The steps down to the Choir District weren't marked on any official city map. No signs. No rails. Just a slit between two forgotten vendor stalls in the Lower Half, hidden beneath a stretched awning of stitched tarps and woven glass threads. Kesh stopped there without warning, placing her hand against a rusted chain that dangled like an afterthought.
"This is where I leave you," she said. "The Archivists won't help unless you've seen what the Choir's become."
The boy stared past her, into the dark below. It wasn't a tunnel. It was a staircase. Spiral-shaped, but inverted — winding downward like a throat.
"You're sending me alone?"
She shrugged. "You're already being called. I just don't want to be there when you answer."
It was meant as a joke, maybe. But her eyes didn't laugh.
He stepped forward.
The chain rattled. The entrance didn't welcome him — it accepted him. Like it had been waiting.
"I'll find you again," she said behind him, "if you come back with your mind still yours."
The descent was uneven.
Some steps were solid stone, others warped wood. One was missing entirely — a gap where sound vanished instead of echoing. At the fiftieth step, the boy noticed that the air had lost temperature. Not gone cold. Just... absent.
It didn't feel like a place that had ever known sunlight.
He passed a broken glyph carved into the wall — a stylized mouth, crossed through with a spiral of nails.
No voices greeted him.
But something hummed. Not with sound. With expectation.
A memory from earlier returned unbidden — the ritual with Kesh, the way her voice had vanished mid-sentence, not swallowed, but refused.
He flexed his fingers. They trembled once, then stopped.
The staircase ended.
The world below opened up like a lung collapsing.
The Choir District wasn't empty.
It was occupied.
Shanties of old worship halls and overturned confession shrines dotted the cavern space. They'd built them in circles, all facing a central spire made from bound bones and melted sigilstone. A shape floated above it, humming a single phrase through silence:
"Unname. Unvoice. Unself."
No one spoke here. They moved in patterns — dancers with no music, priests without sermons. Cloth wrapped their faces, but it wasn't to protect themselves. It was to keep their voices trapped inside.
A woman passed him carrying a bowl of teeth.
A child sketched spiral hymns onto its own forearm with a burnt finger.
He walked slowly, trying not to draw attention. But it didn't matter. They already knew he didn't belong. Not by his footsteps, not by scent.
By sound.
He made it.
They did not.
He passed one of them whispering into a cracked mirror — not words, but breaths arranged like a question. Another hunched near a dripping pipe, mouthing scripture into the leaking rhythm. Language had become ritual, stripped of meaning and rebuilt into cages.
And they wanted him to enter one.
He reached the central pillar.
It wasn't guarded — only watched.
The floating shape hovered closer. Its form bent as it moved, folding space like cloth. Where it passed, sound bent sideways — a ripple of "almost-heard" sentences catching on breath and bone.
The boy touched the base of the pillar.
Something answered.
Not aloud.
Not in thought.
But in removal.
A memory blinked out — the moment he first held the anchorbone Kesh had given him.
Gone.
Just... gone.
He stumbled back, gasping.
Around him, the Choir raised their heads. Slowly. Like puppets moved by cracked strings.
They didn't speak.
But they began singing.
Soundless.
A hymn without voice.
And in his head, something echoed.
"Give it up. Give your sound. Give your self. Join the silence."