gods who never walked the waking world.
The world was folding.
---
Elaria wept beside the fire.
"I can hear them," she whispered.
"All the gods that never existed. All the lives that should have never been."
Anterz said nothing.
He simply sat beside her, sword across his knees, watching the horizon.
Waiting for dawn.
Waiting for choice.
---
At sunrise, they stood together at the edge of a broken bridge.
The Cradle of Shards lay beyond—just visible through the mist.
A city.
Or what had once been a city.
Now, it was a wound in the land.
Towers made of broken mirrors. Streets paved with frozen rivers of memory. Gates formed from shattered dreams stacked into arches.
And above it all, on a throne of singing stone—
Waited the Choir King.
---
Elaria pulled her cloak tighter around her.
"He's not a fracture-bearer," she said.
"No."
"He's not a god."
"No."
"Then what is he?"
Anterz gripped Valteris tighter.
And answered with no joy:
"A man who heard the gods die... and decided he could sing louder."
---
Together, they stepped onto the shattered bridge.
Toward the Cradle.
Toward the King.
Toward the song that promised not salvation—
But the final unmaking of the world's memory.
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