Walking into the Sympathy was not an entry, but a dissolution of boundaries.
One moment, Noctis stood at the threshold of the Rust Gate, the Warden's final, grinding lament still vibrating in the metal at his feet. The next, the world of girders, rust, and groaning machinery simply… ceased. It didn't fade or transform. It was replaced, as completely as a thought replaces silence.
He did not step into a tunnel. He stepped into the ghost of a nervous system.
The space around him was a corridor, but one formed of solidified sound. The walls, ceiling, and floor were translucent, shimmering with opalescent hues that shifted with his every heartbeat. They were not stone, nor metal, nor light, but a substance for which he had no name—a resonant gel, a crystallized echo, holding the memory of vibration within its matrix. It hummed, a low, foundational note that was felt in the hollows of his bones rather than heard.
There was no traditional floor. The surface beneath his boots was firm yet yielding, like walking on packed, resilient ash. With each step, concentric rings of faint, phosphorescent light spread out from his feet, and from these rings, ghostly echoes shimmered up through the translucent medium of the walls. They were not his echoes. They were older, imprints left by other souls who had walked this psychic passage.
A sigh of profound exhaustion here, lingering like smoke. A shard of crystalline laughter there, sharp and bright and gone too quickly. The scream of tearing metal, a flash of panic and ozone. The whispered end of a prayer. They were emotional fossils, trapped in the resonant strata, and his presence disturbed their rest, sending them swirling into brief, poignant life.
The Cradle-shard in his hand was no longer just a warm compass. It was speaking.
Not in language, but in pulses of pure, unmediated feeling that traveled up his arm like synaptic fire, bypassing his ears to settle directly in the emotional centers of his brain. The dominant tone was a profound, weary, geologic grief. It was the sorrow of mountains ground to dust, of oceans evaporated, of a name whispered into a void for millennia with no answer. It was so heavy it made his own breath catch, a physical pressure on his sternum.
But woven through that crushing grief were other, finer threads, sparkling like gold dust in a river of obsidian. A faint, nostalgic joy—the memory of sunlight on leaves that had never seen a true sun, the sensation of a hand in his (no, its) grasp, a connection pure and uncomplicated. A sudden, lancing spike of terror—the first, searing bite of the null-field, the agony of severance, the shock of the cage. And beneath it all, a deep, pulsing, enduring curiosity. A wonder at what he was, at this new, strange note that had entered the long, lonely song.
He was not just hearing Echiel's history. He was feeling her dream. Her nightmare. Her enduring, wounded consciousness.
On his back, the Grimoire was fully awake. He felt the leather grow warm, then almost hot. Pages rustled inside its clasp, though no physical breeze touched them. New lines of elegant, silver script—Tenets, annotations, warnings—burned themselves against the inside of his mind, a direct feed from artifact to psyche.
SYMPATHY PROTOCOL ACTIVE.
USER RESONANCE SYNCHING: 23%.
WARNING: PROLONGED EXPOSURE WILL RESULT IN CONCEPTUAL BLEED. INTEGRITY OF SELF-CONCEPT AT RISK.
ADVICE: DO NOT RESIST THE CURRENT. ATTUNEMENT IS THE ONLY PATH. RESISTANCE IS DROWNING.
Conceptual bleed. The term held a cold, clinical horror. He didn't know its full meaning, but the Grimoire's advice was unequivocal. Fighting this tide of foreign emotion, this alien memory, would only exhaust him, break him against it. To move forward, he had to let it in. He had to become, to some degree, porous.
He stopped walking for a moment, closed his eyes against the shimmering, echoing walls, and focused on the basics. The ragged in-and-out of his own breathing. The solid, if strange, feel of the not-floor beneath his boots. The steady, living warmth of the shard in his palm. He built these as anchors in the swirling psychic tide.
Then, deliberately, he lowered his internal defenses. He opened the floodgates.
The grief hit him like a tsunami.
