The screaming never truly stopped.
It only changed shape.
Where Echoes Beneath Glass and Bone had ended with the shattering of silence—when the chamber breathed and the dead remembered how to speak—this chapter began in the aftermath of that sound, when noise became presence.
Kain stood unmoving at the center of the ruptured hollow, his breath shallow, his ribs aching as though hands still pressed inward from the inside. The floor beneath him—once smooth stone veined with old magic—had split like rotten teeth. Roots, thick as torsos and pale as drowned flesh, crawled upward through the cracks. They did not grow. They arrived, already old, already dead, already listening.
And beneath them, the voices gathered.
Not whispers. Not moans.
A choir.
Thousands of throats, layered wrong—men, women, children, things that had never been born properly—all screaming at different distances in the same breath. Some begged. Some accused. Some laughed, broken and wet, as if joy itself had rotted and learned to mock.
Kain pressed his palms to his temples. It did nothing.
The sound was not entering his ears.
It was rising through his bones.
> You hear us now,
you hear us now,
you hear us now.
The words overlapped, fractured, spoken in languages long collapsed into dust. Yet meaning cut through them cleanly, sharp as a blade across the mind.
He staggered back a step. The roots reacted immediately—twitching, tightening, like fingers curling in anticipation.
"Stop," Kain said hoarsely.
The word echoed once, twice, then returned to him distorted, stretched, screamed back by a hundred stolen mouths.
Memory surged without warning.
Not his.
A woman running through ash with a child pressed to her chest.
A boy kneeling beside a river, blood soaking into reeds.
A man buried alive beneath stones marked with protective sigils that failed anyway.
Kain gasped and dropped to one knee.
The dead were not showing him memories.
They were using him.
The chamber walls—if they could still be called walls—began to bleed light. Pale, corpse-blue veins illuminated shapes carved long ago: figures with mouths sewn shut, figures clawing at their own shadows, figures kneeling before something vast and formless that loomed above them all.
At the base of that carving, newly revealed by the split stone, lay an altar.
Or what remained of one.
It was made of bone. Not stacked—grown. Ribs curved into arches. Spines fused into columns. Skulls melted together into a single warped mass, mouths frozen open in eternal, silent screams.
Except they were no longer silent.
The altar breathed.
Each exhale pulled sound downward, dragging screams into itself like air into a lung. Each inhale released them back out, louder, sharper, more desperate.
Kain felt it then.
The pull.
Not toward the altar—but through it.
Down.
Far below the roots. Below the dead. Below even memory.
Something vast shifted.
> He stands where we were bound,
he walks where we were buried,
he listens where no one listened.
The voices were no longer chaotic. They were aligning.
Forming intent.
Kain forced himself to stand. His legs shook, not from fear alone, but from resistance—like wading upstream through unseen hands clutching at his ankles.
"You were sacrificed," he said, the truth tearing itself from his throat before he could stop it. "All of you."
The choir howled.
The sound slammed into him hard enough to blur his vision.
> SAVED,
we were SAVED,
we were GIVEN,
we were NECESSARY.
Images exploded behind his eyes: elders chanting, charms burning, sigils carved into living flesh. A village gathered in a circle, faces tight with certainty, terror hidden beneath righteousness.
A child at the center.
Hands bound.
Eyes wide.
Not fear.
Confusion.
Kain staggered again, bile rising.
"No," he whispered. "They lied to you."
The roots recoiled violently, slamming into the chamber walls. Dust and bone rained down. The altar's skulls cracked, mouths widening impossibly.
> LIES KEEP THE WORLD TURNING,
LIES KEEP THE SUN RISING,
LIES KEEP THE LIVING SAFE.
The presence below shifted again.
This time, it pressed closer.
The floor beneath the altar began to sink, stone folding inward like wet clay. A vertical shaft opened, swallowing light, sound, and screaming alike. Yet the screams did not fade—they intensified, stretched thin as they were pulled downward, forming a single, endless note.
Kain felt his heartbeat synchronize with it.
Boom.
Scream.
Boom.
Scream.
From the darkness below, something spoke.
Not in words.
In weight.
In gravity.
In the sudden certainty that if it fully rose, the distinction between the living and the dead would simply… end.
The choir reacted instantly.
Not with fear.
With devotion.
> IT HEARS,
IT REMEMBERS,
IT CARRIES US STILL.
The roots bent inward, forming a cathedral-like arch over the sinking altar. The bone structure reshaped itself, ribs locking into place, skulls fusing tighter, becoming less like remains and more like architecture.
A throne.
Kain understood with sick clarity.
This place was never meant to imprison the dead.
It was meant to feed something with them.
And now—because he stood here, because he listened, because he heard—the mechanism was awake again.
A hand brushed his shoulder.
Kain spun, heart lurching.
For a moment, he saw a boy standing beside him—thin, hollow-eyed, with ritual scars carved too neatly into his arms.
The boy did not scream.
He only looked tired.
"You're late," the boy said quietly.
Kain's throat closed. "I didn't know."
"I know." The boy's gaze drifted to the altar. "None of us knew. That was the point."
The boy's form flickered, edges blurring as the choir surged again, voices crashing over one another in renewed frenzy.
> HE SEES US,
HE SPEAKS TO US,
HE CAN FINISH IT.
The boy smiled sadly. "They couldn't hear us anymore. Not after the first few generations. The charms worked too well."
"What do you want?" Kain asked.
The boy's smile vanished.
"Release," he said.
The shaft below roared.
Something vast pushed upward, unseen but undeniable. The roots strained, cracking, bleeding sap the color of old milk. The bone throne trembled.
The dead were no longer screaming in pain.
They were screaming in anticipation.
Kain felt the choice settle onto him like a shroud.
Release them—and unleash whatever had been growing fat on their suffering.
Or seal the chamber again—and become the next voice in the choir.
The boy's eyes met his.
"You were never meant to come here," he said. "But now that you have… it knows you."
The presence below surged closer.
And somewhere deep within Kain's chest, something answered back.
Not fear.
Recognition.
The screaming reached a pitch so high it collapsed into silence—
—and in that silence, the dead inhaled as one.