They did not speak as they were escorted back through the Spire.
The corridors felt narrower now, as if the Obsidian Spire itself had shifted after what was revealed beneath it. The blue-lit walls no longer hummed steadily; their light flickered, irregular, out of rhythm. Kain noticed it immediately. The city had lost sync with its own pulse.
Yuri felt it too—but differently. Not as sound. As pressure. Like a hand resting between his shoulders, unseen but insistent.
The guards said nothing. Their footsteps echoed too loudly, each step ringing hollow against the metal floor, as if the Spire were empty despite being full of life. When they passed sealed doors, Yuri swore he heard something on the other side—scraping, slow and deliberate.
Not machines.
Nails.
They were brought to their quarters without explanation. The door sealed behind them with a heavy thud that lingered longer than it should have.
For a long moment, neither brother moved.
Then Yuri laughed.
It came out wrong—sharp, brittle, breaking halfway through. "So," he said, dragging a hand down his face, "turns out the city runs on ghosts."
Kain didn't answer. He stood by the window again, staring down at the streets of Ares Vaal. Night had fallen, but the city was not asleep. Lanterns burned low and blue. People moved quietly, avoiding one another's eyes. No laughter. No music.
"They know," Kain said.
Yuri frowned. "Know what?"
"That it's awake."
As if summoned by the words, a low vibration rolled through the Spire. Not strong enough to shake anything—but enough to be felt in the bones. Yuri stiffened.
"That wasn't the Heart, was it?"
"No," Kain said slowly. "That was the city responding."
Another tremor followed, lighter this time. Somewhere far below, metal shrieked as something shifted that wasn't meant to.
Yuri swallowed. "Kain… when you touched it—when you listened—what did you actually hear?"
Kain hesitated.
Not because he didn't know—but because he did.
"They weren't screaming at first," he said. "They were counting."
Yuri's breath caught. "Counting what?"
"Time. Or maybe… turns." He clenched his fists. "Some of them knew they were going to be used. Others didn't. But all of them remembered the moment they realized they couldn't leave."
The air in the room grew cold.
Yuri rubbed his arms, suddenly very aware of the faint blue veins running through the walls—Soulglass conduits, feeding power upward. Feeding something.
"What happens to the ones who die now?" he asked quietly. "Accidents. Collapses. People who just… disappear?"
Kain closed his eyes.
"They don't disappear."
Silence pressed down on them, thick and suffocating. Yuri moved toward the bed and sat heavily, his usual restlessness gone. For the first time since they left the mountain, he looked young again.
"I felt them," he admitted. "Not like you. I couldn't hear words. But I felt… longing. Like they were reaching for warmth."
Kain opened his eyes. "That's worse."
A faint sound interrupted them.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Yuri looked up sharply. "Did you hear that?"
Kain nodded. The sound was coming from the wall opposite the window. Slow. Irregular. Like something testing the surface.
Tap.
Then a drag.
Something slid downward behind the wall, leaving a faint scraping noise, followed by a low, wet creak—as if crystal were bending under pressure.
Yuri stood. "Tell me that's just pipes."
Kain moved closer to the wall, every sense sharpening. He placed his palm against the cold metal.
The vibration surged.
Images slammed into him—unbidden, violent.
A worker buried during a tunnel collapse, lungs filling with dust as the ground sealed above him. A woman pushed into a Soulglass pit in chains, screaming until her voice cracked. A child hiding beneath a cart during a night shift, unseen, crushed when the floor gave way.
Kain staggered back, breath ragged.
"They're close," he said hoarsely. "Too close."
The tapping stopped.
For three heartbeats, there was nothing.
Then a voice whispered through the wall.
Not loud. Not clear.
But unmistakably human.
"…can you hear us?"
Yuri froze. His face drained of color. "Kain."
The voice came again, closer now, layered—many voices overlapping, struggling to form a single sound.
"We remember the forest."
Kain's blood ran cold.
"That's impossible," Yuri whispered. "We never told anyone about that."
The wall bulged outward slightly, Soulglass veins flaring bright violet. Shadows pressed against it—faces distorted by the metal, eyes glowing faintly from within.
"You walked free," the voices murmured. "You still breathe air that isn't sand."
Yuri backed away until he hit the bed. "They know us."
"They feel the difference," Kain said. "We're not bound. Not yet."
A sharp crack split the wall.
A thin fracture raced across the metal, leaking pale blue light. The whispering intensified, turning desperate.
"Open it."
"Let us rest."
"End the cycle."
Kain's ears rang. His heartbeat matched the pulse beneath the city again—too perfectly.
Then—suddenly—it stopped.
The light dimmed. The shadows retreated. The wall sealed itself, the fracture melting back into smooth metal as if it had never existed.
Heavy footsteps approached outside their door.
The lock disengaged.
The Warden entered alone.
She took in the room in a single glance—the lingering glow, the tension in their posture—and exhaled slowly.
"So," she said. "You've met the echoes."
Yuri rounded on her. "You knew they could reach this far."
"Yes."
"And you still put people above them?" he snapped. "Do you have any idea what that's like?"
The Warden's jaw tightened. "I live above a grave that breathes. I hear them every night. Don't mistake control for ignorance."
Kain met her gaze. "They spoke of the forest."
That made her pause.
