Movement 1: The Dream | Score I: A Ballad Before Iridia
Resonance | Key of Attunement
Dusk was falling upon the wasteland, painting the dead grasses a sickly amber.
Artus knelt upon one of the ash-white patches of bygone leaves at the center of the caravan. He held the rose seed cupped in his palm, clutching it every so often as if the brittle heat would go cold in a Beat.
He was fixated on the pronunciation of the Ballad through his words, running the same four lines over and over under his breath.
“Daedalus knelt before the burning court, and swore upon the — No. Swore beneath the — That wasn’t it either.”
He pressed his knuckles to the earth. Then the heel of his hand to his ear. He worked with one eye open over the smell of burnt grasses from the campfire. He was focused on the popping cinders, trying to ease clean the lyrics through sheer irritation.
He tried again, quieter. Then again. And again.
“Amadea,” he said, with his look set still on the patches of grass beneath, “does it go swore upon the ashes or swore beneath the flame?”
She didn’t answer right away. She was mesmerized by the dwindling daylight as it washed over the skies, blending at the edges of dark clouds. The amber of the fading light shafts mirrored the inner veins of the rose-gold seed Artus held. The violet that refracted from them was the name she still hadn’t entirely decided how to wear.
“Ashes,” she replied, her voice distant. “You’ve said ashes five times already.”
“Right. Ashes.” He exhaled as if the word had cost him something. “Ashes, then flame, then… Ahh— What else!?”
“You’ve got this, knight. I’m sure you’ve performed this bit over a hundred other fires; you only need to hear it again,” Kay said. He was shifting supplies beneath the children already gathering around Artus’ makeshift stage.
Frustration hijacked Artus’ hands. His fingers fidgeted, restless and anxious, before he shouted to the empty air when the words refused to form for him.
“Corvin! Help! I need to hear the melody, please!”
Corvin was already waiting at the outskirts of the conversation, leaning heavily against a crate. It seemed as if he had known exactly what Artus was about to ask.
He didn’t even speak. He didn’t need to; he had already drawn the cello from the ring and held it firm on its ash-choked wood against the sharp endpin buried in the ground. Amadea knew that much about him already — he made up his mind with action long before words ever reached his mouth.
“Take it easy,” Corvin said in his smoky tone. “We’ve done this already.”
He readied his bow against the strings. Artus held the rose seed high, catching its reflection against the dying light.
“Just hear—”
Boom.
The sound landed before any of them could name it.
A deafening explosion fractured the silent air.
Corvin and his hand flinched; the bow met its cello in a raw, shrieking scream of wood and string ripped out by the sudden, violent drag of the motion.
He didn’t try to correct the vibrating strings. No, he dropped the bow instantly and stood in what was almost a war reflex.
Boom.
Static criticality broke open in the distance.
It came from far away; that was perhaps the worst part.
A cascade of light bloomed low against the horizon, three bursts collapsing inward in its spherical shape, their dim whispers fading before another whistle cut the clouds like Corvin’s held breath.
Amadea looked at Artus. His whole body fell still. The performance had stopped; the noise caught the audience of children in the same terrifying trance.
Then, the ground itself answered.
A tremor, weak but disorienting, dissonant, and wrong. A wave that traveled up through the soles of Amadea’s boots and still reached her chest. It was in a similar way that Corvin’s cello always found a place in the vibration between her body and her thoughts.
Except this sound was no song. Its sensation was arrhythmic.
Static criticality held no resonance.
And underneath it, a terrifying howling from beyond the trees.
Not one voice. Many, stitched together into a single, rotting amalgam of chords that wasn’t a symphony. It was a chorus of a world that couldn’t remember music. It belonged nowhere, let alone in Artus’ Ballad.
“Kay.”
Elaine’s voice cracked across the camp before Amadea had even finished turning her head. She stood frozen for a fraction of a Beat, her head tilted toward the horizon.
“What is that?”
“Starved Hounds,” Corvin cut in instantly. “A whole pack of them.”
He was already moving. He held the celestial astrolabe as a swinging pendulum from the exterior of his coat. It caught the light of the air before his boots fully found the ground.
Corvin was eerily alert. The ring on his finger flared wildly in orange cinders, pulsing as if the light itself was trying to outrun the sound of the cascades.
