The return journey through the Sympathy was a reverse haunting, a walk through the ghost of his own passage.
Where before the resonant walls had shimmered with the memories of others—the Interpreters, the Cage-Makers, the forgotten and the damned—now they showed him echoes of himself. A faint, ghostly silhouette walked ahead of him in the translucent medium, a palimpsest of the Noctis of an hour ago, his form blurred by dread and determination. In places, he saw the after-image of his own emotional release: a dark, bruise-like smudge of color where he had wept, a shimmer of silver where his own resonance had flared in answer to the Cradle's call. The Sympathy was a recording medium, and it was remembering him, etching the brief, intense story of his pilgrimage into its eternal substance.
The conceptual bleed was not a single event but a lingering condition. It left him feeling dual, a being of two minds. One part—the foundational part, he hoped—was still the courier. It assessed exits with a calculator's cold logic, listened for pursuit with a hunter's paranoia, and tallied resources with the grim pragmatism of the under-levels. This part knew the taste of fear and the necessity of the knife in the dark.
But the other part… the other part was softer. Vaster. Stranger. When he looked at the suffering etched into the walls—the captured screams, the fossilized sorrow—he felt more than horror or pity. He felt a deep, maternal pang of sorrow, a protective grief that seemed to originate from a place larger than his own heart. It was an echo, but a powerful one. He had left a fragment of his discrete identity in the Cradle's overwhelming song, and in exchange, he had carried back a sliver of its boundless, wounded empathy. It was like a new organ, unfamiliar and throbbing with a rhythm not entirely his own.
On his back, the Grimoire was quietly, incessantly active. He felt its subtle vibrations against his spine, a constant analysis. Pages turned in their binding, not to be read by human eyes, but to process the data of his transformed psyche.
POST-SYMPATHY ANALYSIS INITIATED.
NEURAL PATHWAY REMAPPING CONFIRMED. SIGNIFICANT DIVERGENCE FROM BASELINE.
EMOTIONAL RESPONSE PROTOCOLS: REALIGNED. PRIMARY RESONANCE NOW HARMONIZED WITH ECHIEL PRIME FREQUENCY (CORE BLUE SPECTRUM).
WARNING: ELEVATED EMPATHY QUOTIENT MAY SUPPRESS SURVIVAL-CRITICAL AGGRESSION PROTOCOLS. RISK ASSESSMENT: MODERATE TO HIGH.
Fantastic, he thought, the irony as sharp and cold as a permacrete shard. He was becoming too gentle, too connected to the pain of others, to survive the very brutal, indifferent world he was now tasked with saving. The ultimate cosmic joke: to gain the power to heal a god, he had to sacrifice the ruthless edge that kept him alive.
He reached the Rust Gate sooner than expected. The atmosphere in the tunnel had changed. The oppressive, metallic grief had lifted, replaced by a hollow, spent silence. The Warden was gone. Only the deep, polished impression of its eternal kneeling remained in the stone floor, a negative space of profound regret. The gate itself still wept its clear, lubricating tears, but the jagged, interlocking teeth seemed less aggressive, less hungry. They were dormant, as if the act of testing him had fulfilled their only purpose for this cycle. Noctis passed through the narrow aperture without ceremony, the Cradle-shard in his pocket now a cool, silent weight. Its desperate, magnetic pull toward the deep was quiescent, sated by proximity to its source. It was just a stone again, for now.
The climb back up through the labyrinth of abandoned transit tunnels, collapsed service ducts, and geological faults was a purely mechanical ordeal. His body ached with a fatigue that was more spiritual than muscular, a soul-deep weariness that no amount of rest would cure. Every distant, grinding rumble from the city far above—the shifting of a mag-lev line, the thrum of a distant generator—felt like a vulgar violation. It was the crude, meaningless noise of the great machine grinding on, an obscenity against the delicate, grieving music that still echoed in the sanctum of his soul. He was an ascetic returning from a sacred vision to a marketplace of shouting merchants.
He used Lyra's resonance keys to navigate the more treacherous, non-Euclidean sections. The data-crystal embedded in his neural interface hummed softly, a guide-tone in the dark. It led him to a seemingly solid wall of dripping rock. He pressed his palm against it, and the crystal emitted a counter-frequency. The rock didn't move, but its state changed. For three seconds, it became permeable, a thick, cold jelly he pushed through with held breath, emerging into the chill, still air of a long-abandoned pre-Consolidation subway tunnel. Graffiti here was ancient, a lost art: stenciled flowers with smiling faces, soaring birds with exaggerated wingspans, hopeful slogans in archaic fonts. Not the harsh, territorial glyphs or desperate etchings of the modern under-levels. He was moving not just upward through space, but forward through layers of time, back toward the harsh, hopeless present.
It was in the echoing, corpse-like stillness of a derelict station, its nameplate meticulously chiseled away by some long-forgotten censor, that he encountered life again.
Not Corporate. Not a fellow fugitive or Residual.
A Wailer.
He heard it first—a low, shuddering, metallic sob that echoed with awful clarity off the cracked ceramic tiles. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated despair, machinic and organic at once. He froze, melting into the shadow of a bank of broken turnstiles, his breathing shallow.
The thing that shambled into the dim, fungus-orange light from a sagging maintenance hatch was a tragedy given shuffling form. It had once been human, likely a subsurface maintenance worker. Now, the left half of its torso and its entire left arm were fused with a patched-together, four-legged drone chassis of rusted alloys and exposed wiring. The flesh at the juncture was a horrifying tapestry of grey, necrotic tissue and proud, weeping scar lines. One human eye, bloodshot and rolling in a permanent rictus of terror and pain, stared from a grimy face. The other eye was a cracked, cloudy camera lens, its red activity light flickering erratically. It clutched a length of broken conduit pipe in its one good, flesh-and-blood hand, but it wasn't brandishing it like a weapon. It was just… holding it. As it moved, it emitted that terrible, shuddering sob, a broken, synthetic sound of purest despair.
