The cathedral was singing.
Not the way it had sung when Ardyn built it, when every surface had been calibrated to carry prayer upward in perfect acoustic harmony, when voices rose through calculated curves and resonant chambers to reach whatever might be listening. This was different. This was wrong. The walls themselves were vibrating with sound that had no source, with voices that emerged from stone and wood and glass as if the building had swallowed too many echoes and was finally choking on them.
We stood at the entrance, our shared body still flickering between states of solidity, still learning how to exist as one consciousness in one form. The massive doors hung open as they always did now, and through them we could hear it. A chorus. Dozens of voices, maybe hundreds, overlapping and interweaving in harmonies that were almost beautiful until you listened closely enough to hear the words they were singing.
Help us.
Let us out.
We're still here.
Please remember.
We existed.
We mattered.
Don't let us fade.
Lysithe's voice, the one that was still distinguishable within our merged consciousness, spoke with a tremor we'd never heard from her before. Those are yours. All of them. Every echo you've consumed. They're not dissolved. They're not gone. They're trapped. In you. In this place. In the architecture you designed to hold sound forever.
Ardyn's voice responded, horror spreading through our shared awareness like ink through water. That's not possible. When I consume an echo, it becomes part of me. It feeds me. It shouldn't remain intact. It shouldn't still be aware.
But you designed this cathedral to preserve sound. To trap it and amplify it and never let it escape. What did you think would happen when you brought all those consumed voices into a building literally built to hold them forever?
We took a step forward, then another, our feet crossing the threshold into the nave. The moment we entered, the singing intensified, growing louder and more desperate, as if our presence had given the trapped voices hope or had reminded them of their imprisonment. The air itself felt thick, viscous, as if we were pushing through layers of sound made solid.
The cathedral looked the same as when we'd left it. The empty pews still lined the nave in perfect rows. The altar still stood bare at the far end, Helvyr's message carved into its marble surface. The windows were still empty sockets where stained glass had once filtered colored light into patterns of saints and angels and all the other comforting lies humans told themselves about divine intervention.
But the walls were different.
They were moving.
Not obviously. Not in ways that violated the basic laws of physics, at least not completely. But the stone surface was undulating slightly, rippling like water disturbed by something moving beneath. And faces were pressing through from the inside, features bulging outward in bas-relief, mouths open in those endless pleading screams. We recognized some of them. The child from the baker's shop, her button-eyed doll clutched to her chest. The old man whose wife's name had been on his dying lips. The woman who'd jumped from the tower, her hair streaming behind her like she was still falling.
All of them. Every echo we'd ever consumed. Not digested. Not truly gone. Just trapped in the walls of the building Ardyn had spent his life perfecting.
This is my fault, Ardyn's voice said, devastation bleeding through every word. I built this place to hold sound forever. I never considered what forever actually means. What it does to voices that can't escape. Can't move on. Can't even properly die.
Our fault, Lysithe corrected gently. We're one now, remember? Your crimes are mine. Your guilt is mine. And this... She gestured at the writhing walls, at the faces pushing through stone like drowning victims trying to reach the surface. This is ours to fix.
We walked slowly down the center aisle, and with each step the singing changed, shifted, reorganized itself around our presence. Individual voices began to separate from the chorus, calling out to us specifically, begging for recognition or release or simply acknowledgment that they had existed as more than food.
"Please," said the child's voice, so small and frightened it made our chest ache. "I had a name. I had a mother once. She used to sing to me. Can you remember? Can someone remember?"
"I loved her," said the old man. "Fifty-three years. Through sickness and health and all the rest. Does that matter anymore? Did it ever matter?"
"I was afraid," said the woman who'd jumped. "So afraid of the silence. That's why I jumped. I thought falling would be better than fading. Was I wrong? Tell me I wasn't wrong."
We stopped halfway to the altar, overwhelmed by the weight of all these voices, all these lives we'd consumed without truly considering what we were taking. Ardyn had told himself he was surviving. That he had no choice. That the echoes would have dissipated anyway, would have been absorbed by the Hushed, would have been lost regardless of whether he'd eaten them.
But that had been a lie. A comfortable fiction to make the horror palatable.
These people hadn't dissipated. They'd been imprisoned. Locked inside a consciousness that was itself trapped inside a building designed to hold sound until the end of time. They couldn't move forward and they couldn't fade back. They could only exist in this liminal space between being and unbeing, aware enough to suffer but not aware enough to understand why.
"We have to let them go," Lysithe's voice said. Not a suggestion. A statement of fact. Of necessity. Of the only moral choice remaining.
"I don't know how," Ardyn admitted. "The cathedral's acoustics are built into its structure. Into the curve of every arch, the angle of every wall, the resonance of every space. I designed it to hold sound. To never release what it captures. I don't know how to undo that."
"Then we break it."
"What?"
"We break the cathedral. Shatter the architecture. Destroy what you built so perfectly. It's the only way to free them."
Ardyn's resistance flared through our shared consciousness, immediate and visceral. This building was his life's work. His masterpiece. The physical manifestation of everything he'd believed about beauty and faith and the power of human creation to reach toward something divine. Destroying it would be like destroying himself.
