The air was too still.
Nima blinked, once—then again. The world had slowed. Not stopped, not paused, just… shifted. Like she'd stepped into a version of reality one layer beneath her own. She could still feel the cold stone under her boots, still hear Dmitri's breath behind her, yet everything felt distant. Muffled. Disconnected.
Before her, the figure remained—neither approaching nor retreating—its body tall and twisted, framed by the dim luminescence that pulsed through the Cradle's veins like lifeblood.
"You brought the Bell into yourself," the creature said. Its voice didn't echo; it simply was, in her ears, in her ribs, in her thoughts. "You called to it. Heard it. Answered."
Nima said nothing. Her mouth felt filled with ash. Her pulse thudded, slow and loud, a war drum sounding in some far-off battlefield within her skull.
Then the walls began to breathe.
Stone didn't move—shouldn't move—but the Cradle's corridors exhaled, inhaled, shifted. Faces formed along the archways: stone visages twisted in grief, laughter, agony. Some were familiar. One looked like Velreth. Another bore the empty eyes of the children in Hollowroot. And a third…
Her mother.
Nima staggered, her katana nearly slipping from her fingers. "This… isn't real," she muttered.
"It is more than real," the figure said, voice threaded with something like pity. "This is the Bell's memory. And yours."
Behind her, Dmitri swore under his breath. "What's it doing to us?"
Nima's hand trembled. "It's not doing anything. It's showing."
The ground beneath them fell away—metaphor, maybe, or memory—but they were suddenly elsewhere. A great field. Red soil. The sky above was weeping ash. Dozens of bells hung from skeletal trees, tolling in a wind that did not blow.
Nima stood alone. Dmitri was gone.
In the distance, she saw her younger self. Running. Barefoot. Screaming.
The sky split open, and a chasm of ringing opened in her mind—memories not just hers, but of others, entire generations who had heard the Bell's call. All those who had touched its Song and been changed by it.
A voice rose within her.
You are not the first. You are not the last.
From the trees hung not only bells—but people. Pale. Still. Open-eyed. They mouthed words, and though no sound came, she knew what they were saying.
Wake up, Nima. Wake up. Wake up before it roots in you.
She tried to move. Couldn't.
Tendrils of memory coiled around her ankles, pulling her back through time. She saw Hollowroot before the fall. She saw the Bell whole. She saw the Cradle alive.
And she saw the end. A blackened field where only the Bell stood, cracked and weeping sound. Alone. Eternal.
Her hands burned.
She looked down. The shard was no longer a fragment—it was the whole. It had grown, reshaped, molded itself into her hand. She had not been carrying it. It had been growing from her.
"You are the Song," the figure whispered behind her.
She spun—Dmitri stood there now, but he was wrong. His eyes were empty sockets of ringing. His mouth hung open as a second voice crawled out of him, deeper, older, hungry.
"Sing, Nima," it said.
She screamed.
The world shattered.
When she came to, she was kneeling in the Cradle, clutching the shard, breath heaving like a beast. Dmitri crouched beside her, his real hand on her shoulder, his real voice calling her name again and again.
She wasn't sure how long she'd been gone.
But something inside her had changed. There was no denying it now.
The Bell wasn't just a curse.
It was her.
_______________________
There was no sound.
Only Nima's breath, soft and uneven, brushing against the stillness like a whispered trespass. The world had folded in on itself again. The battle, the creature, Dmitri's shouts—they had faded as though swallowed whole by the echoing silence within the Bell's song. Or perhaps she had never truly left this place. Perhaps this was where she had always been: inside.
The chamber around her was endless, but not vast. It felt more like a thought given shape—a concept with walls. The ceiling pulsed with pale veins of fractured light, too dim to illuminate, yet too alive to ignore.
A pool of mirrored glass stretched at her feet, perfectly still. When she gazed into it, she saw not her reflection—but thousands. Each one a version of herself twisted by paths not taken, choices never made. In one, her hands were soaked in blood. In another, she was smiling in a town long turned to ash. In the center of it all, the Bell towered—cracked, humming, staring.
Nima blinked. The central figure—her—lifted a hand and touched the shard embedded in her chest.
No. Not her chest.
She gasped. Her fingers found it—a sliver of the Bell, pulsing beneath her skin. She hadn't noticed it pierce her during the fight. Or had it been earlier, when she first touched the Loom? The thought twisted. It was all folding in—time, memory, reality.
The silence broke.
"You are unraveling," a voice said.
She spun around. A figure stood behind her—familiar in posture, but shrouded. It wore her shape, mimicked her voice. But its eyes were not hers.
They were hollow.
"You carry the Song in your veins now," it continued. "Not even silence will save you."
Nima took a step back, her breathing sharp. "You're not real."
"I'm as real as your guilt. As real as the world you abandoned for a lie." The doppelgänger tilted its head. "Do you even remember what you came here to find? Or did the Bell change that too?"
"I came to stop this," she said, voice trembling. "To stop the Bell from—"
"From what? Calling you home?"
The chamber rippled.
And now she saw them—dozens of Bellkeepers lining the walls. Eyes sewn shut, mouths gaping in silent screams. Their bodies were twisted by time and failure, their minds lost to the echo. Some wept without tears. Some still reached for the Bell that had devoured them.
"You are one of them," her double whispered. "You just haven't accepted it yet."
"I'm not."
"You will be."
Nima turned and ran. Not because she believed she could escape—but because she had to believe something was still real. That somewhere outside this echo-chamber of self, Dmitri was still waiting, the world still breathing.
But the chamber warped. Every corridor she took circled back to the mirrored pool.
The Bell loomed taller each time.
"Face it," the voice echoed from all sides. "Face yourself, or drown."
She fell to her knees before the mirror, fists clenched. "What is the Song?"
And the mirror answered.
It shattered—and from its shards poured a chorus not of sound, but of memory—her mother's voice reading stories by candlelight. The smell of iron after the town burned. The distant crack of bone. The softness of Dmitri's hand in hers. The day she first heard the Bell.
The Song was not music.
It was remembrance. The cost of forgetting was silence. The price of memory was pain.
And it had chosen her.
Nima opened her eyes.
The Bell's shard no longer pulsed beneath her skin—it sang. Not aloud. Not yet. But in her blood. Her bones. Her breath.
The chamber was gone. Only stone remained. Cold, cracked, and familiar.
Dmitri knelt beside her, shaking her. "Nima! You were gone—you collapsed—"
She looked up. "I saw it. I saw me."
"What do you mean?"
"The Bell doesn't kill. It shows. It reflects. Every horror we've seen—it's all buried in us already. The Song just… releases it."
Dmitri's face paled.
And somewhere deep beneath the earth, the Bell trembled.