"…That is new," she admitted.
She stepped closer, lowering her voice. "The Heart is not just fueled by the dead. It remembers what they remember. Places. Lives. Loss."
Yuri shook his head. "Then it's not a power source. It's a mind."
"A fractured one," she corrected. "And it's stitching itself together."
Kain felt it again—the pull. Subtle. Persistent. Like a tide he could no longer ignore.
"What happens," he asked, "when it finishes remembering?"
The Warden didn't answer immediately.
When she did, her voice was quiet. "Then Ares Vaal will no longer belong to the living."
Outside, far beneath the Spire, the sand shifted.
And somewhere deep below glass and bone, the dead listened—waiting to see whether the brothers would become voices among them, or the ones who finally made the screaming stop.
The silence did not last.
At first, Kain thought his ears were ringing—residual shock from the tremors. A thin, high whine crept into the back of his skull, like glass being drawn slowly across stone. He pressed his palm against the railing, grounding himself.
Then the sound separated.
Not one noise. Many.
Thousands.
Whispers rose from the Heart, bleeding through the chamber walls, seeping into the metal beneath their feet. They overlapped and collided—voices stretched thin by time, warped by pressure, by death.
Yuri staggered back a step. "Do you hear that?" His voice came out hoarse. "Kain… tell me you hear that."
Kain nodded slowly. He heard more than sound now. He heard weight. Regret. Panic frozen mid-breath.
"They're not echoes," he said. "They're still here."
The blue veins along the Heart darkened, shifting toward a sickly violet. Shapes moved within the crystalline mass—indistinct at first, like shadows trapped in ice. Then one pressed forward.
A face.
Its mouth was open in a soundless scream, eyes wide and glassy, features half-erased by the crystal that had grown through its skull.
Yuri sucked in a sharp breath. "That's a person."
The Warden did not deny it.
"The Heart does not generate power on its own," she said quietly. "It stores it."
Another tremor rippled through the chamber, lighter than before but sharper, like a shiver. More shapes surfaced—arms reaching, backs arched, bodies fused together in layers. Some wore ancient armor, others simple cloth, some nothing at all. Different eras. Different lives.
All trapped.
"They told us Soulglass was mana crystallized," Yuri said slowly, dread creeping into his voice. "You never said how."
The Warden's mechanical fingers curled inward. "At first, we didn't know either."
The whispers grew louder, pressing against Kain's thoughts. He could distinguish fragments now—broken words, emotions stripped bare.
—cold
—don't leave
—still burning
—we held it back
Kain dropped to one knee as the sound spiked. His vision blurred, replaced by flashes that weren't his own: people buried alive as the city rose around them, workers thrown into the depths when accidents happened "too often," criminals sentenced not to death—but to contribution.
"They're fueling it," Kain said through clenched teeth. "Every death gets absorbed. Every burial. Every body lost to the sand."
The Warden turned sharply. "Enough. Pull back."
"I can't," he snapped. "It's pulling me."
The Heart pulsed violently.
For a split second, the chamber inverted—walls seeming to stretch inward, the ceiling collapsing into darkness. The screams peaked, no longer whispers but a unified howl that rattled the metal scaffolds.
Yuri screamed and clutched his head. He couldn't hear individual voices like Kain—but he felt them. Terror slammed into his chest, raw and directionless, like drowning in someone else's panic.
"Make it stop!" he yelled. "They're in my head—"
Kain forced himself upright and locked his gaze on the Heart. His breathing slowed, syncing again with the pulse, but this time it felt wrong—like matching the rhythm of a gallows drum.
"They're not angry at us," he said. "They're begging."
The Warden's composure finally cracked. "You think we don't hear them?" she hissed. "You think this city was built without sacrifice? Without bodies? The desert takes everything. We only learned how to make it useful."
"By turning the dead into batteries," Yuri shot back, shaking. "That's not survival. That's haunting."
The Heart flared again, and this time the shapes pressed so close to the surface that their features became clear—cracked lips moving, hands clawing at the crystal from the inside.
One figure separated from the mass.
A child.
Its face was warped by the crystal growth, but its eyes were unmistakably alive with fear. Its mouth moved, forming a word Kain felt more than heard.
Leave.
Kain recoiled as if struck.
The pulse broke.
The screams collapsed inward, sucked back into the Heart like air into a vacuum. The light dimmed sharply, leaving the chamber bathed in a dull, funereal glow.
Kain gasped, nearly collapsing. Yuri caught him this time, arms tight around his shoulders.
The Warden stood frozen, staring at the Heart. For the first time since they'd met her, she looked small.
"That one shouldn't be there," she whispered. "Children were never—"
"You lost control," Yuri said flatly. "A long time ago."
The Heart gave one final, heavy beat—slow, exhausted. The city above groaned in response, metal settling, stone sighing.
Kain wiped blood from his nose. His hands wouldn't stop shaking. "It's not just a power source," he said. "It's a grave. And it knows we're different."
"Why?" the Warden asked, almost pleading now.
Kain looked at Yuri, then back at the Heart. "Because we're not bound to this place yet."
Yuri swallowed. "And because it thinks we can end it."
Silence followed—not peaceful, but expectant.
Deep beneath Ares Vaal, the dead waited.
And for the first time in generations, the Heart did not merely consume.
It watched.