“I found one earlier. That’s where the seed came from.”
He picked up the bow from the ground and gestured at Artus with a brief, hard glare. His eyes tracked the frantic ticking mechanism of the astrolabe while simultaneously scanning the entire perimeter of the caravan, and the campfire at the edges of the dead crescent of black trees.
“We have about a Bar and fifteen Pulses, at best, before they reach us.”
Corvin’s words echoed throughout as a grim visage; everyone went into motion.
Kay was already at Artus’ shoulder, landing from a leap so fluid it seemed a blur. His easy humor had vanished entirely, replaced by something flat, fast, and martial.
“The seed. Give it to me. Now.”
Artus’ fingers unconsciously closed tighter around the seed before his thoughts caught up to his hand. “It’s just a prop, I haven’t even used it in the—”
“It’s not a prop!” Kay exclaimed. He hadn’t realized he’d raised his voice; the velvety warmth of his voice had charred into a sharp-edged, rushed air.
The howling kept growing in voices and dissonance in the background.
“It’s a corpse’s memory of being alive. You don’t get to decide it’s not important just because tonight’s inconvenient.” Kay held out his palm and seized Artus’ shoulder, grounding him as he recognized the boy’s rising panic.
“The horror is going to be physical before it’s emotional, kid. That’s just the order things happen in out here. But even then — you mourn the fallen. Always. That’s a vow not to be broken even by a horde closing in on us.”
Artus placed the seed into his hand like he was handing over something warm-blooded.
Kay didn’t waste the gesture.
He held a half-closed fist, as if he was about to grab something. His fingers were firm and steady. He closed his eyes, and the prismatic pink gem on the back of his forearm gauntlet pulsed once, twice, and crystallized a large rod into existence between the gaps of his grip.
He pressed the pole and, before his eyes wholly opened, drove its tip into the earth in one seamless motion. He drew a deliberate line through the soil, dropping the seed he held on the other hand into the open earth.
In a single Beat, the heel of his boot folded the soil shut with a second sweep of light. He had pressed and buried the seed into the seam before either of them could blink.
“These are meant to be planted,” Kay said, his voice subdued, spoken mostly to himself and to the ground. “Always. Preferably wherever you found them.”
He stood. The grief of his face lasted exactly as long as it took Amadea to rise to meet Artus’ silent gaze.
“Pack. Anything. Go.” Kay said as a final order.
The adults moved like people who had done this before and still hated how well they knew the rhythm. Their movements hurled the crates into the carts that came for what might crack, but were still ruthless in their efficiency. Kay even dismantled the entire campfire and the makeshift ramps in a flash of unpredictable movements.
Amadea was not a ghost. She carried whatever was shoved in her arms and into the carts. She had a precise step that already moved without instruction. Her memory had a reflex, learned somewhere in the static-blurred moons behind her, that being useful was one of the core safeties that held the world together.
It was Elaine who stopped first.
Corvin called her to review the exit route. They had a rapid exchange of words that Amadea could barely understand. It went back and forth until the conversation halted abruptly.
In the sudden silence, Amadea had a clear look at Elaine.
Her expression had frozen into something intense and unreadable. With one boot resting on the ramp of the center cart, Elaine stared over the map at the black smudge growing on the horizon, where smoke rose between the cascades of light.
“That’s the Twin Rivers crossing,” Elaine shouted as her eyes twitched.
Her voice had lost its stage-warmth entirely. It went flat, through her fingers that shivered in time with the popping embers of the cascades falling to the earth.
“That’s Aberchord!”
“Yes. I know what it is.” Corvin didn’t look up. He kept tapping his finger to the rhythm of his astrolabe. Every Beat was creeping closer and closer.
“What? That’s Aberchord! A major settlement!” Elaine repeated herself, her hands curled into fists at her sides.
“Corvin, that’s the water lens forge. It’s the astrologists’ Flux Haven!”
She stepped off the ramp, her stare traced the lingering smoke over the trees and into a mountain.
“The Great Clepsydras — we can make a run from there, the large riverbank. I think three passages go down the—”
“No.”
Corvin’s sharp denial broke the air harder than the distant explosions. Elaine stared at him, stunned.
