The children did not charge. They unfolded.
One moment they stood in a loose semicircle, blank faces tilted toward him. The next, their bodies twisted in ways bodies shouldn't spines bending backward, limbs extending, fingers lengthening into things that scraped against stone as they moved. Their screaming never stopped, but it changed pitch, modulating into something that made his teeth ache and his armor vibrate.
He moved before thought caught up to instinct.
Lament Edge came up in a tight arc as the nearest child lunged. The blade caught it across what should have been a chest but felt like cutting through bundled reeds. The child split in half without blood, both pieces hitting the ground and continuing to crawl toward him, fingers dragging against stone.
Eudoxia scrambled backward, her weeping mask catching the moonlight. "They won't stop," she gasped. "You can't kill what's already dead. You can't-"
Three more children rushed him from the left. He pivoted, bringing the sword down in a horizontal slash that caught two of them at neck height. Their heads tumbled free but the bodies kept moving, arms outstretched, mouths opening in silent spaces where throats used to be.
The crypt was too narrow for this. Too many burial niches providing cover. Too many shadows where small things could hide and wait and strike from angles he couldn't watch.
He kicked the closest crawling torso away it hit a column and shattered like dried clay then moved toward the center of the chamber where the space opened up. Better to see them coming. Better to have room to swing.
The Choir followed. Not running. Not walking. Something between the two, their movements synchronized like a single organism wearing dozens of small bodies. They circled him slowly, blank faces tracking his every movement with eyeless precision.
One darted in from behind. He felt it more than saw it—the displacement of air, the scrape of bone fingers on stone. He spun and drove Lament Edge straight down through the child's skull. The blade punched through and into the floor beneath, pinning the small body in place.
It kept moving. Arms flailing. Legs kicking. The backwards hymn pouring from its mouth even as its head split open like rotten fruit.
He wrenched the blade free and stepped back. The child collapsed into a pile of loose bones held together by something that looked like dried sinew but moved like muscle.
Not alive. Not dead. Something else entirely.
The circle tightened. Ten children. Fifteen. More emerging from the burial niches, squeezing out of spaces too small for anything with bones. Their blank faces turned toward him in perfect unison.
Then they opened their mouths and vomited light.
Not fire. Not the Eclipse fire he remembered. This was colder, paler, the color of things that grew in deep caves and never saw the sun. It poured from their throats in streams, splashing against the stone floor, spreading in pools that hissed and steamed.
Where the light touched, the stone blackened. Where it touched flesh his boot, for an instant pain lanced through his leg sharp enough to make his vision white out at the edges.
He moved. Had to keep moving. The pools were spreading, cutting off his space, herding him toward the far wall where the largest burial niche gaped like a mouth.
A child lunged from his right. He caught it mid air with a rising slash, bisecting it sternum to groin. The pieces tumbled past him but he was already moving, already bringing the blade around for the next strike.
Two more came from opposite sides. He dropped low, letting them collide above him, then drove upward with the blade. It punched through both at once, lifted them off their feet for a heartbeat before he twisted and threw them into the nearest pool of pale light. They landed with wet sounds and began to dissolve, their backwards hymns turning to static.
The rest of the Choir stopped advancing. Their blank faces tilted in unison, considering. Learning.
Then they began to sing differently. Not backwards anymore. Layered. Harmonic. Each child a different note in a chord that made the air itself vibrate.
The burial niches began to crack. Stone slabs groaned. Something behind them pushed, testing the seals.
Eudoxia screamed. "They're calling the others!"
The first slab exploded outward in a shower of stone fragments. What stumbled out had been human once. Centuries ago. Now it was mummified leather and exposed bone wrapped in burial shrouds that had fused to desiccated flesh. Its jaw hung loose, broken, but it made sounds anyway dry clicking, like beetles in a wall.
Another slab fell. Then another. The dead were rising, pulled from their rest by the Choir's song.
He counted six corpses shambling toward him. Slow. Uncoordinated. But they didn't need speed when the children were already cutting off his escape routes.
The nearest corpse reached for him with hands that were mostly bone. He severed both arms at the elbow with a single strike, then kicked it backward into two children who were trying to flank him. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.
But more were coming. Too many. The crypt was filling with the dead, with the Choir, with pale light that ate stone and flesh alike.
He needed to end this. Fast.
His eyes found the largest child the one who'd spoken with his voice, who stood at the back of the Choir directing the others with subtle gestures of its too-long fingers. The conductor. The leader.
He ran straight at it.
Three children threw themselves into his path. He didn't stop, didn't slow, just lowered his shoulder and crashed through them. Small bodies shattered against his armor, bones snapping, but he kept moving.
The leader child's blank face snapped toward him. Its mouth opened wide, impossibly wide, and that pale light began to pour out in a torrent.
He dove to the side, rolled, came up in a crouch as the light stream carved a line across the wall behind him. Stone blackened and crumbled. The child tracked him, sweeping the beam in a wide arc.
He waited. Counted the seconds. Watched the stream's pattern.
When it swept away from him for an instant, he moved.
Three running steps and he was airborne, Lament Edge raised overhead in both hands. The child tried to redirect the light but too slow, too late.
The blade came down in a vertical slash that split the child from crown to groin.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. The two halves stood upright, still singing, light pouring from the wound.
Then they collapsed.
The song cut off like a severed throat.
The other children stopped moving. Just stopped, frozen mid step, their blank faces turning slowly toward their fallen conductor. The corpses from the burial niches stumbled to a halt, swaying slightly, empty eye sockets fixed on nothing.
Silence flooded back into the crypt.
Eudoxia's weeping was the only sound.
He stood over the split child, watching as its body began to dissolve into ash. Not burning. Just coming apart, atom by atom, until nothing remained but a faint outline on the stone floor.
And something else. Something that gleamed in the moonlight filtering down from above.
He knelt and picked it up carefully.
A shard. Crystalline. The size of his thumb. It pulsed faintly with interior light not the pale cold light the children had vomited, but something warmer. Almost alive.
The moment his fingers closed around it, knowledge flooded his mind. Not words. Not images. Just understanding, complete and sudden:
This was a fragment. A piece of something larger. And he would need to collect more.
He stood slowly, the shard clutched in his fist. The other children remained frozen, blank faces still turned toward where their leader had been. Waiting. For what? New orders? Permission to attack? He didn't know and didn't wait to find out.
He moved past them, past the shambling corpses, past the pools of pale light that were slowly fading. Eudoxia pressed herself against the wall as he approached, her working eye wide.
"What are you?" she whispered. "What did they make you into?"
He said nothing. Just walked past her, toward the stairs leading up and out of the crypt.
Behind him, the children began to move again. Not attacking. Just swaying slightly, blank faces tracking his departure. Their mouths opened in unison.
And they sang one final note—pure, clear, almost beautiful.
Then they crumbled to ash, all of them, collapsing like puppets with cut strings.
The crypt fell silent again.
Eudoxia stared at the piles of ash, at the empty burial niches, at the pale light finally fading to nothing. "They were the first ones," she said quietly. "The first children you executed. Before the eclipse. Before everything ended." She looked at him. "They've been waiting for you. All this time. Waiting."
He climbed the stairs without looking back.
The shard in his hand pulsed once.
Twice.
Then went still.