The air rippled with a silence so deep it seemed to claw at Silas's ears. He stumbled forward into a realm that was not quite a place, not quite a dream—an in-between corridor of glass and shadow where every step produced an echo that didn't belong to him. Lyra's hand tightened around his, grounding him as the floor beneath them fractured into rivers of frozen light.
"This isn't… the same multiverse we left behind," Silas murmured, his voice trembling under the oppressive vastness of the space. "It's older. Wilder."
Lyra's gaze swept across the horizon. Instead of skies, there were layers of sheet music stretched taut like canvases. Notes—ink-black and jagged—bled downwards, dripping into the rivers of light below. Mountains rose in the distance, sculpted not from stone, but from fractured timepieces stacked like jagged teeth. The tick of their hands was discordant, overlapping into a maddening rhythm that made Silas's stomach twist.
"This is where memory becomes geography," Lyra said quietly. "A fracture of echoes, formed from what creation itself forgot."
The world pulsed with a low, droning hum. Silas realized, with a cold shiver, that the sound was not natural—it was breathing. The land itself exhaled and inhaled, each cycle dragging him deeper into its rhythm. He clutched his chest, fighting the pull.
And then, he saw it: a structure that dwarfed everything else. A cathedral carved from ivory bones, with spires of glass stretching upward, piercing through veils of dying constellations. At its gates stood titanic figures in shrouds of fractured sheet music, their faces hollow masks.
"The Choir of Hollow Thrones," Lyra whispered, her voice breaking.
Silas swallowed. He remembered faint fragments—stories, warnings, perhaps? Memories he wasn't sure were his own. The Hollow Thrones were said to be custodians of absence, beings who consumed forgotten gods and ruled over the concept of "emptied legacy." They thrived not on belief, but on silence—the erasure of names, the annihilation of memory.
The figures turned their hollow eyes toward the pair. The air quivered. Silas felt something pierce through him—not flesh, but memory. Moments flashed before his eyes: his mother's smile, his first glimpse of the multiverse, Lyra's laughter—each pulled at as if by invisible hands.
"Stay close," Lyra hissed, dragging him backward as black chains erupted from the ground. The figures were not moving, yet their shadows lashed outward, reaching with desperate hunger.
Silas unsheathed the violin bow strapped to his side—a relic forged from his own fractured soul. The strings of memory vibrated at his call, weaving into a melody that distorted the chains mid-air, unraveling them into motes of forgotten light.
The Hollow Thrones paused. For a brief moment, the silence bent.
And in that hesitation, Silas understood: the Choir recognized his song.
They did not attack further. Instead, the hollow figures parted, granting them passage to the cathedral.
Lyra exhaled. "Why would they let us through?"
Silas didn't answer. The melody still lingered on his strings, a tune that felt both alien and deeply his. Somewhere in this fractured world, an answer waited—one tied to a bond he couldn't yet name.
But in the cathedral of forgotten gods, he would find it.