“It’s a bottleneck. The toll crossing will be jammed.”
“Well… yes? But there’s still another valley! If we make a run on the highways of the tiered clocks— No, wait, what about the waterway? Or, no— maybe, the waterfall?”
Elaine was tripping over her own desperate arithmetic as she kept moving her hands over the map.
“It’s much safer if we push through the valley pass,” Corvin interrupted, ruthlessly severing her train of thought. “I’m sure there’s an outpost on the other side of the hills.”
“The terrain is much steadier for the buffalo if we don’t go off-road!” Elaine insisted, closing the distance between them, her eyes flaring.
“There are many artisans in there. And families. And children! If the tiered clocks still stand, we can hold a Resonance field. We could reach them! I’m sure we could get some of them out — even a handful!”
“There were children in there,” Corvin countered.
He finally stopped moving. He turned to her, his face as a mask of a haunted empiricism.
“Look at the sky, Elaine. The static criticality has already cascaded. You don’t hear detonations like that from a settlement still deciding whether it is salvageable. The frenzy of Luminant Rot has already claimed whatever was fading underneath.”
“You don’t know that for certain.” Elaine’s voice rose, vibrating with a desperate, wavering projection.
“We are going north, Corvin! To the place where the sky still has wall—”
Thump.
Corvin’s fist struck the hardwood beneath the map.
“Only the dead,” he said, the smoke in his voice sinking to charred ash, “let their failing hearts beat loudly enough to detonate.”
He maintained a terrible, haunted calm.
“That’s what the Great Plague does. It doesn’t wait politely at the edge of town for us to decide who’s worth saving.” Corvin cast a single, heavy glance at Amadea, Artus, and the children watching raptly from the carts.
“We can’t risk the entire caravan. We already have enough lives depending on us to gamble. Even worse with the fall of a high Coherence zone like that!”
A Beat.
Elaine froze. Something in her cracked. She stared at nothing long enough for Corvin to resume his ticking count.
A sob finally broke the unbearable silence.
“Then what is the last procession even for?” Elaine whispered, holding the twin wings of her cap. “It was a sacred chalice to catch the Aria’s Resonance so these children never have to hear the static again! How can we leave them to die?”
Corvin’s finger stopped tapping the astrolabe.
“I— I can’t. Where is the light in that?”
For a moment, the sob held back its tears. Her flickering sight swallowed her voice.
Only for a moment.
“That was the vow…” she uttered. The soft note turned sharp, rising into a sudden, screeching scream. “Have you forgotten your humanity!?”
Amadea watched the words tear the light from her eyes.
“Where is the Corvin that wanted to protect the dreams of Lenore!?”
Time stood still.
That name landed wrong.
All sound muffled, smothered by the same veil that had held the Ballad, but all the music was dead. Only that single phrase echoed through the terrified silence of the caravan.
Somewhere else, something snapped.
“Dreams—”
Corvin’s voice broke on the word, then came apart entirely, rising into a feral, ragged shout.
“Is that a sick joke!?”
Elaine went white.
The fire driving her will forward guttered out, replaced by a frozen stutter that immediately absorbed the silence as she covered her mouth with both hands.
“Have you forgotten the place where we stand!?” Corvin screamed. His ring pulsed in frantic sync with his pounding heartbeat and the blazing fury in his eyes.
“We can’t risk another trip into a wasteland of the Age of Embers! We’re in the middle of the third wave of the Great Plague of Euphoria! Do you remember what happened the last time we tried something so reckless!?”
He tore his own coat open with brutal force, jabbing a trembling finger at the patchwork lining — he pointed at the mosaic of stitched cloth that built from its inside to the outside lower half of the jet-black coat.
The sound of his voice was as heavy as the weight it carried.
“You want to know what protecting dreams costs!? This is the weight of your idealism!”
Elaine flinched as if struck.
She was suffocated by the weight of his grief and her own guilt. Pushed to the brink, the raw emotion overwhelmed her hands, as they rose to aim at the yellow-cream gem that flickered before conscious thought could stop it.
Elaine shot a lance of the same refracting Luminance that had woven the veil over the cymatics field. It sliced the dark, grazing Corvin’s cheek by a hair’s breadth.
