The gaze of the head priest did not accuse.
It was warm.
That bewildered Sawyer.
It lingered with a careful weight—not judgment, but consideration. Like a man studying a fracture in stone, uncertain whether it would spread or mend. The priest looked at him as one might look at something rare and easily broken.
Sawyer stood beneath that gaze and felt… nothing press back.
The Song filled the plaza, soft and reverent, carried by bowed heads and clasped hands. It brushed against him, passed through him, and found no acceptance. Where others resonated, Sawyer remained untouched—a hollow left behind where something essential had been removed.
People knelt.
They whispered prayers with practiced cadence. Fingers traced symbols worn smooth by generations of belief. Faces tightened with grief for a man they had never known, a priest struck down in service to something greater than himself.
They mourned honestly.
That unsettled Sawyer more than hostility ever could have.
He studied them in fragments—creases at the corners of eyes, dirt beneath fingernails, the tremor in an old woman's hands as she clasped them together. These were not vessels warped by excess Song. Not hosts hollowed out and worn like armor. These were people who lived, suffered, and aged within the limits of flesh.
Human.
The word felt heavier than it should have.
Not because it no longer applied—but because it still did.
Outside the temple walls, the city endured in silence. Not the silence of abandonment, but of restraint. Stalls stood shuttered, awnings tied back, goods left where hands would soon return to them. Doors were closed, not barred. Footsteps were few and measured, voices lowered to murmurs that slipped away before becoming sound.
Life paused.
Sawyer had seen enough worlds to know the difference.
This was not decay. It was observance.
Civilization had not vanished beneath the Song. It had learned to still itself when required—to bend without breaking. Even held in suspension, the shape of it remained: markets waiting to reopen, arguments waiting to resume, laughter only temporarily withheld.
The Song threaded through the city all the same, humming beneath stone and flesh alike. It altered bodies, redefined faith, demanded reverence.
Yet it had not erased the old motions.
The Reaver had shaped worlds into grotesque hymns of corruption.
And still, here, the city remembered how to stand quietly and wait.
No twisted silhouettes hunched beneath resonance-weighted flesh. No Song-bloated structures grown rather than built. No rot masquerading as divinity.
For the first time, a disquieting thought surfaced—uninvited and unwelcome.
Perhaps the Song itself had never been the problem.
Sawyer had known it only as pressure and mandate, as something that bent will and flesh toward ends not its own. In the Abyss, it had been inseparable from the Reaver—its voice, its leash, its instrument. Corruption and resonance had been one and the same.
But here, stripped of that presence, the Song did not devour. It persisted. It settled into the cracks of civilization rather than tearing it apart. People still lived. Cities still waited. Humanity endured—altered, but intact.
The conclusion sat heavy in his chest.
Not absolution—worse.
The Reaver had not been the Song.
It had used it.
Twisted it into scripture and command, into justification for its own endless musings. The corruption had not been inherent. It had been directed.
Sawyer did not linger on the thought.
Some ideas, once followed to their end, could not be unlearned.
The ceremony concluded. Final prayers murmured. The congregation dispersed with practiced ease, the city swallowing them whole.
Aluna was approached immediately. A bow. Soft words meant only for her. She straightened, expression carefully neutral, and followed the head priest through a side door without looking back.
Bran released a breath he'd been holding.
"Well," he muttered, rubbing at his neck, "we should report what happened. Adventurer's Guild won't like being in the dark."
Agnes turned toward Sawyer, her grin easy, unburdened.
"C'mon," she said. "We can't just leave you behind. Man of the hour."
Sawyer did not correct her.
The Adventurer's Guild hall was loud.
Alive.
Heat rolled through the space, thick with the scent of sweat, ale, and steel. Boots thudded against worn planks. Laughter rang out in uneven bursts. The Song here was unrefined—layered, imperfect, constantly shifting as individuals brushed past one another.
Sawyer crossed the threshold—and slowed.
They were everywhere.
Short, broad figures with dense frames and skin like stone worn smooth by time. Tall, narrow bodies with limbs drawn long, joints bending at angles just shy of wrong. Scales where flesh should have been. Eyes that reflected light too sharply, too knowingly.
They drank. Laughed. Argued.
Adventurers.
Sawyer felt no fear. No confusion.
Only recognition.
The Song clung to them unnaturally, threaded through muscle and bone like scaffolding forced into living bodies. It pulled at posture, dictated motion, shaped flesh into forms that no longer belonged entirely to the people wearing them.
These were not other races.
They were humans.
Humans stretched, carved, reinforced by something that had never cared what they became.
Sawyer's hands tightened at his sides.
The discord metal answered.
Not with sound—but with a sudden, devouring absence.
The Song recoiled.
Conversation faltered. A mug slipped from trembling fingers and shattered on the floor. A veteran near the hearth froze mid-laugh, eyes unfocused—as if something vast had brushed past his thoughts and withdrawn.
Several hands went to weapons.
Not in challenge.
In instinct.
They felt it.
A presence that did not resonate.
A dissonance that did not belong.
Sawyer stood unmoving at the center of it, pale and rigid, jaw set. He did not advance. He did not threaten.
But the truth of him bled outward all the same.
Agnes swallowed.
Bran's hand drifted—slowly—away from his sword.
Sawyer loosened his grip.
The discord metal dimmed.
The Song crept back, hesitant, wounded.
Noise returned in cautious fragments. Breath followed.
Sawyer stared at the floor, knuckles still white.
This world had survived.
But it had survived by changing what it meant to be human.
And for the first time since he had left the Abyss behind, Sawyer wondered whether survival alone had ever been enough.