hapter Six — Shatter Hymn
"What breaks the body is war.What breaks the spirit is a song sung too late."— Verse Fragment, Choir Catechism V
The city wept.
Not in sorrow. Not in grief. Not in defeat.
It wept because the Dominion made it weep.
Two days after Kaelen's song shattered the Tower of Order, the black pylons lit crimson across Arakan. Five resonance fields collapsed. Three Choir-linked sectors were bombed to dust. And in the eastern sector of Noct Vale, six thousand people disappeared before dawn.
No bodies. No blood. Only silence.
Dominion retaliation was not loud—it was surgical. Precise. The Choir had sung, and the response was to erase the listener.
Kaelen stood at the edge of the carnage, his breath quiet, his lungs still echoing.
They weren't punishing him.
They were warning him.
The hymn came the next night.
Kaelen didn't mean to hear it.
He had retreated deep underground, into the broken cathedral beneath the dead aqueducts, where old Choir tones still haunted the walls like ghosts. He was trying to control the resonance again, to silence the shard within his ribs that pulsed with each breath. He couldn't. It was growing, evolving, becoming more than him.
But before he could panic, before he could scream—he heard it.
Not a note.
Not a whisper.
A hymn.
Thousands of voices. Low. Hollow. Ancient.
And not human.
The Choir was singing.
He fell to his knees as the sound passed through him.
It didn't enter his ears—it entered his bones. It carved sigils into his marrow. It whispered memories he had never lived. His skin broke out in glyphs that flickered with meaning he couldn't translate.
The hymn sang of beginnings, of ash-covered thrones, of a world that once breathed in harmony with itself—until silence was forced upon it like a chain.
It sang of the First Harmonic Collapse, where language was weaponized into annihilation.
It sang of the Ashborn, those who once sang with stars in their lungs.
And then it sang his name.
Not Kaelen.
Not Vessel.
It sang: He Who Breathes the Broken Key.
Lira found him hours later, curled against the wall of the aqueduct vault, blood leaking from his ears, symbols scorched into the stone around him.
"You heard it," she said. Her voice was hoarse. Terrified.
He nodded.
She dropped to her knees beside him.
"Then it's begun. The Shatter Hymn. I thought it was a myth."
"It's not," Kaelen rasped. "It's a warning."
"No," Lira said quietly. "It's a summoning."
Above them, the Dominion gathered.
The Pale Refrain, the elite choir-hunters of the Empire, had arrived in Arakan.
They did not wear armor.
They wore bone.
Thin, white plates of vocal-nullified bone, carved from something not quite human, and lined with voice-eating runes. Their mouths were sealed by flesh stitching. Their eyes were covered in glass. They hunted by breath signature alone.
And they were not coming to silence Kaelen.
They were coming to unmake him.
Kaelen awoke in the middle of the night to silence so thick it hurt.
Lira wasn't there. The cathedral had gone cold.
The hymn in his chest had stopped humming.
He panicked—not because it was gone, but because something else had taken its place.
A new note.
Deeper.
Not sung.
Spoken.
It came from within.
He followed the sound down a narrow corridor he had never seen before—stone overgrown with fungal veins, glowing faintly with residual resonance. The path twisted impossibly, folding back on itself, echoing with footsteps that weren't his.
And then he entered the Chorus Crypt.
It was not a room.
It was a memory.
A circular chamber of glass and ash, suspended in stillness, with no air, no gravity, no time. Inside floated twelve bodies—no, not bodies. Instruments.
Each one had once been human. Now, they were twisted into impossible shapes: ribcages turned into harps, spines stretched like flutes, skulls hollowed and tuned to resonance.
This was not slaughter.
This was devotion.
The Choir had once believed that death was not the end—but a transformation. A way to make the flesh sing eternally. And Kaelen now stood in the sacred mausoleum of those who had become Evernotes—immortal echoes of their own belief.
And at the center?
A thirteenth body.
Still breathing.
Kaelen reached out.
Its eyes snapped open.
It wasn't a corpse.
It was a mirror.
He looked into its face—and saw himself.
But older. Scarred. With eyes of obsidian and a voice humming through every pore.
The mirror-Kaelen opened its mouth—and sang one note.
It was enough to fracture the crypt.
Kaelen awoke gasping in the cathedral ruins, surrounded by Lira and three other Choir insurgents. The song was gone. The crypt was gone.
But he remembered the note.
And now, so did the walls.
A plan was already forming.
The Shatter Hymn was more than prophecy. It was a key. A sequence. A pathway.
Lira had spent years collecting fragmentary verses—old Choir codices stolen from Dominion reliquaries. Most were incomplete, destroyed, or deliberately corrupted. But Kaelen recognized the shapes now. He could fill in the blanks. Not with memory, but with instinct.
He began writing.
Not with ink.
With breath.
Each exhale shaped symbols into soot. Each note layered invisible calligraphy into the air. The others watched in awe as glyphs bloomed and faded on the stone, unlocking hidden panels, opening forgotten chambers, revealing Choir relics lost to time.
Kaelen wasn't just remembering.
He was rewriting.
But the Pale Refrain was getting closer.
They struck the outer sectors with surgical precision.
One Choir ally detonated her own lungs rather than be captured.
Lira wept once, in private, and then asked Kaelen:
"How far are you willing to go?"
He didn't answer.
Not because he didn't know.
But because he knew too well.
That night, he returned to the rooftop where he had first hummed.
He inhaled deeply.
And then, without ceremony, he spoke.
One word.
Spoken aloud, with no resonance shaping, no breath field.
Just voice.
Just truth.
The world shook.
Far below, Dominion towers cracked.
In distant bunkers, Evernotes stirred.
In orbit, listening satellites blinked red.
The word was simple.
But it hadn't been spoken in over 400 years.
Choir.