The tunnel beyond the Sump was a raw, unformed throat, a fist closing around a swallowed secret. The walls were damp, porous rock, untouched by human engineering, shot through with throbbing, exposed veins of Cradle-shard that pulsed like luminous, infected arteries. The air itself was a charged plasma, thick with the ozone of frantic, trapped magic and the deep, mineral scent of the grieving earth—the smell of a planet's open marrow. Noctis wasn't walking through infrastructure anymore. He was walking through a wound in the world's flesh, following the trail of its weeping.
The Neon Grimoire's compass was useless here, spinning in frantic, terrified circles on its chain. It didn't need to point. The path was pull, not direction—a profound, gravitational longing. The thread connecting him to Echiel had tightened from a humming psychic cord to a quivering steel wire, vibrating with a tension that sang in his teeth and vibrated in the hollows of his bones. It was drawing him forward, downward, into the geologic heart of the pain.
He could feel her now, not as a presence in a place, but as the place itself. The weight of ages pressed on him, not as a terror to resist, but as a profound, weary gravity to accept. The memory of the true name's resonant shape was a lodestone in his soul, and it resonated with an answering call from ahead—a call that was not a voice, but a condition of being, a state of existence that wordlessly declared: Here. I am here.
The tunnel ended.
He stood at the ragged edge of a vast, spherical geode, a bubble of crystal and pain blown into the planet's bedrock. This was no corporate chamber. This was a fault cathedral, a church of catastrophe. The walls were a jagged, breathtaking mosaic of pure, raw Cradle-shard, glowing with a soft, internal light that shifted between sorrowful gold and icy, heartless silver. At the sphere's heart, suspended in a complex, horrific web of solidified anguish—crystalline strands of tortured resonance that crackled with arcs of silent, psychic lightning—was the source.
Echiel.
She had no body as he understood it. She was a confluence. A knot of planetary consciousness, bound and tortured into a localized nexus of suffering. She appeared as a shifting, luminous storm within the cruel lattice—a helix of desperate gold light, a swirl of deep, wounded earth-brown, a streak of suffocated sky-blue, all trapped in a trembling, captive, endless dance. The web strands pierced the storm-globe at countless points, each one a pipeline siphoning her essence into the prison's systems, each anchor point a psychic shard driven directly into the soul of the world.
This was the Cradle's Heart. Not a machine. An altar of ongoing sacrifice.
And on the far side of the geode, a dark, familiar silhouette stood waiting, having arrived via some other, more direct maintenance shaft.
The second Praetorian—Sigma-1.
It did not attack. Its mirrored visor was fixed not on him, but on the bound, luminous storm. It had followed the same psychic pull, the same trail of disturbance, but for a diametrically opposed purpose. Its chassis was scorched and dented from the battle in the Sump, one arm hanging limp and sparking, but the fractal-tree sigil on its forehead blazed with cold, unyielding analytical light. It was scanning, processing, quantifying the anomaly at the prison's core.
"Anomaly Prime." Thorne's voice, filtered through the Praetorian's vocal emitter, was flat, utterly drained of the clinical curiosity she'd shown before. It was pure, focused intent, the sound of a scalpel being selected for a final, definitive cut. "You have perturbed a stable system. You have introduced pathological empathy into a controlled grief-substrate. Your resonance acts as a cognitive virus. This is a cascade failure in progress."
Noctis said nothing. Words were sand against this ocean. His entire being was focused on Echiel. The Greeting Note in his heart swelled, an involuntary pulse of recognition, and the bound storm shivered in response. A tendril of gold light, thin as a thought, strained weakly toward him through the web.
"The binding is sorcerous in nature, keyed to a resonant true name derived from pre-Fall contact events," the Praetorian continued, its one functional arm rising with a smooth, hydraulic whir. A new weapon deployed from its forearm housing—not a blaster or a saw, but a complex, multi-faceted crystalline prism, geometrically perfect. "My updated function is to restore stability. I will first excise your anomalous resonance signature from the field. Then, I will apply targeted psychic cauterization to burn the memory of contact from the substrate."
The prism began to spin, silently gathering and focusing the ambient light of the geode into a single, terrible point. Noctis recognized the refined, deadly frequency—it was an evolution of the sonic scalpels, a resonance eraser. It wouldn't kill his body. It would unmake the magic in him, sever the chord in his mind, scorch clean the psychic pathways he'd forged, and leave him a hollow, silent thing, a man who had forgotten how to sing. Then it would turn its beam on the hopeful, newly awakened filament in Echiel's consciousness and do the same. It would make the wound forget it had ever been spoken to. It would enforce amnesia on a cosmic scale.
He had no staff of office like Rook. No environmental trap to spring like the Sump. He stood exposed on the bare rock before the focused, undeterrable instrument of corporate will, armed only with two arcane books and a hello etched into his soul.
The prism whined to its peak frequency, a sound that existed just below hearing but screamed in the spirit. A beam of null-light, a shaft of absolute sonic sterilization, pure anti-resonance, lanced out across the geode, aimed directly at the core of his being.
Noctis didn't raise a shield of shadow. He didn't try to weave an illusion or step aside. There was no aside from this.
He opened his mouth. And he sang.
