Chapter Seven — Elegy Protocol
"What cannot be silenced must be mourned. What cannot be mourned must be rewritten."— Fragment from the Fifth Elegy of the Pale Refrain
The air had teeth.
Kaelen felt it as soon as he passed through the city's outer ring — the space where streets turned to stone veins, where shrines once sang but now stood hollowed. The Breath here didn't hum like in Arakan. It crackled, deadened, snarling between buildings as if offended by memory itself.
This place was called Venn's Hollow.
It had no lights. No guards. Only the scent of melted flesh and an absence of birdsong that hung heavier than ash.
They said the Pale Refrain began here.
Kaelen didn't come alone.
Lira walked beside him, her wounded hand wrapped in stained prayer cloth. Her glyphs pulsed faintly beneath her skin, reacting to the lingering silence.
"Don't speak," she whispered. "This place listens differently."
They passed shattered instruments nailed to the walls — flutes with cracked mouths, gutted drums, strings torn from ancient harps and braided into nooses. A shattered mural bore the image of a Choir god with its throat carved out.
Silence wasn't just policy here.
It was worship.
The deeper they went, the more the world bent.
The architecture folded in impossible ways — stairs that led into walls, arches that curved upward and disappeared into shadow. Kaelen's breath began to echo despite the air's resistance, as if his lungs were learning to disobey.
Lira halted at the edge of a dried canal.
"They'll come here," she said. "The Pale Refrain. When the Dominion fails, it sends them."
Kaelen looked across the broken bridge.
"And if they don't fail?"
"Then they still send them. For symmetry."
She knelt, tracing a symbol in the dust. Not a glyph. A note — a musical phrase written in spiral tones, meant to be inhaled, not read.
Kaelen inhaled.
For a second, he saw everything.
The moment the Breath Engine cracked. The bones of the first Echo. Lira, younger, drowning in silence as a girl while a song ate her village from within. And something else — something far beneath the city. Not dead. Waiting.
He coughed violently and spat blood into the dust.
"That's what we're standing on," she said, voice trembling. "What the Dominion buried."
Kaelen felt the weight in his lungs. A tuning. A pressure.
The Protocol had begun.
They arrived at the Choir Ossuary at dusk.
It was a cathedral of broken resonance — half-sunk into the hollow, filled with collapsed spires and jagged glass organs. Bones littered the floor like musical notations, some wrapped in choir robes, others fused to relics.
Kaelen knelt at one of the shattered pews.
A corpse leaned against it, its skull pierced by a chime-rod. In its hand was a shard of silver.
Not metal.
Not stone.
Throatglass.
He took it.
It felt warm.
Lira froze.
"They left that behind," she said. "On purpose."
"Why?"
"To see if you'd touch it."
Kaelen turned the shard over.
It began to hum.
Not aloud — but in his spine, behind his teeth, in the space between thought and breath. A resonance he couldn't name, but somehow knew.
It wasn't a song.
It was a script.
A living memory.
He pressed the shard to his skin.
And the world fell apart.
Kaelen stood in a city that no longer existed.
Venn's Hollow — alive. Voices, songs, the laughter of a thousand children. Priests moved through floating walkways, wearing garments of tuned silk. Above them, the Choir floated — not beings, but collective vibrations given form.
Then came the fracture.
A wave of black air tore through the sky. Every voice stopped mid-note. A child screamed — a high C — and combusted instantly. A mother's lullaby turned into a shockwave that leveled three towers.
The Breath broke.
And from the rubble, came the first Elegy.
A figure of bone-white silk, with no mouth. Only empty lungs — visible, breathing, weeping vapor. It walked through the ruin, collecting silence like a priest collects prayer.
It was the Pale Refrain.
And Kaelen understood, suddenly, horribly, why the Dominion didn't fear the Choir.
It feared them.
He awoke coughing on the cathedral floor.
The throatglass had melted into his palm.
Lira was pale. Shaking. She had seen it too.
"You made contact," she whispered.
"I think... it made contact with me."
They didn't move for a while. The air pulsed.
And then came the scream.
It wasn't loud.
It was total.
Like a blade pushed into thought. Kaelen felt his mind stagger. Lira vomited blood. Stones around them cracked in perfect geometric lines. The sound wasn't in the ears — it was in the bones.
Kaelen stood.
"It's here."
Lira didn't answer.
She had begun to weep.
The Pale Refrain emerged not with steps, but with stillness.
Its arrival silenced the wind.
It floated — a construct of lungs and robes, stitched from grief, its face a blank veil that absorbed light. Its body moved like smoke inside fabric, shifting in pulses, not motion.
It reached toward Kaelen.
He felt his breath lock in his throat.
He wanted to scream.
But he couldn't.
Instead, his chest opened.
Literally.
Ribs parting without blood, revealing his diaphragm vibrating like a trapped note. Lira tried to move, but the Refrain froze her in place with a single breathless exhale.
The Refrain reached into Kaelen's exposed chest.
And withdrew nothing.
Nothing visible.
But Kaelen felt it — a thread being pulled from him.
His first memory.
His name.
His mother's voice.
Gone.
Lira screamed.
Not in fear.
In resistance.
She sang.
A single word — ancient, forbidden, a name known only to the lost Echoes of the Deep Choir.
It broke the air.
It shattered the glass bones in the cathedral.
It tore her throat.
But it also wounded the Refrain.
The being recoiled, robe unraveling, a lung collapsing into smoke. It turned to flee — but not out of fear.
Out of ritual.
The Protocol was complete.
A voice had sung the elegy.
A vessel had been marked.
The Shard had chosen.
Kaelen collapsed as his ribs resealed.
He remembered nothing.
Not his mother.
Not the ocean.
Not the way his name used to feel.
Lira crawled to him, her voice gone, her mouth bleeding.
She held him.
And began to hum.
Off-key.
Rough.
But alive.
At the edge of the hollow, the Dominion's towers blinked.
Someone had sung.
The Empire would now send its choirs.
Not to cleanse.
But to harvest.