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Verse:
He walked where echoes broke into silence,
Where stars dared not listen and steel held breath.
Through wounds in time and rhythm's defiance,
He bled a path where gods had wept.
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Ren's POV
The winds were colder now.
Not the cold of winter—but the chill of something ancient brushing against his skin. The kind of cold that reached past flesh, past thought, and whispered to the marrow. Ren did not shiver. He had long passed that reflex. Where he stood, the world had become more than just sky, stone, and step. It was memory. It was myth.
He crouched by a crumbled ridge of what might have once been a tower or a war monument. The land here was fractured by something that did not obey time. Charred remnants of battle hymns hung in the air like unfinished music. The rhythm here was broken—silent—and that silence hummed.
Kael's voice came faint behind him. "Ren... something watches."
Ren didn't respond immediately. His blade trembled gently against his back, not in fear, but recognition.
"Not just something," Ren murmured. "Many things. None alive."
A slow echo pulsed beneath the ground like a dying drumbeat. Every step forward became a prayer he did not mean to pray. The landscape—the once-great Plains of Elveran—had become a scar across history, where the divine and mortal once clashed.
This was the warfront the gods forgot to bury.
And yet… the land remembered.
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Kael's POV
He hated this place.
Hated the way the air seemed thin and thick all at once. How sound stretched strangely between steps, like rhythm refused to settle. Kael had traveled with Ren long enough to recognize that they weren't just walking into history—they were stepping into its heartbeat.
He gripped the hilt of his own blade tighter.
They had followed a trail of broken echoes from a ruined monastery—symbols scratched into bone, verses scrawled onto the underside of blackened shields. All led here.
To the Field Where Rhythms Died.
Kael moved up beside Ren. "If we don't turn back, we might not find our way out."
Ren's eyes remained forward. His voice, when it came, was quieter than thought.
"I'm not here to find a way out."
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Interlude – The Anvil's Dream
In the deep beneath deep, where rhythm has no name, the anvil breathes.
Molten memory drips onto its back. Sparks dance like voices not yet born. There, the echo of gods still hammer songs into the bones of forgotten warriors.
One such song, unfinished, curls upward through stone and soil.
It searches for the one who can complete it.
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Scene: The Fractured Choir
They reached the ridge just before dusk—a jagged outline of pillars and blades half-buried in the earth. Each monument pulsed faintly with forgotten rhythms, some still vibrating from wars long turned to dust.
Ren knelt.
He placed his hand on the earth.
The moment his palm touched the cracked stone, the silence shattered.
Voices.
Wailing, singing, screaming, laughing.
All at once. All from the past.
Kael fell to one knee, gripping his temples. "Ren—!"
But Ren stood. Taller than before.
"Can you hear it?" Ren whispered.
Kael looked up, eyes wild. "Hear what?"
Ren's gaze lifted to the sky. "The war that never stopped."
Above them, the clouds tore.
And from the heavens fell a memory.
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The God of Light and Wounds
It did not descend in glory. It fell. Like a blade thrown by grief.
A golden figure crashed into the battlefield, sending dust and verses into the air. Its wings were made of light bent backward, its armor etched with glyphs that bled white fire.
The god stood slowly, one leg broken, one eye blind. A crown of cracked mirrors hovered over its head.
It turned to Ren.
"You again."
Ren's breath caught. "You remember?"
"I forget nothing. Least of all the one who carries the silence."
Kael tried to speak but his voice drowned in thunder. The god stepped forward, golden blood trailing in its wake.
"You are too young to carry death's favor," it said. "Too soon to hear the full song."
Ren stood unmoved.
"I'm not here for permission."
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From the Book of Still and Songs –
Where gods remember and mortals forget,
He walks where heaven's wounds still sweat.
One blade, one name, one cursed breath—
He sings the rhythm born of death.
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