The Norwegian coast was a jagged wound against a steel-gray sky. Fjords cut deep into the land, their waters dark and restless. The air was sharp with the smell of salt and pine. Delaney stood on a rocky outcrop, the map spread against the wind, its corners weighted down with stones. Colton's spidery script pointed inland, to a place where the cliffs folded in on themselves, a place the locals avoided. Hviskende avgrunn, they called it. The Whispering Abyss. Colton's map named it The Singer's Maw.
According to his notes, it should have been a place of powerful, stable resonance, a natural diffuser of cosmic pressure. Instead, as Delaney hiked closer, her new senses recoiled. It wasn't silent, like the gate. It was… necrotic. The vibration it emitted was a low, sickly thrum, like the hum of a rotten log full of insects. It wasn't a void; it was a corpse.
The approach was treacherous. The path, little more than a goat track, wound through stunted, twisted pines that seemed to lean away from the center of the anomaly. The closer she got, the more the natural sounds of the forest died away, swallowed by the oppressive, diseased frequency. It was the opposite of the Schism's chaotic scream. This was a slow, entropic decay.
She found the Maw at the head of a narrow gorge. It wasn't a cave, but a fissure in the cliff face, a dark, vertical slash that seemed to breathe out a cold, damp air. The rock around it was stained a strange, lichenous black, and nothing grew within twenty feet of its opening. This was the dead anchor.
Colton's theory echoed in her mind. Wake it up. But how did one wake the dead? She stood at the edge of the dead zone, feeling the wrongness wash over her. This wasn't a simple blockage. This was a fundamental corruption.
Setting up camp a safe distance away, she spent the first day in observation. She used her sensitive audio equipment not to measure sound, but to graph the frequency. The readout was a flat, ugly line, buzzing at a pitch that was inherently unstable. It was like a musical note that had been held until the string was about to snap. This anchor wasn't diffusing energy; it was vibrating itself to death, and in the process, adding a destructive harmonic to the entire system.
On the second day, she ventured closer. The air grew colder near the fissure. She pressed her hands against the blackened rock. The vibration was stronger here, a nauseating buzz that traveled up her arms. She closed her eyes and did what she had done in the heart of the Oriax fortress: she opened the void within her.
But this time, she didn't try to absorb or reflect. She tried to listen. To diagnose.
She pushed her awareness into the sickly vibration, past the surface decay, searching for the source of the corruption. It was like wading through psychic sewage. Images flickered at the edge of her perception: not visions, but sensations of despair, of long, slow forgetting, of a song that had been sung for millennia until the singer had lost all meaning in the words.
And then she found it. A core of absolute stillness buried deep within the rot. The anchor's heart. It wasn't dead. It was dormant. Protected. Encysted within layers of accumulated psychic scar tissue—the residue of centuries of imbalance, perhaps even deliberate poisoning by forces like Oriax. The anchor had shut down to protect itself, and in doing so, had become a dead weight, a clogged artery in reality's circulatory system.
Wake it up. The instruction now seemed terrifyingly simplistic. It wasn't about providing a jump start. It was about performing spiritual surgery. She had to strip away the layers of decay without damaging the dormant core.
She had no idea how to do that.
For two more days, she sat before the Maw, a supplicant before a poisoned altar. She tried everything she could think of. She used a tuning fork to introduce a pure, clean frequency, hoping to shatter the dissonance. The rotten vibration simply swallowed it. She tried to use her own void as a scalpel, attempting to carve away the corruption. The decay was too thick, too entrenched. It was like trying to dig a tunnel with a spoon.
Frustration mounted into despair. The first dead anchor, and she was already failing. Every hour she spent here was an hour the primary gate bore its unsustainable load. She could almost feel Lane straining under the pressure.
On the evening of the fourth day, as a cold mist rolled in from the sea, she sat shivering by her small campfire, on the verge of giving up. She was a musician, not a exorcist. She dealt in vibrations, not in spiritual sickness.
The thought sparked something. A memory. Not of the Schism, but of before. Of sitting at her piano, a lifetime ago. A difficult piece by a modern composer, full of dissonance and unresolved tension. Her teacher had told her, "Don't fight the discordance, Delaney. You have to find the resolution within it. Every wrong note is just a right note waiting to be resolved."
She looked up at the dark slash of the Maw. She had been trying to fight the corruption. To overpower it or cut it away. What if she had to… resolve it?
It was a insane, intuitive leap. But it was all she had left.
The next morning, she approached the fissure not as a surgeon, but as a musician. She didn't try to oppose the rotten frequency. Instead, she opened herself to it completely. She let the sickly, decaying hum fill the void within her. It was agony. It felt like breathing poison. Despair and nihilism threatened to overwhelm her.
But within the void, the corruption met the one thing it couldn't corrupt: the perfect, balanced silence of the gate. The memory of that ultimate stability, held within her, became her tuning fork.
She didn't fight the wrong note. She listened for the silence that would make it right.
Holding the image of the gate's perfect equilibrium in her mind, she began to hum.
It wasn't a melody. It was a single, pure note, held steady. The note of the void. The note of balance. She poured her will into it, making it a constant, unwavering point in the center of the rot.
At first, nothing happened. The diseased vibration continued to thrash around her pure tone. But she held it, unwavering. She was a lighthouse in a toxic fog.
Slowly, infinitesimally, the corruption began to change. It wasn't being destroyed. It was being… harmonized. The chaotic, decaying frequencies started to orient themselves around her steady note, like iron filings around a magnet. The wrong note was finding its resolution.
The black stain on the rocks around the fissure began to lighten, fading from a vile black to a weathered gray. The air grew warmer. The nauseating buzz softened, transforming into a deep, resonant hum, like the lowest pipe of a cathedral organ.
It was working. She was not waking the anchor. She was giving it a reason to wake up.
She poured every ounce of her strength into the note, her body trembling with the effort. The void inside her was no longer a passive shield; it was an active instrument. She was playing the silence itself.
With a final, seismic shift that was more felt than heard, the dormant core of the anchor stirred. The deep hum solidified, stabilizing into a powerful, healthy vibration that radiated out from the fissure. The Singer's Maw was no longer whispering decay. It was singing a low, steady bass note of stability, a perfect counterpoint to the silent treble of the primary gate.
Delaney collapsed to her knees, exhausted, her throat raw. She felt it immediately. A change in the world. A slight, almost imperceptible easing of the pressure on the distant anchor point. It was like a sigh of relief from a universe that had been holding its breath for centuries.
She had done it. She had unblocked a spillway.
Looking up at the now-benign fissure, she felt a grim sense of accomplishment. But it was tempered by the sheer scale of the task ahead. Colton's map was covered in crossed-out symbols. This had been one. There were dozens more.
But as she packed her camp, her body aching but her spirit strangely light, she knew she had found her tool. She wasn't just a cartographer or a warden. She was a tuner. A restorer of harmony in a universe slipping out of tune. The road was long, and the work was desperate. But for the first time since the mountain, Delaney felt not like a victim of the silence, but like its master. She had a song to sing, and it was a song of repair.