The white, yellow light shifted to red in his skin. He didn’t even react to the blood seeping at the edge of the wound. His jaw clenched hard against a fury he had no room left to swallow.
The air swelled with pressure as the dancing flames of his ring filled the outer edges of its casing, igniting the vein-work underneath.
The wind felt warmer.
A Beat.
Amadea blinked. Kay was already there.
He stepped between them, raising his now-crystallized polearm in a low, defensive stance—he was the interruption that made it physically impossible for either to bypass.
“Hands off her, big man,” Kay said. His velvety voice was quiet, and the quiet was arguably worse than the earlier shouting.
“You don’t want an audience for this. We all saw what she did. I’m going to have words with her about it later.”
His stance shifted every so often with slight, calculated movements that mirrored Corvin’s ragged exhales.
“But you don’t get to scream at her. On my watch, you won’t use that coat alongside the weapon you were readying.”
He glanced at the patchwork lining. A trace of profound recognition passed over his alert eyes, beneath his martial pose.
“You want to wear the dead? Fine. I understand that. I don’t agree with it, but that’s only your burden to carry.”
Both men stood at a standstill, Kay’s spear pressing the distance between them.
“What I won’t let you do is swing it at my love. And if you let that coat cloud your judgment, it’s going to get you killed one day. I’d rather have you staying alive long enough to be wrong about this another night.”
Kay didn’t wait for Corvin to answer.
He moved backward slightly, just enough to feel Elaine behind him, lowering his voice without dropping eye contact with the glowing ring on Corvin’s hand.
“I am with you, Corvin. You are right about the cost. We can’t go to Aberchord. That place is doomed. And about Len—” He caught his own words before they fully dropped in intonation. “She… She shouldn’t have brought that up.”
Kay’s eyes flicked down to Corvin’s metallic kneecaps, grounding the tension.
“But you’re always wrong about how you say it. Let’s back off, breathe, and find your count again.”
Corvin finally relaxed his shoulders a fraction, giving the air enough space for Kay to breathe in, too.
Kay heard his language, and he used it as a cue to turn and center his gaze on Elaine, whose tears finally began to seep through her vacant, silky eyes.
“You’re also right, my singer,” Kay said softly to Elaine. “We shouldn’t have to leave anyone. But you’re in no state to argue this properly right now. It’s too dangerous for us to try and play rescue. If we’re really going to be heroes, let’s find the path ahead.”
Kay fully relaxed his pose. The velvet of his tone regained its familiar, anchoring note.
“Well then, let’s get ourselves back. Violence is over. I go first.”
He raised his prismatic polearm over his head. It caught and reflected the dying light that kept pressing closer as the sun neared sunset and faded to nothing.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to stop screaming at my partner. She’s going to stop throwing lights at your face. And I’m going to stand here — between the two of you — because someone has to.”
Boom.
Another cascade of static criticality fired anew.
Kay looked out toward the howling in the dark.
“We all become dead meat before nightfall if we don’t get out of here right now. The howls of that were a massive horde.”
Corvin’s jaw worked once, twice.
“Fine.” He spat a single drop of blood into the dirt. “Let’s move.”
The words left him like a physical expulsion. He turned his rigid back to them and went to gather the last of the children without another glance.
Elaine let out one sharp, unwilling tear. Then she forced a practiced smile and turned to secure the children. She acted warmly, at least to help those who were still frozen in shock.
Amadea sat witness to all of it, and the name ‘Aberchord’ stuck in her mind as she filed away a brutal, highly legible lesson:
Even the people who protect you are one wrong word away from breaking.
The bitten, cold wind caressed Amadea’s face, tender and wrong.
It dragged the tang of its thin, metallic undertones as it howled rhythmically against her nose.
They had walked alongside the white-furred buffalo through a gallery of dead trees until the clearing ended. The caravan reached the rim of a cliff where the land broke and gave way to a sunken basin of laddered ruins. The landscape painted a valley that was as much a maze of jagged rock and splintered tree carcasses as it was half-drowned ruins.
The area was one of shattered terraces, sloping toward an open sky swallowed by dark clouds above. Nighttime was about to set in.