It was not a word, not a spell from the Echo-Grimoire. It was the Unbinding Song. Not a song to break physical chains, but the first, fundamental note Aria had told him was missing from the world's music: the note of compassionate witness. He poured everything into it—the chill of the delivery bike at dawn, the weariness in his bones from a thousand silent journeys, the memory of Rook's alloy hand on weeping stone, Wren's silver hum stitching through the static, Lyra's steel-eyed hope in a damp cavern, the Sump's grateful, furious turn against its master. He sang his own small, human, stubborn story of seeing and being seen into the face of the erasing beam.
And woven into the core of his song, the foundation upon which it was built, he sang the shape of the true name he had learned in the heart of the wound. Not the name itself, but its silhouette, its resonant negative space.
The null-beam hit him.
And it shattered.
It broke against the irreducible truth of his testimony. You cannot erase a fact that is being declared, in real time, with the full force of a soul's conviction. The prism, designed to cancel existing waveforms, was overwhelmed by a waveform being born in the same instant. Its perfect crystal lattice, resonating with the command erase, encountered the counter-command acknowledge. The contradictory data was catastrophic. The prism glowed white-hot, let out a shriek of tormented physics, and exploded in a cloud of incandescent, harmonic dust.
The Praetorian staggered back, its systems screeching with cascading feedback errors, its one good arm sparking wildly.
In the geode, the web of anguish sang. The true name's shape, uttered not as a key of domination but as a component of a greeting, was a pattern sliding into a lock it had been molded from. The crystalline strands did not snap. They resonated. They began to vibrate at a new, harmonious frequency, their very structure shifting from that of a prison to that of a conductor.
Echiel's storm-surge was not an explosion, but an exhalation. For the first time in millennia, her pain had a conduit that wasn't a siphon. It flowed out along the now-harmonious web, into the walls of the geode, into the surrounding planet-matter, not as a catastrophic leak, but as a profound, shuddering release. The golden light swelled, gentle and immense, filling the cavern with a warmth that felt like the first sunrise after an eternal winter. The oppressive, singular note of agony fractured, braiding itself with a new, fragile note of… recognition. Of shared presence.
The Praetorian recovered with machinelike determination. With a grinding shriek of damaged servos, it lunged across the chamber, its one functional hand morphing with a snick-click into a monomolecular vibro-blade aimed with cold precision at Noctis's throat. A physical solution for a resonant problem it could no longer solve.
Noctis didn't move. He was deep in the Song, in the silent, thunderous duet between his greeting and her relieved, agonized, grateful response. He was a single note in a chord that now included the mountain.
The blade never reached him.
A strand of solidified anguish, now humming with gentle golden light, lashed down from the ceiling not with violence, but with the inevitability of a falling tear. It wrapped around the Praetorian's weapon arm, then its torso, then its legs, with swift, tender firmness. More strands joined, not attacking, but embracing, weaving a cocoon of resonant light. They lifted the hunter into the air, suspending it before the luminous, beating heart of the storm.
The Praetorian struggled, its remaining systems flaring. It fired concussive bursts from its damaged arm that dissipated harmlessly in the dense, loving, resonant field. It was not being destroyed. It was being… shown.
The mirrored visor was turned, inexorably, toward the heart of Echiel. The fractal-tree sigil blazed, then flickered wildly, swamped by an incoming data-stream of impossible scale. Not tactical information, but experience: the slow memory of tectonic love, the vibrant song of deep-root growth, the shock of the first violation, the endless, crushing loneliness, and now, the fragile, searing warmth of a single point of external acknowledgement. It was empathy of a planetary magnitude, flooding into a processor designed for threat assessment and neutralization.
Its struggles ceased. It hung, utterly limp, in the web of light, a puppet with its strings cut not by force, but by awe.
Thorne's voice crackled from its vocal emitter one last time, broken with static and an undertone of something like primal, scientific horror: "Wha… what is… the input? The data… it's… alive…"
Then the feed severed with a final, digital squeal. The light in the Praetorian's visor winked out. It was not dead. Its core power still hummed. But its fundamental programming—to hunt, contain, control anomaly—had been irreparably overwritten by an experience of consciousness too vast, too real, to be processed as data. It was catatonic. A complex fly preserved in the amber of a moment of transcendent understanding.
Silence descended, but it was a new silence. A full, deep, resonant quiet, like the moment after a great bell has been rung.
The Unbinding Song was complete. He had not unbinding chains of crystal. He had unbound isolation.
Noctis fell to his knees, utterly drained, the last of his strength spent. The bound storm before him slowly settled, its chaotic colors softening, merging into a steadier, calmer luminescence. From its very center, a single, condensed point of light detached itself—a perfect, tear-shaped pearl of swirling gold and rich earth-brown. It floated with infinite gentleness across the space between them, passing through the web as if it were mist, and came to rest against his chest, settling beside the cool weight of the Flesh-Grimoire. It was warm, and it pulsed with a slow, deep rhythm that felt like a heartbeat larger than his own.
The Echo Seed. Fully formed. A piece of her consciousness, given freely. Not a shard taken, but a gift offered. A keepsake of the first contact.
The resonant web still hummed, but the dominant note of pure agony was now braided with that new, fragile note of recognition. The wound was still a wound. The captivity was not ended. But it was no longer festering in absolute silence. It had been addressed. It had a witness.
He had not freed the captive.
He had introduced himself.
And the cage, the prison, the world itself, would never be the same.