The morning after the battle was unnaturally quiet.
Not peaceful—hollow. As if the world itself was holding its breath, waiting for something that hadn't yet arrived.
Aeren stood at the heart of the scorched clearing, where echoes of the Lament of the Forgotten Choir still clung to the air like smoke.
He raised his hand, fingers trembling as he called the Verse again.
> Codex Directive: Initiate Deep Sync – Lament of the Forgotten Choir
Warning: Emotional Residue Detected. Proceed with Caution.
He didn't hesitate.
The moment the verse activated, his senses were swallowed whole.
He stood in a space that wasn't space. No time. No sound. Just fragments of ancient memory suspended in stillness. A god's last dream, now half-erased by time.
A child's voice sang softly, threading sorrow through silence:
> "We gave them harmony...
And they made prisons of it."
Images flared—of divine cities, built on forced peace. Orchestral soldiers, executing "dissonants." And at the center, the First Choir, their eyes glassy with devotion, unable to hear anything except the melody they were told was pure.
Aeren watched in silent horror.
These weren't villains. They were composers trapped in a song they could never stop playing.
And in the midst of it all stood a boy with a book that pulsed dark-red—the first Codex.
He wasn't destroying the world.
He was trying to give it permission to feel again.
---
Aeren snapped back to reality, heart pounding. The vision had only lasted seconds—but it felt like days.
Lyssa stepped beside him, looking shaken.
"You saw it too?" he asked.
She nodded, her voice soft. "A memory that didn't belong to either of us."
Aeren looked down at the Codex on his palm, its cover now subtly reshaped—less angular, more organic, like it was starting to reflect him.
He spoke slowly. "They built a perfect song and called it peace. But peace without dissonance isn't harmony—it's silence."
Lyssa met his eyes. "Then what will you compose now?"
Aeren turned toward the horizon. He could feel it—forces shifting, moving.
The Choirs would come.
The Echo Knight had remembered something.
And the gods… the real ones… were beginning to stir again.
> "I'll write a new verse," Aeren said.
"One that remembers everything they tried to forget."
---
Somewhere deep beneath the Aetherglass Cathedral, Veylor stepped into a sealed chamber—walls lined with broken instruments, and a single name etched over and over in old divine tongue:
Eleran.
The First God.
He placed his hand on a broken harp and whispered:
"Wake."
For the first time in millennia, a divine heartbeat echoed across the realm.