They left the hollow square behind just before dawn. The Bell's remnants still smoldered behind them, though the light had dulled to a sullen ember. What remained of Hollowroot was crumbling—buildings folding in on themselves, streets fading into dust. The sky above looked raw, like torn skin over a wound too deep to heal.
The silence wasn't peaceful now. It was wary, watching.
They crossed into the Ashwake, the great grey fields that sloped downward from Hollowroot's edge like the scorched bones of a battlefield. Charred trees stood like broken sentinels, and ash clung to their clothes and skin. The Song's influence had burned more than wraiths—it had burned history itself.
Nima walked ahead, the shard of the Bell wrapped in cloth and bound tightly to her waist. It pulsed occasionally, faintly—like a dying heartbeat. She couldn't bring herself to touch it again. Not yet. Not after what it had revealed.
Dmitri stayed close, but neither had spoken since they left the ruins. Words felt brittle.
Only when they reached the outskirts of what might once have been a village did he finally break the silence. "That creature we fought—was it guarding the Bell? Or was it… born from it?"
Nima stopped. The wind stirred the ashes around her boots. "I think it was both," she murmured. "A guardian and a consequence. Something bound to the Song… maybe even a fragment of the Bell's own will."
Dmitri frowned, his brows drawn. "A will?"
"Everything we've seen… everything it's done to the world," she said, slowly turning to him, "it doesn't feel accidental. It wants something. The Song—it isn't just a curse. It's a message. A demand."
They pressed on, but now the silence seemed deeper. The ash underfoot gave way to stone as they approached a chasm spanned by an ancient bridge. The stonework was cracked and uneven, and the air shimmered faintly around it.
Something was waiting on the other side.
Nima sensed it first—the subtle weight of presence. Not like before. Not rage, not wrath. Curiosity.
She drew her blade slowly. Dmitri followed suit.
A voice echoed from the other side, calm and composed. "You carry it openly. Bold. Or foolish."
A figure stepped forward from the shadows beneath the broken arch. A woman in a cloak of mothwing and iron thread. Her face was partially veiled, and her hands bore the brand of the Bell—coiled script seared into flesh, still glowing faintly.
"I heard the Song when it screamed," she said. "You did something most thought impossible." Her tone wasn't reverent. It was… speculative.
"Who are you?" Nima asked, blade raised but not yet striking.
The woman bowed her head, just slightly. "I am Miren, a Bell-Seer. Or was. Until the Song turned inside-out and took my temple with it."
Dmitri lowered his sword slightly. "A survivor?"
"A witness," Miren corrected. "The Bell spoke once to me. Then it bled into my dreams. Now it sings through the cracks of the world. And you've cracked it further."
Nima stepped closer. "What do you want?"
"Truth. The kind that doesn't whisper. The kind that stares back." Miren's eyes glinted beneath her veil. "But first… I want to know what you heard when you silenced the Song."
Nima didn't answer.
Instead, she reached for the shard.
As her fingers touched the wrapped fragment, the air twisted. The bridge groaned. Miren flinched slightly.
"Ah," she breathed. "It's alive. Still listening."
Suddenly, the wind died—and then came a scream. Not human. Not natural.
From below the bridge, figures rose—not wraiths, but pilgrims. Their bodies were broken in strange ways, bent like warped iron, their skin glowing with fractal burns. They moved with purpose. Not blind. Not lost.
"Song-Bound," Miren said softly. "Those who couldn't let go."
They charged.
Dmitri was the first to move, his blade flashing as the first pilgrim lunged across the bridge. Nima followed, moving with instinct honed by trauma. Her katana cleaved through a lunging form, and the creature burst into a cloud of embers and whispering voices.
They fought side by side. Each strike sent echoes into the ash-drenched air, and each kill felt heavier than the last. These weren't just monsters. They had once been listeners, believers.
Miren stood behind them, watching carefully, lips moving in silent prayer—or calculation.
