CHAPTER 1
The tram smelled like burnt plastic and someone's cheap cologne.
Ilias leaned his head against the window, watching the city blur past in streaks of neon and shadow.
His headphones sat crooked on his ears, one side held together with electrical tape, the other
crackling with static. Not music. Just noise.
That's all he ever heard anyway.
The ad screens along the tram walls cycled through their usual rotation: a woman in flowing white
robes, arms raised like she was conducting an invisible orchestra. "Crescendia Premium — Feel the
Harmony. Upgrade Your Connection Today."
He looked away.
Across from him, a kid—maybe seven—hummed along to something only he could hear, eyes glazed,
lips moving in prayer. His mother sat beside him, serene, a faint green glow pulsing beneath the
skin of her wrist. Tuned. Both of them.
Ilias pulled his hood up and stared at his hands. Calloused. Scarred. Normal.
No glow. No hum. No connection.
Doctors called him "unstable resonance." The system labeled him "basal defective." The
tabloids—back when they still cared—called him The Silent Flame.
A kid who couldn't burn.
He hated that name.
The tram hissed to a stop. Final station. Lower Elyria.
He stepped out into the night, and the city hit him like a wall of sound. Engines growling. Voices
overlapping. Somewhere, a street preacher was shouting about the Old Ones returning.
Holographic banners floated overhead, cycling through hymns and slogans:
"Harmony is Purity."
"Tune or Be Tuned."
"The Source Watches."
Ilias shoved his hands in his pockets and started walking.
He'd seen this all before. The churches fighting for followers like streamers chasing subscribers.
Premium tiers. Exclusive access. Pay to feel closer to god. It was all the same hustle, just wrapped
in stained glass and marketed as salvation.
He didn't believe in any of it.
But he worked for them anyway.
The Church of Crescendia's supply depot sat wedged between a noodle shop and a pawn broker
advertising "Echo-Tech — No Questions Asked." Ilias punched in the code, slipped through the side
door, and grabbed the loading cart.
Sound batteries. Fifty of them. Each one humming faintly, storing compressed resonance for
tomorrow's sermons. He'd done this job a hundred times. Load the cart. Haul it to the upper district.
Get paid. Go home.
Simple.
Except tonight, the batteries felt… wrong.
Not broken. Not dead. Just off. Like they were vibrating at a frequency he couldn't quite hear but
could feel in his teeth.
He loaded the last one and paused, staring at it.
The hum grew louder.
Then stopped.
The silence hit like a punch to the gut.
Ilias stumbled back, hand pressed to his chest. The city—the entire city—had gone quiet. No engines.
No voices. No hum from the resonance grid that powered every light, every screen, every heartbeat.
Nothing.
He looked up.
The sky flickered. Once. Twice. Then cracked open like glass, revealing patterns of light—symbols,
runes, something ancient—etched across the dark.
People poured into the streets, staring. Screaming. Praying. Recording.
And then Ilias heard it.
A voice. Not through his ears. Inside his head.
"You hear it too, don't you?"
He spun around. No one was there.
The Source stirs again…"
His knees buckled. The light from the sky poured down like liquid, wrapping around the buildings,
the streets, him—and for the first time in his life, he heard something clear.
A single note.
Perfect. Infinite. Impossible.
It wasn't sound. It wasn't light. It was both.
And it knew his name.
Then the explosion tore through the lower district.
The shockwave hit before the sound did. Ilias was thrown sideways into a stack of crates, ears
ringing, vision swimming. Smoke filled the air. Alarms blared. Somewhere, someone was screaming.
He dragged himself upright, coughing, and stumbled toward the source of the blast.
Half a block away, a building had collapsed. The debris was still smoking, and in the center of the
wreckage—glowing faintly, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat—was a crystal.
Broken. Jagged. Beautiful.
And carved into the rubble around it, burned black into the stone: a spiral.
The symbol of the Cult of Silence.
Ilias took a step closer, hand outstretched. The crystal hummed. The same note he'd heard before.
The same frequency that had split the sky open.
"Step away from that crystal."
The voice came from behind him—sharp, controlled, trained.
He turned slowly.
A woman stood in the glow of the fires, her Church uniform scorched, badge still gleaming on her
chest. Her face was all hard angles—jaw set, eyes cold but steady. She held a resonance blade in
one hand, the edge shimmering with a low, controlled hum.
Agent Seraph Kael. He'd seen her on the feeds before. Church investigator. High clearance.
Dangerous.
She leveled the blade at him. "You shouldn't be here. That crystal's unstable."
Ilias looked at her. Then back at the crystal. Then smiled—faint, exhausted, the first real smile he'd
managed in months.
"You hear it too?"
Her expression froze.
For a brief, impossible second, they both stood there, caught in the same silence.
And beneath the noise of the burning city, beneath the alarms and the screams and the hymns still
playing on loop from the shattered screens—
—something divine stirred awake.
The crystal pulsed.
The city hummed.
And the silence that came before creation began to bleed through the cracks.