The human song was a fragile thing against the roaring silence of the rift. It had no power to mend, no strength to shield. It was simply a statement of existence, a whispered "we are here" against a void that screamed "you are nothing."
Morwen stood frozen before the pulsating wound in reality, the shards of the Crown hovering around her head. The raw, human chorus did not attack her; it simply was. And in its simple, defiant being, it found a crack in her millennia of hardened grief.
Kaelen saw it happen. He saw her flinch as Elara's voice, clear and strong, sang a lullaby her mother had sung in Oakhaven. He saw her shoulders tremble as Roric, his voice a low, gravelly rumble, sang a woodcutter's drinking song, a melody of camaraderie and simple joy. They were not singing at her. They were singing for themselves, for the memories that made them who they were.
The shards' dissonant scream faltered. The perfect, controlled silence Morwen sought was being polluted by these messy, emotional, utterly unpredictable notes.
"Stop," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the rift's roar. "Your noise… it ruins the symmetry."
"It's not noise," Kaelen said, his own voice joining the chorus, not with power, but with conviction. "It's the song you want to erase. It's Corbin's patience. It's Finn's sacrifice. It's Aeliana's compassion. It's your brother's love for you, before it all went wrong."
He took a step forward, the void in his chest aching, but no longer controlling him. He had made it a part of his song.
"You told me Iscarius was the brightest of you," Kaelen continued, the words flowing now, a final, desperate plea. "But you were his twin. You were his other half. His song was ambition. What was yours? Before the grief? What did you love about the world, Morwen?"
For a moment, her mask of cold fury shattered completely. A glimpse of unimaginable pain and loss shone through. He saw not a monster, but a sister who had watched her other half be destroyed.
"I loved… the dawn," she breathed, the words torn from a place deep within, a memory so old it was almost dust. "The way the light would catch the dew on the spiderwebs in the grass… He always said it was frivolous." A single, black tear traced a path through the dust on her cheek. "He never understood… the small things."
In that moment, Kaelen understood the true tragedy. Iscarius had been so focused on the grand symphony he had forgotten the individual notes. Morwen, in her grief, had decided if she couldn't have the small, beautiful moments, then no one would.
The shards of the Crown, so closely tied to her soul, reacted to her moment of vulnerability. Their scream turned inward, becoming a wail of shared agony. The control she exerted over the rift flickered.
It was the only chance they would get.
Kaelen did not attack her. He did not try to seize the Crown. He turned to the raging, green wound in the world—the source of the Silence. He had no power to heal it. Aeliana could have, but she was gone. He was just a mason.
But a mason knew how to build. And sometimes, building meant making a choice about what to preserve.
He Sang.
He poured every ounce of his being, every lesson from the Warden, every memory of his journey, every note of the survivors' fragile chorus, into a single, focused act of the Fifth Note. But it was not a song of creation or destruction.
It was a song of separation.
He could not heal the rift. But he could ask the world to do what it had always done—to endure. To wall off the infection. To contain the wound.
He sang to the bedrock of the planet, to the deepest, most ancient stone that remembered a time before the Weave, before Singers, before life itself. He showed it the festering wound, the spreading sickness. He did not ask it to fight. He asked it to remember its nature. To be the foundation. To be the boundary.
Let this be the anvil, he sang, his soul straining at the effort. Let the wound be the hammer. But let the rest of the world be the metal that is shaped, not shattered. Contain it.
The response was not immediate.It was slow, ponderous, and immense. The very cavern began to shudder. Not with the violent unmaking of the Blight, but with the deep, grinding shift of continents. The stone around the rift began to flow like water, not away from it, but towards it, sealing the edges, containing the corrosive energy. It was the world putting a scab on a wound that could not be healed.
"NO!" Morwen shrieked, feeling her connection to the source of her power being severed. She lunged for the Crown shards, trying to force them together, to unleash one final cataclysm.
But she was too late. The world itself was rejecting her.
The last thing Kaelen saw was the cavern collapsing around the contained rift, the stone sealing it forever into a tomb of its own making. He saw Morwen, surrounded by the screaming shards, consumed not by the Blight, but by the collapsing mountain she had sought to command.
Then, a wall of solid granite slammed down between them and the sealed rift, cutting off the green light, the screaming, everything.
Silence.
True, absolute silence.
The survivors' song died in their throats. They stood in the dark, the only light from Kaelen's glowing stone, which now pulsed weakly. He lay on the ground, utterly spent, the void in his chest a numb, cold emptiness. He had not won. He had not defeated the Blight.
He had merely contained it. He had asked the world to endure, and it had.
Slowly, a new sound began to filter through the silence. The drip of water. The ragged breathing of his friends. It was not a song. It was not a melody.
It was a chance.
Elara knelt beside him, her hand finding his. "Kaelen?"
He looked up at her, then at the others, their faces pale and shocked in the dim light. They were alive. The world was wounded, scarred, but it was still here. The song was not over. It had just found a new, quieter key.
He had not sung a song of victory. He had sung a song of resilience. And in the aching, exhausted silence that followed, that felt like enough.