The Acid Staircase
The entrance to the Maw wasn't so much a path as it was the corpse of a fallen civilization. Ryn Varrik tested the first metal slope with his boot, listening to the ominous groan of stressed plating beneath him. The air here tasted like burnt copper and something far worse—a thick, metallic tang that clung to the back of his throat even through his scav mask's faltering filters. Every exhale fogged against the cracked visor, obscuring his view of the jagged descent.
Cassia Veydran stepped past him without hesitation, her liquid metal gown rippling as nanites reformed its structure into armored boots with spiked grips. The fractal patterns along its hem pulsed faintly as she moved, casting ghostly blue light across the corroded wreckage.
"Try not to slow us down, scavenger," she said, her voice distorted slightly by the protective field around her face.
Ryn adjusted the straps of his rig, wincing as the weight of the Whisper Choir case dug into his shoulder. The two Rust Angel corpses they'd dragged along as bait hung between them on a repulsor sled, their Godrot-blackened limbs twitching occasionally despite being clinically dead. The stench of decay mixed unpleasantly with the Maw's ever-present ozone reek.
"You sure this is worth eighty thousand credits?" Ryn asked, watching a droplet of acid eat through his glove's stitching, leaving a smoking hole against his skin. He didn't flinch.
Cassia didn't bother turning. "You sure your sister's life is worth wasting my time with questions?"
A deep vibration thrummed through the metal beneath them—rhythmic and unsettlingly organic, like the heartbeat of some colossal, slumbering beast. Ryn's Scrap Sense erupted along his nerves, his fingers tingling with electric warning. His ocular implant flickered, struggling to parse the energy signatures.
"Something's awake down there," he muttered, wiping acid residue from his visor. "And it knows we're coming."
The First Whispers
They found temporary shelter in the wreck of a Conclave surveyor mech, its cockpit half-crushed but still maintaining atmospheric integrity. Cassia activated a palm-sized glow orb from her belt, its cold blue light revealing the previous crew's final notes scrawled across the fractured viewport in what looked like dried blood:
"Day 12: The Spike's song is louder today. Corporal Jex claims it's speaking to him."
"Day 14: Jex was right. Vesh walked into the black this morning. We can hear her singing with it now."
"Day 17: IT KNOWS WE LIED. IT KNOWS WE—"
The last entry ended in a long, ragged smear of something dark and flaky. Ryn didn't need his Scrap Sense to know it wasn't blood.
Cassia pressed a gloved finger to the audio log terminal. The speakers hissed with static before a voice emerged—but not from the console. The words came from the walls themselves, the metal vibrating with unnatural resonance:
"...thirteen has come...thirteen has come...thirteen has—"
Ryn's breath fogged suddenly in air that had gone frigid. The voice was identical to the whispers coming from their corpse-bait, a realization that made the reactor burn on his hand throb in sympathetic pain.
Cassia's gloves emitted a soft, melodic chime as she extracted a neural scanner from her belt. The device unfolded like some delicate mechanical flower, its petals forming a halo of glowing sensors. "Let me see your arm."
Ryn instinctively pulled back. "Why?"
"Because," she said with terrifying patience, "you're the only host who's lasted more than six hours after direct contact with a Whisper Choir sample." Her fingers hovered over his injury without touching. "I need to understand why."
The scanner emitted a pulse that made Ryn's teeth vibrate painfully. For a brief moment, he saw his own skeleton projected in the air between them—and there, wrapped around his bones like barbed wire, were threads of the same black energy that filled the case at his hip.
Cassia's eyes gleamed with something dangerously close to hunger. "Fascinating."
Outside, something heavy scraped against the hull, the sound setting Ryn's nerves on edge.
The Warden
It stood silhouetted in the broken doorway—a nightmare fusion of Conclave armor and scavenger flesh, its proportions all wrong. The limbs were too long, the joints bending in impossible directions. The helmet had been torn open to reveal a face that wasn't human anymore, just a screaming mouth set in black-crystal flesh, the jaw unhinged like a serpent's.
Ryn's pulse pistol was in his hand before conscious thought, the weapon cycling up with a rising whine.
"Don't!" Cassia knocked his aim aside with surprising strength. "Energy weapons make it stronger!"
The Warden lunged with terrifying speed.
Ryn barely dodged, feeling the whoosh of air as those elongated fingers grazed his neck. His wrench connected with its knee joint—or where a knee should've been—with enough force to dent steel. The thing didn't even stagger.
Cassia moved like liquid death, her nano-blade extending from her glove with a sound like ringing crystal. The monomolecular edge sliced through the Warden's arm, sending black ichor spraying across the walls where it sizzled like acid. The creature howled—a sound that wasn't sound but a vibration that made Ryn's fillings ache and his vision blur.
Then it spoke.
"Hosssst..." The voice was a grotesque amalgamation of dozens of people, all screaming through the same ruined throat. "The Spike huuuungers...for the lying flesh..."
Ryn's Scrap Sense flared, highlighting a damaged power core exposed by Cassia's attack. He grabbed a broken conduit and jammed it into the sparking components with all his weight.
The explosion threw him against the far wall. When his vision cleared, the creature was twitching violently, its body unraveling into black threads that slithered across the floor with terrible purpose—
—straight toward the Whisper Choir case.
Which was now open.
The Edge of the Pit
The cavern defied all logic. The walls pulsed like living tissue, veins of glowing crystal threading through rusted metal in patterns that hurt to look at for too long. At its center floated the Godspike, suspended above a pool of liquid shadow that reflected no light yet seemed to contain infinite depth.
Their corpse-bait stood up.
Not reanimated—puppeted, their limbs moving with jerky precision as they walked into the black pool without hesitation. The liquid swallowed them whole, leaving no ripples in its perfect, lightless surface.
Cassia's breath hitched, her armored gown shimmering as she took an involuntary step forward. "Fascinating."
Ryn barely heard her. The whispers had become a roaring tempest in his skull, the black liquid from the case now coiling up his arm like a lover's embrace. His vision fractured—
—he saw the Shattered God's final moments—
—a blade of light through celestial flesh—
—the Spike's birth from divine corpse-meat—
—a thousand thousand voices screaming as one—
Then Cassia was screaming too.
A new Warden emerged from the pit, twice the size of the last, its body studded with the screaming faces of previous hosts, their mouths moving in silent agony. It moved straight for Cassia, ignoring Ryn completely.
He didn't think.
The shove sent Cassia sprawling clear as the Warden's claw arced down in a killing blow—
—and Ryn fell backward into the abyss.
The last thing he saw before the shadows took him was Cassia's outstretched hand, her eyes wide with something almost like regret beneath the dynastic composure.
Then the Spike's voice filled his skull, louder than anything he'd ever known:
"HOST DESIGNATION: THIRTEEN. FRAGMENT SYNCHRONIZATION INITIATED."
Pain beyond comprehension as his right hand shattered and reformed in a blaze of blue light—
—then nothing.