“We have to cross that,” Elaine muttered over glittering eyes, hugging the pelt at her neck. Her voice had gone flat, stripped of its warm performance. “No way around. The flood took the old path.”
“And the hounds took whatever was left of these ruined outskirts,” Kay sighed.
The precipice was a tomb for a bygone settlement. It was coated in a thin layer of golden dust, claimed by moss much older than Amadea, and perhaps than any of the adults of the caravan. Only eerie black walls remained, rejoined with nature, gilded yellow and silver flowers pushing up through the cracks every so often.
“Impossible to cross directly,” Corvin observed, his eyes mapping a path toward the horizon. “If one of the wheels catches on the ruins, it will have a hard time regaining balance.”
Corvin traced the distant smoke over the mountains, settling his eyes on the contour of a dry bank of what seemed like a river.
“Elaine, we need a route west. We may run face-front into some of the horde, but threading the old waterway is our best shot.”
Elaine’s jaw tightened. She looked at the dry riverbed a long moment before she answered, and when she did, something in her voice wavered under the flatness of a half smile.
“Right, west, then.”
Her thumb drifted to the gem at her winged cap without her seeming to notice she’d done it, rubbing at its cold, dulled face over the silver casing.
“I’ll need to see the ground first. My last flare choked halfway through the last fight. I don’t know if I’ve got another good one left in me.”
She said it lightly, like a joke that hadn’t quite become one yet, but her eyes didn’t match her mouth.
“You’ll manage,” Corvin replied, a reassurance half decided on her behalf. “We depend on you.”
Elaine glanced back. She saw the crowd of children standing in front of the white buffalo, their faces and many eyes, Artus and Amadea’s too, waiting for an answer.
She didn’t say a word. Instead, she only took a breath and stepped to the cliff’s border, her boots finding an anchor on the overgrown moss of a stone slick with old rain. She stopped where the ground gave way to the long laddered drop into the valley.
She raised her left hand. Thumb to gem. The teal vein-work beneath the surface pulsed. Arrhythmic. It cut to black at the edges, stuttering in cold static rather than warm light.
She closed her eyes, exhaled. Her breath came out ragged. It was as if her mind was still carrying the exhaustion of the fight before this one, and on its doubt the gem answered with a feeble flare that sputtered like static criticality.
A thin, ugly static hiss began to gnaw at the air instead of illuminating it. The dissonance was low, yet it crawled stronger, the hiss rising to a whistle that was jarring, and then suffocating.
Until the air went still.
A Beat.
Elaine flinched, recoiling, and reopening her eyes to the pain as if the gem had bitten her, as the flicker died out on her fingers, unable to focus.
Her shoulders dropped. She wore that thin, awkward smile like a heavy blade as she curled her hand against the fur of her coat. For a moment she stood there with an unreadable expression, staring at her own hand as it belonged to someone else.
“Elaine.”
Kay severed the silence. He stepped up just behind her, his chest brushing the back of her coat. He leaned to see her profile, just close enough to whisper a velvet cadence that mimicked the rhythm of a Ballad.
“She implored the heavens until dawn. Tell me, Silver Moon, which voice is the note of Consonance?”
As the words left his lips, he kissed the wounded hand of Elaine.
“Let the singers find you, Elaine.”
She didn’t answer him with words. Something in her chest loosened at the touch. She turned her hand over in his, just once, and stepped away from him toward the edge again.
This time, she did not reach for a smile. She let it wash over to a solemn expression. She raised both arms in a theatrical pose against the crushing dark of the forest, forming a V that mirrored the wings of her cap. She pointed the figure toward the cold canopy of dead trees. The teal vein-work of the gem ignited, steady and pure.
The Pulse answered.
As she lowered her arms, rhythmic chimes harmonized with the howling winds. It ran clear, and then light.
From the yellow-cream edges, a ray burst in a flare that condensed mid-air in a cloud of gold-amber. Its ethereal threads were similar to Corvin’s cello, but shaped a smaller, gentler figure, from thin strings to a pale wooden throat.
The light became a violin cloaked in white.
When the instrument became real, she rested it in the grass beneath her, and as she stood up, she curled both of her hands and aimed them in front of her chest.
