Nima awoke gasping for air.
There was no sky above her, no earth below. She floated—or perhaps fell—through an endless field of glass, each shard reflecting a different moment of her life: a sliver of her home in the mountain village, her mother's hollow eyes, Dmitri's rare smile, the wraiths writhing in moonlight, the Bell's impossible song.
She tried to scream but had no voice. No throat. She wasn't even sure she had a body. She was thought, suspended in memory.
Then came the sound.
Not the Bell's toll—but something quieter, crueler.
Laughter.
The kind that crawled under your skin and made your bones itch. It echoed through the shards, warping the memories into something grotesque. Her mother's face stretched into a grin of cracked porcelain. Dmitri stood still, limbs twisted in wrong directions, his eyes two dark wells.
"You chose to listen," said a voice—her voice—but wrong. Like an imitation carved from her own throat and strung on wires.
"You touched the Bell's heart, Nima. You let it see you. And now…"
A mirror snapped beneath her. Reality split, and she fell into herself.
She landed hard—this time, truly landed. Grass scratched her arms. The sky was a smear of burnt orange, and the trees bled from their bark like weeping wounds. She stood, breath ragged, sword gone, shard gone.
Something was wrong with the light. It flickered, as if reality couldn't decide on its shape.
Dmitri stood in the distance, his back to her.
"Dmitri!"
He turned.
Only it wasn't him.
His face was carved from wax, eyes unmoving, his mouth parted just enough for a slow, droning hum to leak through. The Song. Still there. Still alive.
Nima backed away.
The world shimmered, peeling at the edges.
She ran.
The forest was a spiral. No matter where she turned, she returned to the same crooked tree with roots that resembled a hand pressed against the earth.
"Where are you going?" a child's voice asked.
Nima spun around.
There was a girl. Same eyes. Same hair. Younger. Much younger.
It was her.
The child held a music box. The one her mother had burned years ago.
"Do you remember this?" the girl said, winding the key. "Before you started running?"
"I never ran," Nima whispered, but her voice shook.
"Then why are you still dreaming?" The girl opened the box.
A chime played. Not discordant. Not haunting.
Beautiful.
Too beautiful.
Nima fell to her knees.
She remembered. What it felt like to listen to something beautiful and believe it could last. Before her father vanished. Before the Bell called. Before the world began to rot.
The forest sighed.
The girl was gone.
So was the tree.
All that remained was her.
And the voice.
"You're waking up now," it said. "But not to the world you left."
_______________________
She gasped again.
This time, her breath caught on something real.
Stone. Damp. Cold.
Nima lay curled in a circle of unlit runes, her fingers twitching against etched grooves in the floor. It wasn't the Bell's square anymore. Not the warped forest either. She was somewhere else—beneath. Beneath what, she didn't know.
Dmitri lay a few paces away, unconscious but alive, his skin damp with sweat, his face locked in a grimace. His sword was there beside him. Its edge trembled—vibrated, as if whispering against something unseen.
A circle of candles surrounded them, unlit but still warm. Something had used them. Or perhaps… someone.
Nima sat up, heart pounding. The stone beneath her glowed faintly with the outline of a symbol—one that matched the markings on the Bell shard.
She wasn't dreaming anymore.
But the dream hadn't ended.
Whispers filtered in from the walls, like voices just beyond understanding. They didn't speak to her. They through her. As if her thoughts were glass and they moved behind it, breathing fog into her mind.
Dmitri groaned. "Where… what happened?"
"You tell me," Nima muttered, standing, unsteady. "I think we crossed a threshold."
He looked around, eyes catching the faint traces of black ash clinging to the walls, like fingers dragged across soot.
"This isn't the city anymore."
"No," she said. "It's what's beneath it."
As she stepped toward him, the floor shifted slightly. Not a quake. A breath.
And then the symbols lit up.
All of them.
The circle. The runes. The stone on the walls.
The whispers sharpened into a song—fractured, incomplete, like someone struggling to remember a tune once beloved and now forgotten.
Dmitri grabbed his blade. "Something's here."
The flame in the center of the chamber ignited without spark. Blue. Hungry.
From the other side of the chamber, a silhouette emerged—a figure wrapped in burial cloth, its head tilted too far, as if listening to music no one else could hear.
"Children of the silence," it said, its voice echoing as though spoken through centuries. "You've walked into the Cradle."
"The what?" Nima's hand went to her belt, but the shard wasn't there.
The figure didn't approach. It hovered—slightly above the ground. The cloths undulated in waves, like a veil over something still forming.
"The Bell was never just a song," it said. "It was a womb. A thing waiting to birth what the world refused."
Dmitri stepped forward. "What are you?"
"I was the first," it said. "The first to hear. The first to bleed."
Nima's breath caught.
The chamber trembled again.
Behind the figure, the walls cracked open—not as rock splitting, but as flesh giving way. And beyond it, they saw something shifting. A great form coiled in darkness, breathing. Sleeping.
"You have interrupted its gestation," the figure whispered. "And now, it will wake wrong."
The whispers turned to screams.
The air distorted.
The stone bled.
Dmitri moved—fast—his blade striking toward the figure, but it vanished like smoke, and the chamber erupted with pressure, collapsing in on itself without crumbling.
The Bell wasn't calling anymore.
It was remembering.
And something below all memory was starting to rise.