The quiet after the Gate-maw's collapse was more awful than the shouting.
Cinder fell like a burial service cover. Neon Avalon's corpse-glows flashed through the haze—sickly greens and purples recoloring the ruins where Silas's Tower once clawed the sky. Kael flexed his hand. The hybrid rune throbbed, satisfied but eager, its violet-indigo light darkened to ashes underneath his skin. Reason, it whispered. Not peace.
Valen heaved bile onto smashed asphalt. His human eye was ragged-looking, wild. The green sensor remained dead—a split focal point reflecting nothing. "It saw us," he scratched, wiping his mouth. "That thing... felt us."
Lyss stood statue-still, her violet look settled on the wound within the sky. Where the Gate-maw had been, reality tingled. A scar that pulled at the light, at the edges of Kael's Soul-Sight. "The Primary Walker tastes this world presently," she said, voice level. "Silas was a split within the entryway. We tore it off its pivots."
A moan shivered down the road. Not wind. Not soil.
Metal.
Kael spun, rune flaring.
Down the corpse-littered road, shapes unfurled from the shadows. Not Gate-beasts. Not Searchers.
Empties.
Their shapes were human—or had been. Appendages extended as well, long joints twisting in reverse. Skin supplanted by plates of rummaged armor welded over leaking indigo veins. No eyes—just empty attachments, sobbing thick light. They moved with a herky-jerky syncopation, like manikins tangled in their claim strings.
"Silas's scraps," Valen breathed, stunning upright. "Soul-Forged... but the web's gone. Who's pulling their strings?"
One Purge staggered forward. Its jaw unhinged, uncovering a spiraling drill-bit tongue buzzing with inactivity. A sound destroyed the air—a psychic screech that clawed at Kael's sanctuaries.
" Bolster US THE KEY. Nourish US THE STORMHEART. "
The words weren't listened to. They were infused.
Lyss clutched her scarred ear, blood welling between her fingers. "They're empty! The Primary Walker pours itself into the breaks!"
Kael didn't falter. He pushed with the Soul-Sight.
The vision hit like a hammer-blow:
A cavern more profound than bedrock. Dividers beating with cancerous indigo developments.
The Purges, standing unmoving in lines, cables winding from their spines into a central spire of dark gem.
And inside the spire—a part of the Gate-maw's core, beating like an unhealthy heart. Stormheart.
The Purge lurched. Drill-tongue pointed at Kael's chest.
Valen moved quicker. His bladed arm—still utilitarian, still monstrous—intercepted. Flashes shouted as tungsten teeth ground against the spinning bore. "Go!" Valen growled, pushing Kael back. His human eye burned with frantic anger. "Discover that heart! Smash it, or these manikins won't halt!"
More Purges peeled from the ruins. Ten. Twenty. Their developments were smoothed, facilitated. Learning.
Lyss snatched Kael's wrist, her touch frosty. "Underneath the Ironworks! The grave is covered up there!" She yanked him into a collapsing bunker. Valen's thunder of torment reverberated after them, gulped by the shriek of severing metal.
The burrows stank of ozone and spoiling meat.
Shining parasites painted the dribbling dividers in harmful greens. Lyss explored the maze without light, her violet eyes penetrating the anguish. Kael's rune beat a gloomy caution against his palm. The more profound they went, the heavier the air, thick with psychic buildup. Whispers brushed his intellect:
"...connect the quiet... gotten to be purge..."
"Battle it," Lyss mumbled, her little hand fixing on his. "The Stormheart sings the Void's starvation. It needs you to tune in."
"Does it need you as well?" Kael inquired, voice harsh.
Her grin was a phantom within the dull. "I am the hush it pines for."
They dropped into a cavern slargeto swallow areas.
The Grave of Empties.
Thousands stood unbending in idealized lines, cables murmuring from their spines into the central spire—a twisted spoof of Silas's position of royalty. At its crest, the Stormheart beat: a shard of the Gate-maw, veins of passing on light threading through obsidian. Its beat vibrated in Kael's teeth. In his bones.
"KEY..." The thought resounded from the tower. "Deliver... CONTROL..."
Lyss ventured forward, palms raised. Violet light accumulated around her, not an assault. A cradlesong. "Rest," she whispered to the closest Purge. Its sobbing attachments diminished.
The Stormheart beat brighter. Indigo light lashed out—a whip-crack of immaculate invalidation.
Lyss cried out, tossed back. Blood streamed from her nose. "It rejects peace! I it as it we're getting to our starvation!"
Kael met the Stormheart's beat. His rune answered—not with accommodation. With contention.
He pummeled his palm against the cavern floor.
Bolster me.
The hybrid rune exploded.
Violet-indigo light tore through stone, shattering cables, tearing Purges from their roots. The rune didn't expend the Stormheart's energy—it desolated it. Tore shouts of null-space anger from the precious stone.
The spire cracked.
"NO!" The psychic cry shook the cavern. Stalactites sprinkled down.
Kael twisted the rune's control more profoundly. Soul-Sight showed him the Stormheart's core—a hitch of outsider will, fraying.
Yours, the rune murmured. Take it.
He got a handle on the unraveling hitch.
Misery. Bliss.
The Stormheart's light kicked the bucket. The cavern dove into near-darkness, spare for Kael's rune—now throbbing with a modern, more profound indigo, cold and endless.
Quiet.
Then—a damp, worn-out hack.
Valen bumbled from a side burrow, bladed arm gone, middle dying from a dozen wounds. He collapsed at the base of the dead tower, gazing up at Kael.
"You... ingested it?" Valen whispered, frightfulness and wonder warring in his human eye. "Divine beings... what are you getting to be?"
Over them, the cavern roof trembled. Not from collapse.
From strides. Enormous. Ponder.
Lyss looked up, her violet eyes wide with primal fear. "It's taken after the tune."
The Primary Walker had found its key.
End of chapter 15.