It wasn't an emotion; it was an environment. He was drowning in it. The loneliness of epochs pressed in, the despair of being used as a battery, a tool, a thing. The sorrow for ten thousand severed connections, each one a lost color in the world's spectrum. A sob, raw and unformed, ripped from his throat. Tears he didn't understand—tears for lost symphonies, for silenced stars, for a hand he had never held—traced hot, shameful lines down his cold cheeks. The shadow that lived within him, always pooling at his feet, reacted. It darkened, deepened, stretching out around him like a stain of shared sorrow on the resonant ground, its edges feathered and weeping faint tendrils of darkness.
But as he stopped clenching his psyche against the assault, something fundamental shifted. The grief didn't diminish—it was too vast for that—but it ceased to be an attack. It became a condition. A shared space, vast and melancholy, that he had entered. And in accepting his place within that space, his perception cleared. He could perceive more than just the overwhelming sorrow.
The Sympathy began to show him things.
In the wall to his left, a ripple formed, the resonant material flowing like liquid to resolve into a brief, vivid memory-scene: A group of people, perhaps a dozen, stood in a sun-dappled grotto that felt impossibly distant from the under-city. They wore simple, undyed grey robes. Their hands were raised, glowing with a soft, silver light that was gentle on the eyes. Before them, a crystalline structure—like a tree of living quartz—grew, not with the jerkiness of machinery, but with the fluid grace of a living thing. It pulsed in perfect, gentle time with a deep, rhythmic thrum that came from the earth itself. The Interpreters. Their faces were serene, focused, not with the strain of control, but with the joy of collaboration. One turned to another and smiled, a flash of unguarded, human connection. The image held for three heartbeats, then shattered into a million glittering motes that dissolved back into the wall.
It was replaced immediately by another on the wall to his right. Same crystalline structure, but the grotto was gone, replaced by the sterile, angular lines of a Veridia containment chamber. A lattice of cold, grey ferrocarbon alloy encased the crystal like a cage of blunt fingers. Thick, insulated cables, throbbing with a harsh, actinic blue stolen energy, plunged directly into its heart. The robed figures were absent. In their place, men and women in the sharp, navy-and-silver uniforms of Veridia Secor studied floating holographic readouts, their faces illuminated by the cold, parasitic light. Their expressions were not cruel, but professionally detached. The Cage-Makers. The memory carried with it the emotional residue of cold thrill, of power harnessed, of a dangerous mystery solved and made useful.
Noctis walked, a pilgrim in a gallery of ghosts, and the walls told their story in a cascade of felt history.
He saw the first Residuals—people whose resonance was too strong to be silenced—hunted not by monsters, but by clean-cut Corporate Retrieval teams armed with sonic nullifiers. He felt their terror, their confusion, the betrayal of being turned upon by their own kind for a trait they did not understand.
He witnessed the Great Rationalization not as a noble, historical purge of chaotic magic, but as a systematic, surgical amputation. He saw the gleaming, silent machines that severed the silver threads, felt the psychic shockwave of each cut ripple through the world-soul, a lancing pain that echoed in the hearts of every resonant being. It was not a cleaning; it was a mutilation.
He saw Lyra, decades younger, her hair dark and her two eyes clear and fierce. She moved through the sterile halls of a Veridia sub-level, her hands deft and sure as she bypassed security fields, her expression a mask of concentrated fury as she stuffed glowing data-cubes into a shielded satchel. The emotion was a hot coal of righteous theft.
He saw the Warden—not as the rust-colossus, but as a young man, his face earnest, unlined by regret. He was welding a support beam to the burgeoning prison lattice, sparks flying around his protective visor. The feeling emanating from him was one of determined duty, of playing a part in a grand, necessary project of security and progress. There was no malice, only a profound, tragic ignorance of the curse he was helping to seal.
This was not reading a history text. It was bleeding the past. Each image was a direct injection of lived experience, complete with its emotional signature—the warm pride of creation, the cold, intellectual thrill of control, the searing burn of betrayal, the slow, acid drip of regret that follows a terrible mistake.
USER RESONANCE SYNCHING: 41%.
