The Shadowlands welcomed us with silence too sharp to be natural, as if the forest itself held its breath. Damon strode ahead, pace merciless, shoulders carved from iron. His presence pressed down on all of us—commanding, suffocating, leaving no room for hesitation.
Mira hovered at my side like a blade unsheathed, her eyes catching every faint flicker of glyphs crawling beneath my skin. She did not speak, but I felt her suspicion coil tighter with each step. She was not just guarding me—she was waiting for proof that I was no longer me.
Lucian kept back, bow slung but never lowered, gaze cutting through the trees. He had said nothing since the battle, but I knew his silence was not peace. It was restraint—an arrow drawn and held, waiting for release.
The twins walked just behind, their voices sharp, brittle as glass. Veyra mocked Marlow's stumble over a gnarled root; Marlow answered with teeth, but the edge of their banter rang hollow. Fear bled through their usual games, laughter reduced to an echo of itself.
Jareth brought up the rear, every motion disciplined, measured. His head tilted often, eyes narrowing at movements none of us could see. The hunter knew we were being followed. He simply hadn't decided whether to warn us or keep us sharp.
And then there was Sareth. His lips moved in whispers that chilled the spine, words spilling out like a hymn half-heard through broken glass. No one asked what he murmured. Not even Damon.
The wind shifted, and I felt it—thin, brittle notes curling through the branches like a hymn carried on air. Whispers brushing against bark, weaving in and out of the silence. No one else flinched. No one else reacted.
But the words were clear to me. Each syllable burrowed into my bones as if I had always known them. As if the forest itself was not singing to all of us—only to me.
---
The path narrowed into a corridor of black pines, their branches interlocking like the bars of a cage. Every footstep crunched against frost-crusted leaves, loud in the silence that pressed close around us. Damon walked ahead, cloak trailing, his presence cutting through the shadows like a blade. No one dared speak; even the twins' quarreling had dried to a brittle silence.
Yet the silence wasn't empty. It carried a faint thread of sound—half-sung, half-breathed—woven through the trees. A hymn without source. Too faint to follow, too steady to dismiss. Sareth's head twitched as if he heard it too, but he bit down on the words clawing at his lips.
I should have been frightened, but something in the melody curled against my ribs like recognition. The air brushed my throat, shaping syllables only I could catch. Fragments, scattered and broken: blood… vessel… song unending. My skin prickled. The glyphs beneath it stirred, pulsing faintly in rhythm with the unseen hymn.
Mira noticed. Her eyes flicked to my hands, then to my throat, her suspicion sharpened into open fear. She shifted closer, too close, as if she could shield me from what was already inside me. Lucian lagged behind, bow drawn but unreadable, watching me as much as the trees.
I didn't dare speak. The moment I opened my mouth, I feared the song might not stay inside.
---
The hymn was still in my ears when Marlow's voice cut through, sharper than usual.
Something there—
His hand froze mid-gesture, pointing toward the trees. I followed his line of sight just in time to catch it—a flicker, pale as bone, slipping between the ash-thick trunks. Veyra finished her brother's sentence without missing a beat.
—moving fast.
Their voices overlapped, uncanny in their sync, a habit I'd always read as theatrical. This time it was different. The banter stripped away, leaving only a shard of warning.
The forest itself seemed to hold its breath. Damon stilled, head tilting like a predator scenting prey. Lucian's bow snapped taut. Mira's arm pressed against mine, protective and firm. And then—
The white figures burst from the treeline. Not one, but three, their bodies jerking like marionettes half-rotted. Skin fissured, faces blank with sculpted grief, their mouths spilling fractured melody.
For a heartbeat, I thought we'd all be overwhelmed. The things moved too fast, their hymn staggering thought.
But the twins were already moving.
Marlow lunged, reckless, crashing into the nearest husk and dragging it clear of me. His laughter was hollow, desperate, but it drew the second figure toward him. Veyra pivoted behind, circling like a shadow. Her hands lifted—steel gleaming in one, a cord in the other—and with startling precision she swept the husk's legs, dragging it into her trap. The two collided, limbs tangling, voices breaking into discordant moans.
The third one turned its face toward Damon. But before it reached him, Veyra's cord tightened, snapping brittle bones with a sound like kindling breaking. The hymn stuttered into silence.
The forest was still again. My breath was loud in my own ears.
The husks didn't bleed. They didn't even fall properly—just slumped into themselves, hollow shells unravelling, ash drifting off their edges like burnt parchment.
The twins stood over them, panting, eyes wide. And for once, neither of them said a word.
Damon's gaze swept over the ruined husks, then lingered a heartbeat on the twins. His silence wasn't approval, but it wasn't dismissal either. That, from him, meant more than praise.
I caught the tremor in Marlow's hand, the tightness in Veyra's jaw. Beneath their bickering masks, fear had carved itself deep.
And still, they fought.
---
The thing lurched out of the trees at last—no heartbeat, no breath, just the sound of a cracked hymn rasping through its broken throat. Its skin was flaked with ash, fissures running across its body like dried earth, and where its eyes should have been, there were only pits of dim light.
It moved too fast for something so ruined. Its hand, long and brittle like charred branches, reached for Veyra's throat—only to be caught in a sudden twist of steel. Marlow had slipped in from the blind side, his blade catching the light, severing wrist from arm in a clean flash. The husk did not cry out. It simply kept singing.
Veyra spun on instinct, her bow already half-drawn. Instead of loosing, she thrust the arrow into its chest like a stake, pinning the wraith-thing against the twisted trunk behind it. The hymn broke into a ragged drone, its cracked lips spilling words no one wanted to hear.
