Part III — The Song of Reverb
He didn't sleep for three days.
Instead, he went back to his apartment — the small one above the vinyl shop, where posters of long-dead punk bands stared at him from the walls. He sat among the wreckage of cables and notebooks, bleeding ink and divine static.
Lira came once. She stood in the doorway but didn't cross the threshold.
"You killed him," she said.
Kai didn't look up. "He wanted a god. I gave him one."
She flinched — not from the words, but the tone.
"What are you becoming?"
He smiled faintly, eyes hollow. "Music."
When she left, the silence that followed was heavier than guilt.
He picked up his guitar and began to play.
No plan. No melody. Just the truth of everything he'd lost.
The strings responded like veins. The sound rose, cracked, wept, burned. It was agony turned to art, grief turned to gospel.
The song flowed through him like blood through copper — divine resonance encoded in human sorrow.
When it ended, he hit upload.
Within hours, the world changed frequency.
The track spread through underground networks, pirate streams, divine relays — every realm tuned to it, unable to stop listening.
Humans heard it as rebellion.
Wolves heard it as prophecy.
The gods heard it as blasphemy.
They called it Reverb.
For Kai Moon, it was just the sound of losing the last piece of himself.
He sat by the window as dawn approached — city bathed in muted silver, his reflection fading between human and wolf.
And he whispered, not to the moon, but to the silence:
> "If this is what truth sounds like…
then let it echo."
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> "Rebellion isn't born in riots.
It's born in the quiet moments
when you finally stop pretending to be human."
— Echo, from the liner notes of "Reverb"