CONCEPTUAL BLEED DETECTED. MANIFESTING AT SENSORY LEVEL.
A new, more unsettling sensation began. At first, it was subtle, almost ignorable. He looked down at his own hand, the one clutching the Cradle-shard, and for a fraction of a second, his perception stuttered. He didn't see skin and worn synth-leather glove. He saw a faint, shimmering outline of crystalline structure, as if his bones were made of light and his flesh was temporary glass. He blinked, hard, and the vision was gone, leaving only a phantom tingle.
Ten steps later, he heard a voice. Clear, familiar, beloved. "Noctis?" It was Elara, his sister. It held her particular lilt, the slight questioning rise at the end of his name. His heart clenched. He spun, the grief momentarily eclipsed by a sharper, more personal ache. "Elara?" But there was no one. The corridor was empty. The voice had not come from behind him, or beside him. It had come from inside the wall to his left, or perhaps from a fold in his own unraveling mind. A memory that was not his own, borrowing a voice he loved to get his attention, to test his coherence.
Conceptual bleed. The boundaries—between his own memories and Echiel's, between his senses and the trapped echoes in the Sympathy—were beginning to dissolve. The architecture of his self was growing permeable.
He pushed forward, driven now by a need to reach the source before he lost all sense of where Noctis ended and everything else began. The shard's pull was a physical magnetism, a yearning in his very cells. The corridor began to widen, the walls curving upward and outward like the ribs of a colossal, fossilized beast. This space was different. The solidified sound here was thicker, darker, streaked with veins of deep umber and bruised violet. It throbbed with a pained, rhythmic pulse that vibrated up through his soles.
Ba-dump…
A long, agonized pause.
Ba-dump…
It was a heartbeat heard through layers of scar tissue and prison walls. This was the inner chamber. The antechamber of the prison itself.
In the center of the vast, vaulted space, the floor dipped into a wide, shallow basin. And in that basin stood a figure.
It was not Echiel. It was something born of the wound.
The figure was humanoid in rough shape, but composed of the same unstable, solidified resonance as the walls. Its form was in constant, agonized flux, flickering between a dozen different silhouettes at speeds that nauseated the eye: a robed interpreter with hands outstretched in blessing; a Corporate technician holding a data-slate, face stern; a small child, curled and weeping; a stern-faced guard in archaic armor; a woman singing a lullaby; a man screaming as he fell. It was a composite echo, a psychic scar tissue formed from the most intense, repeated emotional traffic that had passed through this space over centuries—the hope of the interpreters, the cold focus of the jailers, the terror of the lost, the laments of the bereaved.
It turned its featureless, shifting face toward Noctis. A voice emanated from it, not from any mouth, but from the air itself, a tapestry woven from stolen whispers and echoes.
"Turn back." The voice was a chorus of despair and warning. "Nothing here but pain. It gives only pain. It knows only pain. It has become pain."
Noctis halted at the rim of the basin. This was no guardian set by Veridia. This was a symptom. A cyst of shared agony given sentient form, the prison's own reflection of its inmate's suffering.
"I'm not here to take," Noctis said, his own voice sounding thin and reedy in the immense, resonant vault. "I'm here to listen."
The composite echo flickered violently. The weeping child silhouette became dominant, its form small and heartbreakingly clear. "Listen?" it whimpered, the word soaked in tears. "It has been screaming for two hundred years. No one listens. They only take. They take and take and the screaming gets quieter, but it never stops." The form shifted, melted, reshaped into the Corporate technician. The voice became flat, analytical, devoid of empathy. "Cycle report: energy yield is stable at 94.7%. Recommend we increase the siphon by five percent in the next quarter. Efficiency must be maximized."
As it spoke, a phantom sensation assaulted Noctis—a bitter, metallic taste flooded his mouth, the taste of stolen energy. A deep, aching coldness pierced his own chest, a sympathetic pain exactly where the imaginary siphon cables would be anchored in Echiel's heart. He gasped, staggering back a step.
