The path beyond Hollowroot no longer resembled anything human.
Twisted forests hunched against a horizon of colorless hills, and the sky refused to hold its shape—one moment bruised violet, the next a dirty, smothered white. What sun there was gave no warmth. What stars there were no longer obeyed the heavens.
Nima led the way now. Not by choice. The others simply followed, as if something unspoken had changed between them—especially Dmitri, whose usual commentary had dried up since they'd left the cathedral ruins. He walked beside her, blade sheathed, face unreadable.
But Nima wasn't the same.
Something had crawled beneath her skin.
The shard's hum had quieted, yes—but it was still aware. Not a sound, not a word, but the weight of it in her pack changed. Its pulse felt like a second heartbeat. She sometimes caught herself holding her breath, just to see if the shard would breathe in her place.
They crossed a jagged pass between broken stone towers and reached a cliff that overlooked what had once been a town. Now, it was a crater.
Stone bones jutted from the edges—pillars of scorched foundations. Fires still smoldered below. Smoke danced like phantoms in the ravine. The smell of burnt parchment and copper clung to the wind.
"A Bellfire storm," Dmitri muttered. "Not natural."
"It was provoked," Nima said without looking at him. "There's something here."
The girl they'd saved—quiet as ever—stood behind them, eyes locked to the crater below. Her name still hadn't been spoken aloud. She hadn't given one.
Nima turned to her. "You've seen this before."
The girl finally nodded. Her lips barely moved. "They call it a Harm Note."
"A what?"
She touched her throat gently. "When the Bell screams instead of sings."
Nima's blood ran cold.
"You're saying the Song… reversed?"
The girl didn't answer.
Instead, she began to walk.
Straight down the side of the cliff.
Before either of them could stop her, she disappeared behind a fallen pillar of stone. Nima didn't hesitate—she followed. Dmitri cursed and ran after both of them.
They found the girl standing in front of a black obelisk.
It was cracked and half-buried, but unmistakable. Carved into its face were symbols neither Nima nor Dmitri recognized—but the shard in Nima's pack thrummed violently as if responding. The sound was deafening in her skull.
The girl placed her hand on the obelisk and whispered: "The Echo that shouldn't be."
Light erupted.
The ground shook.
Dmitri tried to pull Nima away—but she was already falling.
Into herself.
_______________________
She stood on a field of glass.
Endless. Empty. And yet, from the horizon, a thousand versions of herself approached. Some carried blades. Some wore crowns. One bled from the eyes. Another from the mouth. They whispered as they passed her, every one of them murmuring a fragment of a phrase.
"…you will break…"
"…you already have…"
"…the Song is a memory, not a future…"
"…you can't save them…"
"…you were never meant to be chosen…"
She spun. The sky above her cracked, revealing another eye—massive, hollow, lidless. It watched her without blinking, and inside it was not a pupil, but a shard of the Bell.
A voice—ancient and female—whispered from everywhere and nowhere at once.
"What are you willing to become to silence the world?"
She dropped to her knees.
She remembered her mother's voice. Her village's bells at dawn. The sound of running water. Dmitri's awkward jokes. Her own laughter—how foreign it sounded now. She hadn't laughed in what felt like years.
"Choose," the voice urged. "A path, a promise, or a prison."
She looked up.
All three lay before her.
A blade.
A mirror.
A cage.
Nima stood.
She stepped forward.
And chose—
Her eyes snapped open.
She was lying on her back. Dmitri hovered over her, panic scrawled across his face.
"You stopped breathing."
She sat up.
The girl was gone.
The obelisk was cracked completely in half.
Nima's hand still gripped something. When she opened it, the Bell's shard no longer glowed.
But etched into its surface—unmistakably—was her name.
Nima.
Written in the Bell's script.
Something had changed.
She had made a choice.
Now they'd have to live with it.
_______________________
The morning air was heavy with an unfamiliar stillness.
Nima's mind buzzed with the echo of her choice—the shard now cold and inert in her palm, the girl vanished like a whisper into the wind. Her name was etched into its surface, a reminder of something greater than herself. The song was still, but in its silence, a deeper dread settled in her chest.
Dmitri stood nearby, scanning the ruined landscape with guarded eyes, his hand still resting on his sword, though he hadn't yet drawn it. It was as if the world itself was waiting for them to move first, but Nima could feel the weight of the pause—something was shifting beneath the surface of reality.