Then one of the Song-Bound shattered, and instead of falling, it screamed again—and from its remains, a dozen ghostlike tendrils lashed upward toward the shard at Nima's waist.
Nima ducked, slicing three tendrils in a single motion, but one grazed her wrist.
And in that instant—she heard it again.
A voice, neither man nor woman. Neither god nor ghost.
Why do you run from what you are? You carry my echo, child of the dying world.
Nima gritted her teeth and shoved the voice out. It took effort. The Song had never spoken so clearly before.
The last of the Song-Bound fell. Dmitri exhaled shakily. Miren approached now, slower.
"You heard it again, didn't you?" she asked.
Nima nodded. She couldn't lie. Not now.
Miren knelt beside one of the broken forms and traced a symbol in the dust. "Then you're already deeper than you know."
"What was that?" Dmitri asked. "What were they?"
"Those are the faithful who drowned in the Song," Miren said quietly. "When it was silenced, they lost their anchor. Now they hunt the next voice."
She looked directly at Nima. "And that voice… might be yours."
The clash of steel and shadow rang out across the hollowed square. Nima's blade bit through the creature's veil of darkness, sparks flying where it met resistance. Dmitri circled with precise strikes, keeping its attention divided, but the thing was tireless—an ancient echo that refused to be slain.
"You're not real!" Dmitri shouted between swings, his arms trembling from the sheer force needed to keep the creature back.
"I am more real than you," the entity rasped, its voice like wind through broken flutes. "I was born from the first toll. I remember the world before your gods."
It lashed out with a tendril of living shadow. Nima ducked under it, rolled, and slashed at the limb, cutting through the veil. For a moment, the creature recoiled, shrieking, its form unraveling into fragments of memory and starlight. But it didn't fall. It reformed.
Nima grit her teeth. "We can't kill it like this."
"Then how?" Dmitri asked, parrying another blow. "What are we missing?"
She felt the shard of the Bell pulse in her pouch, still warm from the last song. Not a weapon—no. A key.
"The shard," she muttered. "It resonated with it. That means it's part of the same… music."
"You're not thinking of playing it again?" Dmitri's voice was hoarse with disbelief.
"No," she said. "I'm thinking of ending the note it left behind."
She sprinted toward the edge of the square, where the broken bell had once stood before its collapse. Beneath it, the veins of molten light still pulsed—living echoes of the Song's power. The entity noticed her shift and howled, turning away from Dmitri with a lurch that twisted gravity itself. Tendrils burst from its back like wings of shadow.
Dmitri threw his body into its path.
"GO!"
Nima dropped to her knees at the edge of the broken pedestal. The shard thrummed in her hand, vibrating in rhythm with the earth's whispering song. She drove the shard into the molten light.
Reality screamed.
A shockwave burst from the contact, throwing her back against a toppled pillar. The air split apart—not broken, but opened—and the creature screamed with it. Where once it had been whole and unstoppable, it now fractured, pieces of its shadowy body tearing away like paper burned at the edges.
"No!" it bellowed. "You would sunder me to silence?"
"You don't belong here," Nima spat. "You're not a memory—we are."
The light swallowed the creature whole, collapsing it inward like a dying star. For one moment, the square fell silent again.
Then the Song returned—not a toll, not a scream, but a whisper. Gentle. Like breath over water. The shard, now dulled, rested at Nima's side.
Dmitri limped to her, battered, bleeding. "What was that?"
"The last resonance," Nima whispered. "A closing chord."
They stood together in the aftermath, watching as the stars began to flicker back into the sky. The wounds in the earth still pulsed faintly, but the shadow was gone.
But then, far off, another sound stirred—different, distant, and not the Bell.
Footsteps.
From the northern road, a procession approached—figures robed in faded blue and white, faces hidden behind bronze masks shaped like crescent moons. They bore banners woven with the same symbols etched into the Bell's base.
Nima gripped her sword again. "Who the hell are they?"
One of the robed figures stepped forward, bowing deeply. A feminine voice spoke from behind the mask.
"We are the Bellborne. And you've made far too much noise."