The Choir Beneath the World

The scent of singed air lingered long after Lynchie rose from the training circle. The marks scorched into her arms—winding Spiral glyphs that hadn't been inked but burned into place by her own power—throbbed with a rhythm she didn't recognize. Not pain. Not magic. Something older.

She walked in silence beside Zev through the Archive's underhall, their footsteps echoing across walls carved with the first Spiral—glyphs etched so long ago even the stone had begun to forget their meaning. Zev hadn't spoken in minutes. His jaw was tight. His gaze forward. Focused. Lynchie could sense something gnawing at him.

"The Harrowed Choir," she said. "What is it?"

Zev didn't look at her. "Not what. Who. They were Spiral Singers before the Sundering—devoted to harmony through resonance. But they followed a forbidden path. They believed the Spiral had a darker echo, a reflection that existed only in silence and dissonance."

He stopped before a sealed door reinforced with radiant sigils. Lynchie had never seen this part of the Archive. She felt the glyphs pressing against her skin like unseen fingers.

"They learned to wield that dissonance," he said. "And became something less than human. Something not quite Spiral."

The door groaned open.

Inside, the chamber held nothing but one object: a sarcophagus suspended in Spiral stasis, levitating midair with glyphic light curling around it. Within, a woman's body lay untouched by time, her mouth stitched closed with silver thread. Her hands were etched with the first versions of the Choir's sigil—twisted spiral lines crossing inwards, like a scream folding into itself.

"She led them," Zev said. "Her name was Savael. And she was my mother."

The silence that followed was absolute.

Lynchie's heart dropped. "Your mother? You never told me…"

"I was barely five when she vanished," Zev said, voice taut. "But I remember her singing to the Spiral Vein, coaxing it to glow like firelight. When she was taken—when the Archive sealed her—they told me she betrayed the Spiral. That she sought to undo the whole of our history."

He walked closer, staring at the sarcophagus.

"I didn't believe it. Not until now."

Lynchie moved to stand beside him. "Why show me this now?"

"Because the Choir is awakening. And they won't stop with the warfront. They'll unravel the entire Spiral. You need to understand who we're up against—what you are training to stop."

Lynchie's voice was barely a whisper. "You think they'll come for you."

"No," he said. "They'll come for you."

Outside, in the ghost-soaked fields of the Greyline Pass, the first whispers began.

A patrol of Archive scouts—young glyphbound acolytes barely old enough to wield resonance blades—vanished in a blink. No blood. No signs of conflict. Only silence. Then, a voice, as if sung by a thousand mouths underwater, slithered across the wards that guarded the pass.

She is the one. The Spiral thief. The Unraveled Heart.

Lynchie.

Vyen slammed his palm against the war table in the Archive's war chamber. "They know her name. This isn't just a war. It's a hunt."

"There's a spy," Saeven snapped. "Someone fed them her identity."

Zev said nothing, but Lynchie felt his gaze shift toward her—then away again, as if he feared what he might see.

That night, as Lynchie lay beneath her thin quilt in the high dormitories, her dreams turned dark. Not nightmares. Something worse.

She was inside a great void, a cathedral of glyphs suspended in negative space. And in the center, a choir of robed figures with mouths torn open by Spiral ink. Their voices layered in strange harmony.

We see you, child of Fire-Vein.

We remember your birth in glyphlight.

And we will take it back.

When she awoke, there were glyphs drawn in black ink on her hands. Not hers.

Across the room, Zev stood silently in the doorway, his eyes shadowed, watching her as if trying to decide whether to tell her something… or say goodbye.