The longsword snapped toward Marcus's chest with an executioner's velocity — and the vision didn't end so much as fall, collapsing into a panorama of their final moments on the ice shelf.
Marcus went down into the widening fracture behind him. Taryn screamed his name across the shattering world — except the scream never fully arrived. It came swallowed and half-formed, fighting through something far louder than a collapsing island.
The Nameless Choir had found the memory.
Their chant rose under the vision like floodwater under a door, pressing Taryn's scream and Lysara's answering cry into a muffled, underwater register. He could see Taryn's mouth shape his name. He could see the exact moment the sound left her. Between her lips and his ears, the Choir swallowed it, the way deep water swallows a shout from the surface, leaving only pressure where words should have been.
She was crawling across the cracking ice, bleeding hands reaching for the place where Marcus Reed's body was already sinking into the freezing current. Before the silhouette could close the gap, Lysara Veyn's broken staff flared once — royal violet — and the world tore sideways, teleporting them off the floor the instant Marcus's consciousness slipped beneath the dark water.
Then came the final shift in frequency.
Names rose out of the chant, one after another, like a roll being called. Taryn Sol. Lysara Veyn. Kaelen. Voren Klythe. Marcus Reed , last and longest. They didn't arrive like names. They arrived like code — fixed sequences all the Choir's overlapping voices locked onto at once, syllables scraped to pure frequency, vibrating through the enamel of Kael's teeth. None of them sounded like something a person had once been called. They sounded like coordinates. Entries in a ledger the Choir had kept long before Kael ever opened Marcus Reed's eyes.
The teeth-rattling gravity of the song snapped his soul back across dimensions and dropped his awareness into his borrowed shell.
The return wasn't a fade. It was a collapse.
One moment: ice, violet light, a silhouette turning away. The next: raw stone, bruised sky, a cold that belonged here. His lungs seized. He hauled in one ragged breath, then another, chest working as if he'd surfaced from deep water. The phantom weight of the shove lingered in his joints, a bruise of the kind that stays after the fall. His ribs ached. His hands were braced flat against the stone.
He pushed himself upright. It took longer than it should have.
"You're back," a voice said.
Marcus turned.
Taryn sat across from him, back straight, watching with the stillness of someone who had been watching a while and had already decided what she thought. Her eyes were clear — not with the wide clarity of someone who'd just witnessed something terrible, but the narrower, steadier kind that comes after.
She knows something, he thought. Not everything. But something.
He looked at his palm. The sigil had gone quiet, but the skin around it was different now: scarred, silvered, etched with fresh tracings that hadn't been there before the vision. Terrain he hadn't drawn and would need time to learn.
"Your sigil was bleeding light," Taryn said. "The blue of it turned white. I've never seen that before."
"What did you do?"
"Waited." A pause. "Lysara wanted to break the connection with her staff. I told her to wait."
"And she listened?"
"She agreed the risk of stopping a vision like that mid-channel was worse than letting it run. She was right. For the record." Taryn's fingers moved against the vial in her hand, an amber compound catching the light. "If it had run much longer, I don't know if I would have been."
He let that sit.
Across the platform, Lysara stood with her back to them, staff angled toward the void between islands, doing what she always did when things got heavy: pointing herself at something she could fix.
He thought about what he'd seen on the ice. A boy named Kaelen who never had time to raise his baton in earnest. Lysara crumpled and unconscious before the figure turned. And the voice — present, familiar somewhere below recognition, not placed.
There had been someone else in that memory.
"There was someone else with you," he said, keeping his voice even. "On that floor. Thin. Ashen skin, silver hair. Hands empty. He stayed back from the rest of you."
Taryn's hand stopped moving against the vial. She didn't look up right away, studying the amber liquid the way you look at a thing you're using to steady yourself.
"Voren Klythe," she said. The name came out flat, the way names do when they carry too much to carry decoration as well. "He wasn't a fighter. He kept the rest of us pointed in the right direction."
Marcus held the name and said it once to himself, the way you try a word in a language you're still learning, just to feel its shape. It stirred something he couldn't place. A familiarity with no face attached, like a word half-remembered from a dream.
"He's not with us anymore," Taryn said. "When the roll was called after the fall, the wardens who gathered the survivors listed him with the dead." Her jaw worked once. "I never saw the body."
"So you don't know."
"No." The flatness in her voice cracked, just slightly. "I hope he's alive. I hope it anyway."
Marcus didn't ask anything else. He had a name. A thin man at the edge of the ice who never raised his hands. A killer with no face. Three separate things, and nothing yet to join them.
He let them sit apart. There would be time to find out which ones belonged together.
"We keep climbing," Marcus said.
Taryn looked at him, and something in her expression shifted — not quite trust, but the quiet recognition of two people who'd arrived at the same resting point from different directions. She tightened the buckles on her armor and nodded once.
"Lysara," Marcus called across the platform.
The rift-warden turned. Her eyes moved from him to Taryn and back, reading the moment with the same precision she read everything else.
"The bridge to the left is still viable," she said. "But we have roughly eight minutes before it begins to degrade."
"Then we have eight minutes."
He stood. The platform was cold and solid beneath his boots. His palm throbbed faintly with what was left of the vision. He had more now than he'd had an hour ago, and none of it proved anything.
He walked toward the bridge. Taryn fell into step. Lysara moved to his left, staff tilting forward at the angle that meant she was already reading the current ahead.
He noted his position between them, and kept walking.