Not toward the gem. Not toward the violin. Toward nothing at all — perhaps toward the cold air itself. Her fingers drew slowly as if gathering the thread of an invisible loom. This time, her gem flickered again, but with a light devoid of the dark edges of dissonance.
Her gem pulsed once, twice, and the teal became a blinding flare.
“Go on, singer of Luminance,” she whispered, her voice flowing smooth and melodic, stripped bare for the first time all night.
A faint figure rose off her palm in a single unbroken filament that condensed into two wings. She cupped it between her open hands, with feathers etched in the texture of her white fur.
“Fly far, and thread anew this world. Let me see through your eyes what lies ahead.”
She released it.
A colossal figure erupted from her hands — no longer a faint spark. It became a massive, towering entity of pure, ethereal teal light. The bird-flare unfurled its wings of searing brilliance, bathing the dead trees and the ruined stone in a breathtaking, oceanic glow.
Amadea stood frozen in the blast of Luminance.
The reflection of this massive spirit swallowed her vision entirely; it illuminated her wide, unblinking eyes from within. In that breathless moment, the radiant light banished every shadow from her face.
“Pure Light,” she said to herself.
The bird-flare launched in a narrow arc, skimming the cliff’s edge before plunging into the valley as a ray of light. Its massive body elongated as it flew until it became more thread than creature.
The light exposed the rot below.
It became a living flare tracing moss, dead wood, golden dust, and ribcage.
Heartbeats — too many heartbeats — their black dissonance cores were pulsing in the shadows as the flare revealed starved hounds by the dozen. A hundred hungry eyes tracked the light, yet it flew high enough that none of them struck at the bird. They only followed, teeth bared, until its threads thinned and dissolved into nothing.
The light attenuated until it dissipated as a path of teal motes, swirling in patterns.
Silence did not return.
Instead, the bedrock shuddered in a massive rumble.
Boom.
A sound rose from the earth itself. A subsonic tremor, hollow, and bearing a wet, sustained roar. It lacked the sharp, whistling crack of static criticality. No, this was deeper — the deafening, crushing momentum of millions of gallons of dark water obliterating stone and chamber.
The rumble reached Elaine first.
“The Great…” she gasped, the words dying in her throat.
“Aberchord…”
Her breath stuttered. She recognized the catastrophe a half-Beat before the sheer volume of it spilled over the cliff. Her hands tightened in the white fur at the collar as the wet, heavy dissonance of the flood swallowed the remaining silence.
The Great Clepsydras had fallen.
A Beat.
“Elaine.”
Kay’s voice cut through the distant, drowning rumble — once, flat, final. He and Corvin were already hauling children toward the carts.
“The path is forward.”
A shuddering exhale escaped her lips. She stood in shock until a wave of the tremors reached her boots. She picked up the violin from the earth and pressed a quick, absurd kiss to the muzzle of the nearest buffalo before vaulting into the coach box.
“No chance to go in silent,” she declared, then her voice settled lower somewhere under the words. “Well — as if that mattered, with all the noise of Aberchord…”
She let her composure settle back over her shoulders like her coat being pulled tight against the weather.
“There’s a whole horde, though they all read Nascent. We may still have some luck in our favor.”
She raised the violin, signaling the massive white buffalo.
“Get inside, everyone! Three-cart formation,” Elaine called, already three plans ahead and discarding the worst two out loud.
“Triangle down. I take center, buffalo on my reins. Kay — right cart. Corvin — left. Children to the second floors, backs to the inner walls. No one touches the rail.”
Corvin seized Amadea’s shoulder — too tight at first, correcting a Beat too late — and steered her up the ramp.
Amadea stumbled forward under his weight just as the silhouette of Artus vanished with Kay, who was lifting two smaller children by the shoulders as well, hoisting them toward the interior of the wheeled fortress.
“And buckle up! It’s going to be a long run.”
She heard the final words of Elaine on a final glance before entering the cart, as she bolted up the second level with the rest of the nameless faces.
Inside, the world narrowed to the beams, crates, and the signature ghost-smell of rust, tallow, and the charred herbs of past campfire nights.
Corvin rushed to the metal hatch of the second floor, throwing it open to access the upper deck. Chimes echoed soon after, followed by the flare that signaled that Corvin had also invoked his instrument.
Amadea followed the light, curious where Corvin went.