"I carry a piece of it," he forced out, holding the Cradle-shard aloft. It blazed in the gloom, its blue light pushing back the dark, resonant flesh of the chamber. "I can hear its song. I feel its grief. I am… connected. Let me pass. Let me reach it."
The echo shuddered. The forms cycled—guard, interpreter, falling man—before finally solidifying, with great effort, into the shape of the robed interpreter. This version's face was serene, yet etched with a bottomless sadness. Its voice was soft, almost kind. "To reach it is to join it. Your 'self'—the fragile story you call Noctis—will unravel. Your memories will become its memories. Your pain will be a drop in its ocean. Your voice will become a whisper in its dream forever. Is that what you want? To cease being a 'you'?"
The Grimoire's warning flared behind his eyes, stark and undeniable: CONCEPTUAL BLEED: 58%. IDENTITY COHERENCE AT RISK. INTEGRITY FAILURE IMMINENT.
Noctis thought of the memory-costs he'd already paid to the Grimoire—the specific, cherished taste of real rain, the exact sound of his father's lost laugh. He thought of the Warden's toll, the rust in his own veins. This was the true, final price of the Deep Ways. Not just losing what you were, but having the empty spaces filled with something else. Becoming a vessel, a footnote, in a story infinitely older and more tragic than his own.
He looked at the shimmering, unstable form before him, this thing made of other people's regrets. He looked at the pulsing, wounded walls. He felt the shard's desperate cry for home in his hand.
"I am already unraveling," he said, and the admission was not a defeat, but a profound and weary relief. "I have been since the moment I remembered how to forget. If my threads… if what's left of me can be woven into a single strand of a bridge out of this place, if it can carry even one note of its song back into the world… then that is the debt. That is the delivery."
The composite echo stared at him, its form holding the interpreter's shape. The sadness in its expression deepened, but something else entered it—a flicker of something that might have been recognition, or pity, or release. It did not move aside. It simply… let go.
The resonances that pain and memory had knotted together into this semi-being sighed apart. Its form dissolved from the feet upward, streaming away in rivulets of fading light and sound, flowing back into the walls and floor from which it had been born. The last of it, a faint silhouette of the weeping child, lingered for a moment in the air. Its final whisper, woven from the last breath of a hundred ghosts, brushed against Noctis's soul:
"Then go. And when you join the song… tell it… it is not forgotten."
The way was clear. Beyond the now-empty basin, the far wall of the vast vault was not a wall at all.
It was a veil.
A curtain of shimmering, liquid darkness, profound and deep, yet shot through with pulsating, living veins of silver and brilliant, sorrowful blue. It did not hang still; it breathed, in and out, in time with the heartbeat that filled the chamber. Ba-dump… Ba-dump… Behind that permeable membrane, he could feel a presence. Vast beyond his ability to comprehend. Ancient beyond the concept of years. Wounded beyond any measure of healing he knew. The grief of the Sympathy, the pain of the composite echo—they were but faint reflections, previews of the agony concentrated beyond that veil. The heartbeat sound was the engine of it all, the slow, laboring pump of a dying god.
The Cradle-shard in his hand blazed like a captive blue star, its light now blinding, its song in his mind a single, desperate, keening monosyllable: HOME. HOME. HOME.
He had reached the prison door. The end of the Sympathy.
He stood before the breathing veil, the composite echo's warning about unraveling still ringing in the chambers of his mind, the Grimoire's synch percentage climbing—61%, 62%—a relentless countdown to a threshold he did not understand.
To step through was to accept the final, irrevocable stage of the Sympathy. To move beyond witnessing echoes, and to stand as a Witness before the source itself. It was to accept the final conceptual bleed.
He found he was not afraid. There was only a vast, quiet solemnity, and beneath it, the shard's irresistible pull.
He took a final, deep breath of the static-charged, memory-saturated air. He tightened his grip on the shard until he felt its pulse sync perfectly with his own frantic heartbeat. He did not look back.
Noctis stepped into the veil.
The world did not go dark.
It became music.