The ocean was dead.
Kairo had expected that much. The stories spoke of saltwater turned to glass when the old gods fell, of waves that froze mid-crest and hardened under the weight of sorrow and skyfire. But seeing it—standing on it—was something else entirely.
Beneath his feet, the sea stretched endlessly, a mirror of broken reflections. Shattered ships were frozen within it, some upright like grave markers, others half-submerged in fractured waves, their sails fluttering in a wind that no longer belonged to this world.
Above him circled crows—thousands of them, silent, blacker than ash. They did not call. They simply watched.
Waiting.
Yui stepped cautiously beside him, her boot tapping the surface with a soft ring. "It feels like we shouldn't be here."
Aeska agreed. "This place remembers. Every death. Every oath. Every betrayal."
"Good," Kairo said. "Then maybe it remembers the truth, too."
He lifted his head toward the horizon, where a black tower rose from the sea like a spine piercing the sky. The tower from the vision—the one shown to him by the obsidian shard in the Vault. It pulsed with faint red light, and its surface shimmered like obsidian dipped in starlight.
It was their destination.
"The Tower of Song," Aeska whispered. "It's real. I thought it was just a myth. A place where memory becomes magic."
"It called to us," Kairo said. "It knows something about the Ashborn."
They began walking, careful with every step across the slick surface. The crows followed from above, shifting in unnatural patterns—forming circles, then symbols. Yui noticed first.
"Kai… they're drawing runes."
He stopped.
She was right.
The birds weren't flying randomly. They were forming sigils in the sky—ancient, complex. Spells written in wings.
The sea beneath them pulsed.
And then, without warning, it screamed.
A shriek rippled across the ice-glass ocean. It wasn't a sound so much as a feeling—a jagged knife in the soul, scraping bone. The crows scattered in every direction.
From beneath the frozen surface, shadows began to rise.
Figures, once human.
Now glass-bound, their bodies fused with shardsteel and memory. Echo Wraiths.
Aeska drew her twin daggers. "They're bound to the tower! Guardians, maybe."
"Or prisoners," Kairo said.
Yui stepped behind him, her fingers already weaving subtle light spells.
Then the ice cracked.
Dozens of wraiths burst from the sea with unnatural grace, moving as though still underwater—flowing, gliding, silent.
Kairo grabbed his new weapon: the reforged spear made from the mirrorblade and Yui's obsidian shard. Its edge pulsed with energy tied to his mark.
He charged.
The battle was surreal—mirror and magic, glass and blood. The wraiths did not speak. They sang, each movement accompanied by haunting melody, harmonies of agony. Each strike threatened to shatter not just his body, but his memories.
A wraith touched him once—and he saw his own childhood again. Yui, crying in the snow. His mother, vanishing into flame. His father's hands, covered in blood.
"KAIRO!" Yui's voice grounded him.
He roared and slashed through the wraith, severing its core.
The sea flared red—and then fell still.
Silence.
The tower loomed only a few hundred paces away now.
And Kairo knew: whatever waited inside would not be a monster.
It would be a song.
A song meant for him.