The twins said nothing as they worked, no quips this time, no cutting remarks. Marlow's hands trembled, and Veyra's jaw was tight but never lost their precision. They moved like two halves of the same blade, one baiting, the other cutting. And when the husk tried to wrench free, Marlow stepped in and drove steel through its spine. The body crumbled into ashen fragments that sifted into the roots.
For a moment, silence. Then the trees themselves seemed to inhale, as if the death of one had summoned the notice of many more.
Damon had not moved once, his arms folded, his gaze cold as he watched the twins. When they finally stepped back, their chests heaving, he inclined his head just barely—acknowledgment, nothing more.
Dahlia caught what others missed: the fleeting look in their eyes as the ash fell. Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Only terror. A private fear neither of them dared to name aloud.
And far behind that, faint as breath on a dying ember—the hymn still carried on the wind.
---
The silence after the husk's fall lasted only a breath. Then the treeline rippled as if the night itself exhaled—shapes slithering forward, ash-white bodies peeling out of shadow. Their mouths moved in broken rhythm, and the sound came like fractured glass dragging across stone. A hymn.
Layered voices, wrong in every cadence, swelled in the clearing. Their chant mirrored something I already knew, a rhythm carved into my bones since the night of the ritual—the Knight's terrible intonations twisted into a choir. My knees weakened, the glyphs branded beneath my skin flaring to life with such heat it was as if fire crawled through my veins.
I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood, but still the hymn pierced me. Each word felt sharpened, shaped for me alone. A shiver tore through me when I realized—my name. It was there. Hidden, repeated, layered within the chant like a secret everyone could hear but none would understand. Dahlia. Dahlia. Dahlia.
Lucian didn't hesitate. The bow in his hands blurred into movement, each arrow loosed with predatory precision. Shafts sang through the air, pinning Psalmists before their mouths could fully shape another verse. But death wasn't silence—their collapse only echoed the hymn louder, the sound multiplying as though their voices never left the air.
The pack braced, caught between steel and song. Damon's voice cut through the madness, sharp as command steel—Strike. And Mira answered. She was no longer the sharp-tongued survivor that followed us from Valemont—here she was fury incarnate. Her blades carved, tore, and split the husks apart, each strike driven by a ferocity that made even the Psalmists falter mid-hymn. Bloodless ichor sprayed across her arms, and still she moved, unstoppable, merciless.
Yet the sound didn't fade. The Psalmists' hymn grew into a wall, pressing against thought, against will. My skull thrummed with it, drowning sense, until it felt like all I could hear was my own heartbeat stuttering against their song. And under it, always, my name. Whispered, called, claimed.
---
The ground shook as the Psalmists multiplied—splintering shadows given form. Their ragged mouths opened in unison, spilling a hymn that was not sung but exhaled, a thousand throats sharing one grief. The cadence mirrored the Knight's oath Dahlia had endured, every syllable a serrated hook pulling her deeper into the memory. Her glyphs seared alive, fire veins racing beneath her skin, branding her from within. She staggered, clutching her arms, the glow bleeding through her flesh like cracks in a vessel about to break.
Lucian did not falter. His bowstring thrummed with ceaseless rhythm, arrows tipped with silver fletching splitting the veil of voices. Each Psalmist that fell only fed the chorus, their broken hymns collapsing into the whole, a wall of sound that thickened until thought itself became muffled. The hymn wasn't meant to be heard—it was meant to overwrite.
Damon's command cut through it all. His voice was sharp, absolute, a blade above the storm. Mira answered instantly. She hurled herself into the swarm, a streak of iron and rage, twin blades flashing as she tore through the husks. Their limbs cracked beneath her strikes, their torsos split open like brittle wood, but no blood spilled—only dust and whispers. Mira fought with no flourish, no hesitation, only the merciless rhythm of a soldier who knew hesitation was death.
Still the sound rose. Louder. Heavier. The hymn pressed down on lungs and bone, every note a weight. Dahlia bit her tongue against it, copper flooding her mouth, but the hymn slipped deeper. Beneath it, she heard her name—not shouted, not spoken, but woven, hidden like a curse within the folds of the song. Dahlia.
It wasn't a call. It was an invitation.
---
The last husk fell beneath Mira's blade, its body collapsing into dust with a hiss like ash meeting water. The clearing held still, breathless in the aftermath. Yet the silence felt wrong—too absolute, as though it held its breath with them. My glyphs did not dim. They spread instead, crawling brighter beneath my skin, threads of fire veining across my arm, pulsing to some rhythm not my own.
Sareth's knees hit the earth. His hands shook as his face tilted skyward, eyes black as pitch, drowned in foresight. A whisper leaked from his lips like a curse, his voice cracked with dread. These were not the choir. These were only its heralds.
Every pair of eyes turned to me. Damon's command died on his tongue as the glow on my arm burst into open flame, glyph-fire lashing up to my shoulder. No longer hidden, no longer mine to cage. It branded me before them all.
Sareth's trembling deepened, his mutters spilling like fevered prophecy. The song is not chasing her... She is calling it.
And then it came—the sound. A low murmur at first, like wind groaning through a graveyard, swelling until the ground itself seemed to tremble. From the horizon, the voices rose, countless and in perfect unison, hollow and merciless. The chant rolled toward us like a storm breaking, like the sea collapsing onto stone.
My breath caught, terror closing around me. The realization hit like a blade in the gut—this was no pursuit, no hunt. My body was the beacon. The hymn was not drawn to the pack. It was bound to me.
And the Choir was coming.
---
What do you think—should Dahlia try to echo the words she hears, or keep them locked down and risk exploding later?