Except he'd already destroyed himself. They both had. The person who'd built this cathedral, the person who'd lived and loved and believed in meaning, that person was dead. Had been dead for three months, if Kerra was telling the truth. Everything since had been a ghost playing pretend, consuming other ghosts to maintain the illusion of existence.
Maybe it was time to stop pretending.
"Alright," Ardyn's voice said, resignation heavy in every syllable. "Alright. We break it. We free them. We undo everything I built."
The voices in the walls seemed to sense the decision. The singing changed again, shifting from desperate pleading to something that might have been hope or might have been terror at the prospect of finally, truly ending. The faces pressing through stone pushed harder, trying to break free before we could change our minds.
We walked to the nearest pillar, one of the massive stone columns that supported the ceiling's weight and served as acoustic focal points, directing sound upward and outward in carefully calculated patterns. Ardyn had spent weeks on this single pillar, measuring and remeasuring, ensuring every dimension was perfect.
We placed our hand against it, feeling the stone cold and solid beneath our palm. Feeling the vibrations of trapped voices thrumming through the rock. Feeling the weight of all those lives we'd taken pressing back against our touch.
"I'm sorry," we whispered. Our dual-toned voice harmonized perfectly for once, Ardyn and Lysithe speaking as true unity. "I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm sorry I took you. I'm sorry I kept you. But I'm going to try to make it right. I'm going to try to let you go."
We pulled our hand back and formed a fist. The transparency that had been spreading through our body made the gesture look strange, unreal, like watching someone punch through a window in a dream. But when we struck the pillar, the impact was solid. Real. Powerful enough to send cracks spiderwebbing across the stone surface.
The singing stopped.
Complete silence for one heartbeat, two, three.
Then the pillar shattered.
Not just cracked. Not just damaged. It exploded outward in a burst of stone fragments and dust and something else, something that looked like light but sounded like voices, a cascade of echoes finally breaking free of their prison. The trapped souls poured out of the broken pillar like water from a ruptured dam, streaming upward and outward, and for just a moment we could see them clearly. The child with her doll. The old man reaching for his wife. The jumping woman still falling, always falling, finally able to reach the ground.
They looked at us as they passed. Some with gratitude. Some with anger. Some with expressions too complex to parse. Then they were gone, dissipating into the grey light filtering through the empty windows, released at last from the architecture that had held them too long.
But the other pillars were still standing. The walls were still intact. And hundreds more voices remained trapped, pressed into stone, begging for the same release.
We moved to the next pillar and struck it. Then the next. Then the next. Each impact sent more cracks spreading, more echoes escaping, more of our victims finally allowed to properly die. Our fist began to bleed where the skin split against stone, but we barely felt it. The pain was distant, unimportant, nothing compared to the urgency of freeing everyone we'd imprisoned.
The cathedral began to groan. The ceiling sagged as support pillars crumbled. Chunks of stone fell from above, crashing onto pews and exploding into dust. The carefully calibrated acoustic balance Ardyn had spent years perfecting collapsed into chaos, all those measured angles and calculated curves becoming meaningless as the structure itself started to fail.
We reached the altar where Helvyr's message was carved and brought our fist down on it with all the strength our failing body could muster. The marble cracked. Then shattered. The words disappeared into fragments, and from beneath them emerged a sound unlike anything we'd heard before. Not singing. Not screaming. Something older. Something that predated language itself.
A voice that might have been God's, or might have been what was left after God had finished dying.
It said: FINALLY.
It said: THANK YOU.
It said: I WAS SO TIRED OF HOLDING ON.
Then it too dissipated, released from whatever prison the altar had become, and we understood with sudden clarity that the cathedral hadn't just been holding the echoes we'd consumed. It had been holding something else. Something divine that had been trapped here since the moment Ardyn had finished building it, since the moment he'd created a space so perfect for containing sound that it had accidentally imprisoned the last whisper of a dying god.
The ceiling collapsed.
We didn't try to run. There was nowhere to run to and no reason to try. Our body was more than half transparent now, fading faster with each echo we released, as if we'd been held together by the weight of all those stolen voices and without them there wasn't enough of us left to maintain coherence.
Stone fell through us as much as on us, passing through our increasingly insubstantial form. We felt it, felt the impact and the crushing weight, but distantly, like a memory of pain rather than pain itself. The cathedral came down around us and on us and through us, and we stood in the center of the destruction, watching our life's work unmake itself, watching all those trapped voices escape into whatever waited beyond silence.
When the last stone fell and the last echo faded, we were alone in the rubble. The cathedral was gone. Just scattered fragments now, broken pillars and shattered walls and piles of debris that no longer held any acoustic properties at all. The voices were silent. Not the oppressive silence of the Hushed, but the simple absence of sound that comes when there's nothing left to make noise.
Peace.
Actual peace.
For the first time since we could remember.
