CH 7:
The Choir of the Unnamed
Ashes of the Divided Crown
The first time the Choir sang, it wasn't with voices. It was with silence so complete, it deafened the birds mid-flight. The skies dimmed—not from clouds, but from memory forgetting light. Those who heard it wept, not out of sorrow, but recognition.
They remembered a thing they had never known. A harmony older than fire.
Older even than the Testament.
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Dustrest, now pulsing like a heart in the earth's broken chest, had become a crucible. Within it, dreamwalkers had stitched their minds together through the dust-born songs, composing verses not in words, but in sensation. Grief. Hope. Hunger. Rage. And among them, the Choir began to form.
Not a cult. Not a church.
A faction, born not by decree but by resonance.
They called themselves The Choir of the Unnamed.
No one chose to join. You awakened into it. One moment, a mourner. The next, a vessel of a forgotten chord echoing through your marrow.
They had no leaders. No hierarchy. Only the Song. And only those who heard it could truly act in its will.
Yet within this strange egalitarian current, three voices began to rise above the others—not to dominate, but to harmonize the chaos:
Vereya of the Unseen, a blind archivist whose fingers read the Codex without ink.
Ser Karthon Delane, once a holy knight, now armorless, whose oath broke when he saw a child burned for dreaming.
And Thireon, who did not sing the Song, but was the key they tuned their tones to.
Together, they invoked the Second Fragment of the Testament, thought lost:
> "When the name is forgotten, it finds its truest sound.
Those without names shall carry the heaviest truths.
And only in discord shall the New Harmony rise."
The Choir did not chant in temples. They whispered in battlegrounds, sang in execution squares, and wept songs into the dying breaths of both tyrant and peasant. Their presence was both blessing and curse.
Some said their songs healed.
Others swore they unmade cities.
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In Kael-Mirath's chamber, the High Quorum gathered under duress. Reports flooded in:
A legion defected overnight after hearing the Choir hum.
Flameborne twins in the East walked into a mirror and vanished after receiving "the note."
The Citadel of Thorns melted into glass after the Choir sang for seven hours straight beneath its foundations.
The Crown was fracturing faster than prophecy could bind it.
"Who leads them?" one elder spat.
"No one," Kael-Mirath answered. "That's the problem. You cannot kill what has no head."
The old world was unraveling, not with fire or steel, but with verse.
And beneath it all, the Third Testament stirred.
Not written.
Not recited.
But waiting.
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