She climbed up the ladder; it was steady in its roughness but strong enough to have a good grip.
Her head poked just barely outside of the hatch to catch a glimpse of the upper floor of the caravan.
It was a stage.
The upper floor formed a square area, flanked by archways acting as barricades. In the center, a circle rose over two twin rails that closed in a crescent. Corvin was sitting here, tending to the strings of his cello.
He caught her movement in his periphery. His hands stopped.
“No, don’t come here. It’s too dangerous,” he almost screamed in a rasp bark.
The sudden reprimand made Amadea flinch. However, she held a gaze to him in frosty eyes. The gesture was enough to force Corvin to exhale, shifting his tone to be lower and slightly more tender as he continued to care for his cello.
“Fine, you can stay at the hatch. But hands only on the ladder! And you move only when I say move. If the cart ever lurches too violently, you immediately drop beneath the slates and cease the curiosity. Understood?”
She nodded.
“Good.” Corvin adjusted his grip on the cello, his eyes scanning the pitch-black descent waiting for them.
“What are we fighting?”
She asked in a smooth voice against the creeping wind, her knuckles clenched around the topmost rung.
“Remember the one from earlier?”
“Atonalis.”
The word stopped Corvin mid-movement.
He wasn’t paying attention to her so much as he was tending to his cello, but his expression shifted to a gentle, genuine smile. It was clear he didn’t expect her to remember that first encounter.
He briefly stood up. His hand rose in a single motion, patting the top of her head once before dropping back to the instrument.
“Good memory, my little sharp note.”
He regained his posture, eyes sliding past her toward the valley floor.
“Yes. Atonalis. Clots of hunger that are the undigested pain of the world — suffering that coagulates until it grows teeth, claws, and learns how to feed.”
He exhaled, rigorously waxing his bow.
“There are eight paths of demons. These horrors in particular are called Carnalix. They’re the shadow of starvation, likely born from whoever was devoured by the explosion from earlier.”
He paused, the bow held steady over the strings. His smoky voice hardened into a grim, absolute tone as his memory drifted elsewhere.
“It’s now up to us to put them down before they take us instead.”
Carnalix.
The word sat heavy in the space, a dark new note dropped into an unfinished song, perhaps as black as the same dissonance of the rest of the Atonalis.
Crack.
Elaine’s whip echoed across the caravan. The guttural voices of the buffalo merged into a single, thundering chorus as the hardwood wheels ground against the stone, teetering on the edge of a dead run.
“Sorry, Corvin — for earlier!” Elaine screamed over the increasing sound of the buffalo and the moving fortress.
“Give me some Resonance!”
“What? Why? We’re setting up a field?”
“Give her a Beat, you idiot,” Kay shouted before Corvin could finish the thought. He was already braced against the right cart’s rail on the upper deck. She saw him standing through the gaps in the arched barricades.
“Start playing something. Who knows if the water and the flood of broken water clocks will actually reach us here?”
He was standing in what seemed to be the largest stage, and Artus was there too, on the ladder; he was set exactly like her, looking with curious gleaming eyes just over the hatch.
Corvin shifted gears immediately, wedging the pendulum of the celestial astrolabe on his own elbow, using it as a second rhythm against the violent jolt of the wheels.
“Third of Cindergale,” he announced to no one, and to everything.
Click.
The brass device snapped its bottom layer open, revealing a hidden secondary mechanism; Corvin’s finger flew across it.
“On 118 Beats.”
He angled it toward a shard of crimson rock he pulled from the inner lining of his coat. The moment it touched the brass, the astrolabe seemed to whisper.
It reacted once, twice.
The rhythm locked in. The ticking count became a flawless heartbeat, kept as an anchor every four Beats.
As soon as the metronome began, another sound joined in.
Crack.
Elaine raised the violin at the front of the caravan. The leash cracked. The buffalo lunged into a full stampede.
The wind felt warmer.
Corvin’s orange ring flared, its vein-work of cream-yellow light bleeding across the back of his hand. He drew the bow across the oak-worn cello as a heavy, driving bassline that rolled out over the valley — a dark, melodic promise that swallowed the chaos ahead of them.
The caravan plunged down the slope, diving into the pitch-black valley below.