We sat down on what had once been the altar and was now just a pile of broken marble, our body flickering like a candle in wind, barely maintaining the pretense of solidity. Through our translucent chest we could see the ground beneath, could see our own spine and ribs like an x-ray, like a preview of the skeleton we'd eventually become once this last pretense of flesh finally gave up.
"We did it," Lysithe's voice said softly. "We freed them. All of them."
"Yes," Ardyn agreed. "But now what? Without their weight holding us together, without their voices filling the emptiness, what are we?"
"I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe that's alright."
We sat in silence for a while, not speaking even in our shared consciousness, just existing in the rubble of everything Ardyn had built and everything we'd destroyed. The grey light pressed down from above, and somewhere in the distance we could hear bells ringing, could hear the city continuing its slow dissolution, could hear the Hushed growing closer, always closer, patient and inevitable as tide.
Then we heard footsteps.
Real footsteps. Human footsteps. Someone approaching through the debris.
We looked up and saw Kerra picking her way through the rubble, her face expressionless, her movements careful. She reached the edge of what had been the nave and stopped, staring at us and the destruction surrounding us.
"You destroyed it," she said. Not accusatory. Just observational. "The cathedral. The one thing in this whole city that still held beauty. You tore it down."
"We had to," our dual voice responded. "It was a prison. For the voices. For God. For us. Some things need to be destroyed before they can be released."
She considered this for a long moment, then nodded. "I suppose that's true. Though it doesn't make the loss hurt less." She moved closer, climbing over fallen stones until she stood a few feet away. "Do you remember me now? Do you remember who I was to you? Who you were before you died?"
We searched our memories, tried to find her face among the blur of past and present and all the stolen lives we'd consumed. There was something there. Something familiar. A workshop beneath the cathedral. Hands covered in plaster dust. Someone laughing at something Ardyn had said. Someone who'd helped measure and calculate and build.
"You were my assistant," Ardyn's voice said slowly. "When I designed this place. You helped with the acoustics. With the mathematics of resonance. You were there from the beginning."
"I was more than that," Kerra said gently. "But yes. I helped you build it. Watched you pour your life into these walls. Watched you believe so desperately that if we just got the angles right, if we just calculated the curves perfectly, if we just made the space beautiful enough, God would have to listen. Would have to respond. Would have to acknowledge that we existed and mattered and deserved attention." She paused. "He never did, did He? Even when the acoustics were perfect. Even when every prayer we sent up was amplified and focused and impossible to ignore. Silence. Always silence."
"Yes," we admitted. "Always silence. Until the silence learned to eat."
Kerra sat down on a piece of fallen pillar across from us, mirroring our position. "The Hushed is coming here. It followed you from the Deep Silence. It knows what you did, knows you're releasing its food, knows you're teaching others that resistance is possible. It won't allow that. It can't allow that. If people stop accepting the quiet, stop surrendering their voices willingly, it will starve. And hunger makes even gods desperate."
"We know. We can feel it getting closer. Taste it in the air."
"Then you need to leave. Find somewhere else to hide. Keep moving. Keep fighting."
"There's nowhere left to hide," Lysithe's voice said. "And we're barely here anymore. Look at us. We're more absence than presence. Another day and we'll just dissipate like the echoes we released. Maybe that's how it should be."
"Or maybe," Kerra said, pulling something from inside her coat, "you need to consume again. To rebuild what you've let go. To take back the weight that held you together."
She held out a vial. Large, ornate, filled with light that swirled in colors we'd never seen before, colors that shouldn't exist in a world dominated by grey. Inside that impossible light was a voice. An echo. But not just any echo.
"This," Kerra said quietly, "is your voice. Ardyn's voice. From before you died. From the moment you realized the cathedral was finished and God still wasn't listening and everything you'd built had been for nothing. The moment you decided to eat the first echo. The moment you chose survival over surrender. I preserved it. Kept it safe. Waited for the right time to give it back."
We stared at the vial, at the impossible colors swirling inside, at the promise of remembering who we'd been before we became what we were. Our hand reached out automatically, drawn to it the way a starving person reaches for food.
Then stopped.
"If I consume my own echo," Ardyn's voice said slowly, "if I eat my own voice, what happens? Do I remember everything? Do I become whole? Or do I just close the loop, become the snake eating its own tail, trapped forever in the moment of my death?"
"I don't know," Kerra admitted. "I've never seen anyone consume their own echo before. It might restore you. It might destroy you completely. It might do something I can't even imagine. But it's the only thing I have left to offer. The only chance for you to be more than a fading ghost pretending to be alive."
The vial hung in the air between us, glowing with those impossible colors, pulsing in rhythm with a heartbeat we were no longer sure we actually had. Inside it, our own voice was screaming or singing or speaking truth we'd spent three months running from.
We had to decide.
Take it and risk whatever came with consuming ourselves.
Or refuse it and fade into the grey, release ourselves the same way we'd released all the others, accept that some endings can't be fought and shouldn't be.
From somewhere in the ruined city, the bells began ringing again. Louder now. More urgent. Painting the world red with each vibration, calling us toward something or calling something toward us.
The Hushed was coming.
And we still had no idea who or what we really were.