She didn't speak. She couldn't.
Instead, she rose to her feet, her gaze sweeping over the valley before them, the remnants of what had once been a town. The flames had died down, but the charred remains of buildings seemed to stare back at them with hollow eyes.
"Where did she go?" Dmitri asked, his voice tight with concern.
Nima didn't answer. She couldn't. The girl—the one who had led them here—had disappeared, leaving behind only the obelisk, broken and forgotten. The moment the light had consumed her, the girl's presence had faded as though she were never real in the first place.
Nima's fingers tightened around the shard. The name inscribed into it burned against her skin. It had meant something. It had to.
"The Song…" Dmitri continued, eyes narrowing, "it's still there, isn't it?"
Nima's mind flickered with the fragments of what she had seen during her vision. A thousand different versions of herself. Paths that split, choices that led to nothing, or everything. She could still hear the haunting question ringing in her ears.
What are you willing to become to silence the world?
She didn't have an answer. But she was beginning to understand that the question was no longer hers to answer alone.
"No," she said quietly, staring at the shard once more. "The Song is gone. But its price remains."
"Price?" Dmitri's voice cracked slightly, as if the weight of those words had taken him off guard.
"It's not over," she muttered. Her voice was distant, lost in the sea of thoughts she could not reconcile. She had chosen, but in doing so, she had opened a door she wasn't sure she could close. "We've only just begun to pay for it."
Before Dmitri could respond, the wind shifted, pulling their attention toward the horizon. A shadow stirred—too dark, too sharp, a jagged edge against the dimming sky.
Nima's heart clenched in her chest. It was wrong. The way the land around them had been twisted, warped by something unnatural, something old. She could feel it in the air—a presence, lurking.
From the ridge, a figure emerged.
Tall, cloaked, and impossibly still, the figure descended into the valley toward them. Every step seemed deliberate, each footfall resonating with a sense of inevitability. Nima's pulse quickened. She wanted to draw her blade, but something held her back. She could feel the presence, like an invisible weight pressing against her chest.
Dmitri shifted behind her, clearly ready for a fight, but Nima's hand stopped him before he could act.
"No," she whispered. "Wait."
The figure stopped just a few paces away from them, lifting its head. Its face was hidden by the shadows of its hood, but Nima could feel the eyes upon her. A cold, knowing stare.
"I've been waiting for you, Nima," the figure said, its voice smooth and low. "You're the one who answered the call, aren't you?"
Nima's breath caught in her throat. The name, her name, spoken by something that wasn't human. This wasn't a coincidence. This wasn't chance. The path she had chosen had led her here, to this moment.
"I don't know who you are," Nima said, her voice firm despite the fear that gripped her.
The figure laughed, a sound like wind through dead leaves. "You don't know who you are, either."
The words stung. Nima clenched her fists, but her gaze never wavered. "I'll find out."
"Oh, you already have." The figure's hands lifted slowly, as if in invitation. "You think you've made your choice, but there's a far deeper one to be made. The Bell is silent, but its echoes still bleed through the fabric of your world. It knows you. It remembers you."
The figure's voice seemed to reverberate within Nima's bones, crawling beneath her skin. "You've just begun to realize the cost of what you've done."
Nima felt a chill run down her spine. She didn't understand, couldn't fully grasp the weight of what the figure was saying. But there was something in those words—a terrible certainty.
"What do you want?" she demanded, forcing herself to sound resolute.
"I want nothing," the figure replied, its voice a soft rasp. "I simply am. And you… you are the key."
Before Nima could react, the ground beneath her feet trembled. She stumbled, reaching for Dmitri's shoulder to steady herself. Something was pulling at her, tugging at the very fabric of her being.
The figure stepped forward, raising one hand.
"You've already made your choice. Now, you must face what it means."
With a flick of the figure's wrist, the earth cracked open.
A dark chasm yawned before them, an abyss that seemed to stretch forever. From the depths of that void, something stirred. Something alive.
Nima felt the presence grow stronger, a terrible force rising from the depths. And she understood, with a sinking certainty, that it was no longer the Bell that was haunting her.
It was something worse.
She had walked too far into the darkness to turn back now.