The ramp spiraled down into the absolute dark, a coiling descent into the fundament of the world. The polished walls gave way to raw, living rock threaded with veins of softly glowing, crystalline ore that pulsed in time with a deep, subsonic rhythm they felt in their bones, not their ears. The air grew dense, charged with potential energy. The hushing field was gone, replaced by something heavier: a profound, watchful stillness, like the moment before a lightning strike in a world without sky.
The ramp ended in a cavern so vast their lamp beams could not find its ceiling or distant walls. The floor was a perfect, black disc of obsidian, mirror-smooth. And in the center of that disc stood the Anvil.
It was not a tool. It was an altar. A block of the same unknown, living metal from the legends, roughly the size of a cottage. Its surface was neither smooth nor rough, but seemed to flow like captured smoke, holding a solid form. Light did not reflect off it; it was absorbed and then re-emitted as a faint, corona of shifting colours—tarnished bronze, deep ocean blue, storm-grey. From it emanated the subsonic pulse, the heartbeat of the silent mountain.
And on the Anvil, encased in a sphere of crystalline energy that flickered with the same colours, floated the God-Engine's Core.
It was smaller than Lyra had imagined, no larger than her own head. It was not a crystal, nor a machine part in any conventional sense. It was a knot of impossible geometry, a solid manifestation of a transcendent equation. To look at it was to feel both understanding and utter ignorance. It sang a silent song that structured the very air around it.
This was it. The source of the myth. The lost score.
There was no final guardian, no monstrous automaton. Just the Anvil, the Core, and the crushing weight of their own insignificance.
They approached slowly, their footsteps silent on the obsidian. As they neared, the sphere of energy around the Core brightened, and a figure coalesced from the light and swirling metal-dust of the Anvil itself. It was humanoid, but wrought of the same shifting metal, featureless save for two points of steady, blue-white light where eyes would be.
A voice spoke, not in the air, but directly into their minds. It was neither male nor female, but vast and old, like stone grinding on stone. "You have passed the tests of will, of recognition. You approach the Seat of Song. State your intention."
Elara, ever the diplomat, stepped forward. "We seek knowledge. The world above is failing. Its heart is sick. We believe the Song of the God-Engine, the harmony it conducted, might hold a key to healing it."
The entity's gaze—if it could be called that—shifted to Lyra. "And you, Daughter of Entropy? You who wield the un-song, the note of ending? What do you seek?"
The title hit Lyra like a physical blow. Daughter of Entropy. It was the truth she had been fleeing, now named by a primordial intelligence. She forced herself to meet its luminous regard.
"I seek… to understand my note," she said, her voice small but clear in the immense silence. "To see if a song of endings can be part of a greater harmony. Not just to break, but… to make room for what comes next."
The entity was silent for a long moment. The Core pulsed within its cage. "The God-Engine did not create harmony," it intoned. "It listened. It heard the Song of the World—the ley-lines, the growth and decay, the rise of mountains and the wearing of stone. It then sang a counter-melody, a stabilizing resonance that allowed for civilization without stagnation, progress without cataclysm. It was a dialogue between will and nature."
It gestured, and images flashed in the air around them: the ancient, thriving world, pulsing with balanced energy; the Cataclysm, a discordant scream as other, arrogant wills tried to control the song, not harmonize with it; the Ascent, a retreat into fragile, artificial stability. "The ones who fled took the Score—the knowledge of the counter-melody—and turned it into a shackle. A crystal to siphon and control. They feared the decay. They banished the necessary endings. In doing so, they made their world brittle."
Lyra understood with devastating clarity. The Convocation's magic was a perversion. A fear-based monoculture. And her power… her "rust-touch"…
"You are not a flaw, Daughter of Entropy. You are a forgotten instrument. The note of decay is part of the World's Song. Without it, there is no change, no growth, no new beginnings. The God-Engine's counter-melody made space for that note, gave it rhythm and purpose. Your people have tried to silence it. And now their world silences itself."
"Can we fix it?" Elara asked, her eyes on the pulsing Core. "Can we restart the Engine?"
"The Engine is broken beyond my capacity to repair. Its physical form is dust. I am its Echo, its final memory. The Core is not a battery. It is the last recording of the true Song." The entity extended a molten metal hand toward the sphere. "To take it is to take a responsibility. You cannot wield it as your ancestors did. You must learn to listen anew. To reintroduce the lost notes—including the note of ending—into the chorus. It will be dangerous. It will break things that seem unbreakable."
It looked at Lyra. "You must be the vessel for this knowledge. Your affinity is the key to its understanding. But to hold it, you must first reconcile with your own nature. You must accept the note you sing."
Lyra stared at the Core, the embodiment of everything she was not: order, harmony, stability. To touch it felt like a profanity. Yet the Echo said she was the only one who could truly understand it.
She thought of Skyreach, dying by inches. She thought of the Rotting World, thriving in chaotic, beautiful decay. She thought of rust, and the strong, clean metal that is only revealed when the corrosion is scraped away.
She stepped forward. "I am ready."
The crystalline sphere dissolved. The God-Engine's Core floated gently into her outstretched hands.
There was no blast of power, no overwhelming download of knowledge. There was only a profound, deep stillness, and then, the first clear, perfect note of a song forgotten for millennia. It resonated in the hollow of her bones, in the wild core of her magic. It was a note that did not fear rust, but understood it as the breath between verses.
The Echo of the God-Engine dissolved back into the Anvil, its duty passed on. The cavern's pulse began to slow, the glowing veins dimming. The Foundry, its purpose fulfilled, was entering its final, true silence.
Lyra held the hope and the doom of two worlds in her hands. The long journey back would begin now. But she was no longer just Lyra the Expunged, or Lyra the Rust-touch.
She was Lyra, the Keeper of the Last Song. And she had a world to teach how to sing again.