The Salt Cathedral rose from the dunes like a broken tooth of mirrored obsidian. Its spires were fused shards of pre-Rift skyscrapers, edges still sharp enough to slice the wind into screams. Around it, glass storms circled in slow, patient spirals—tornadoes of razor sand that flayed flesh from bone in heartbeats.
Farren crouched on a ridge, Sable's breath warm against his ear. The rattlesnake fang had guided him true; the storms parted just enough for a single rider.
Inside the Cathedral's nave, Cherina's voice rose in a hymn that was not human. Each note struck the glass walls and refracted into blades of sound. Farren felt them cut his mind even from a mile away.
He studied the patrols: Choir acolytes bonded with mirror-backed scarabs, their shells reflecting a dozen false images; serpent-priests whose lower bodies were coils of diamondback; and at the heart of it all, the Bellkeeper—a towering figure whose fusion was not one beast but many, limbs ending in snapping jaws, eyes a constellation of stolen souls.
Farren needed a way in.
He found it in the slave pens beneath the Cathedral's roots—cages of living crystal where unbroken animals and unbonded children waited for the Choir's knives. Among them paced a massive desert tortoise, shell cracked, spirit dim. Its human bond-partner had died in the last glass storm; the beast's grief was a low, continuous moan.
Farren pressed his palm to the cage. Sable's spirit reached out, lynx and tortoise regarding each other across the bars.
Will you carry me? Farren asked in the silent speech of bonds. One last ride, old friend.
The tortoise lowered its head. Farren sliced the crystal with Moonfang; the bars screamed like breaking bells. He climbed onto the shell. Sable flowed across both their backs, weaving lynx agility into tortoise endurance.
Together they charged the Cathedral's undercroft. The glass storms sensed intrusion and howled inward, but the tortoise's shell deflected the razors; Sable's claws found purchase on shifting sand.
They burst into the nave as Cherina's hymn reached its crescendo. She hung suspended in chains of living sound, eyes milk-white with magic, mouth open in a note that shattered stained-glass saints.
The Bellkeeper turned. Its voice was a chorus of devoured beasts.
"Vale's heir. Your lynx will make a fine tongue for the bell."
Farren drew Moonfang and the revolver in the same motion.
"Release my sister," he said, "or I'll carve you into wind chimes."
The Bellkeeper laughed, and the glass storms answered.
Farren smiled with Sable's fangs.
"Then let's dance."
He leapt. The tortoise shell became a battering ram; lynx claws raked mirrored scarabs into glittering dust. Bullets etched with his father's sigil punched through serpent scales and exploded in geysers of black blood.
Cherina's chains wavered as her hymn faltered. Farren reached for her across the chaos, fingers brushing the broken signet at his throat.
Hold on, Cheri. I'm coming.
The Bellkeeper raised a hand woven of stolen wings, and the glass storms descended like the wrath of a shattered sky.