A drone-human hybrid. A discarded experiment from some forgotten Corporate biotech division or black-site mercy. A thing that should not be, left to wander the dark and feel its own impossible existence as agony.
The old Noctis—the courier who had survived the under-levels on silence and sharpness—would have observed, calculated the best route for silent egress, and slipped away like smoke. Survival was a selfish act. You couldn't carry the world's pain on your back and still run.
But the new Noctis, with Echiel's borrowed empathy bleeding through his psychic barriers like a slow dye, felt its pain. It was a tiny, sharp, dissonant shriek—a grotesque, miniature parody of the Cradle's vast symphony of suffering. A child's whimper beside a planetary funeral dirge, but pain all the same. Authentic. Deserving of witness.
He didn't move. He barely breathed.
The Wailer's head jerked up with a squeal of grinding servos. Its cracked camera lens focused with a series of gritty, internal whirrs, the red light brightening. It saw him. A sharp, static-filled shriek erupted from a grille in its chest, and it lurched forward with shocking speed, the pipe rising in a clumsy, overhand arc.
Noctis didn't reach for the monofilament blade at his belt. He didn't call upon the whispering, defensive dark. He did something entirely instinctive, born of the Sympathy's lessons in resonance. He didn't cast a shadow.
He cast a feeling.
He focused on the core blue tone now woven into his being, the frequency of acknowledgement, of seeing. He didn't attack the Wailer's mind. He simply pushed out a gentle, resonant wave of that blue feeling, mixed with a reflection of the creature's own despair—not to amplify it, but to mirror it, to say, I see it. I feel it too.
The effect was immediate and uncanny.
The Wailer stopped mid-lurch, its body seizing as if hit by a tranquilizer pulse. The conduit pipe slipped from its fingers and clattered loudly on the tiles, the sound echoing through the dead station. Its human eye widened, the panic momentarily eclipsed by profound, soul-deep confusion. The static sob choked off into a wet, gurgling click. It stood there, trembling, its camera lens refocusing on him again and again, as if trying to reconcile this new sensory input with its reality of endless pain.
Then, without another sound, it turned and shambled away, its uneven gait carrying it back into the dark maw of the maintenance hatch. Its sobs resumed, but they were quieter now, tinged not just with despair, but with something else—something like bewilderment. Or maybe the faintest echo of peace.
Noctis slumped against the cold turnstile, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. That had been phenomenally stupid. Reckless beyond measure. He'd exposed himself, wasted energy, risked everything on a gut feeling that wasn't entirely his own.
It had also worked. Not through force, but through… recognition.
The Grimoire noted the event with clinical detachment:
TENET 2 APPLICATION EXPANDED: RESONANCE EMANATION (NOVICE TIER).
OBJECTIVE: NON-VIOLENT PACIFICATION VIA EMPATHIC MIRRORING.
RESULT: SUCCESS.
COST: MINOR PSYCHIC FATIGUE. NEURAL STRAIN WITHIN ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS.
He wasn't just a passive listener to the world's song anymore. He could project. He could broadcast resonant emotion like a tiny, personal transmitter. It was a tool—for communication, for confusion, for pacification. The psychic cost was notably lighter than the violent, soul-draining act of shadow-weaving, but the potential implications were vast and deeply unsettling.
He moved on, the encounter leaving a residue of profound disquiet. The city wasn't just a cage of steel and a web of surveillance. It was a gallery of suffering, an open wound of indifference. Every discarded experiment, every broken mind, every Wailer in the dark was a testament to the cost of "progress." His grand, terrifying mission was to free a slumbering, wounded god. But looking at that one broken creature, he wondered: how many of these small, silent agonies could he ever hope to mend?
He finally breached the upper layers, emerging onto Level -5, a nominally "active" but deeply dilapidated residential sector. The sensory assault was a physical slap. The profound, resonant silence of the deep was annihilated by a wall of noise: the shouts of hawkers, the blare of cheap, holographic advertisements for nutrient paste and dream-stimulants, the clatter of makeshift machinery, the smell of frying synth-grease and overcrowded humanity. It was the frantic, meaningless din of mere survival, a symphony of desperation that had no melody, only volume.
He needed to think. To process the directives swimming in his mind—find the other notes, awaken the choir. He needed information. A fix on the world he'd re-entered.
He ducked into a public data-den, a cramped, humid hole-in-the-wall reeking of stale sweat and overheating circuitry. Citizens without the credit for private terminals rented time on filthy public consoles, their interactions filtered and monitored by a dozen Corporate algorithms. He paid the sullen attendant with a sliver of untraceable polymer scrip and took a sticky seat in the corner booth, pulling the hood of his new, nondescript jacket low over his face.
He didn't dare access any of his old courier channels or personal feeds. They'd be honey-traps now. Instead, he called up the public bulletins, the official news streams, the bland municipal service alerts.
The aftermath of the "unfortunate power surge and structural incident on Level -17" was still being managed. Sterile images of clean-up drones scuttling over debris. A Veridia spokesperson with perfect teeth and empty eyes offered rehearsed assurances of public safety and structural integrity. No mention of magical anomalies, rogue Resonants, or active Retrievers. The incident was being memory-holed, smoothed over into an acceptable narrative of minor infrastructure failure.
Then he saw it. A small, scrolling ticker at the bottom of a financial channel stream, between stock prices and commodity futures:
…VERIDIA SECOR ANNOUNCES MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN STABLE RESONANCE APPLICATIONS. DIRECTOR ARIS THORNE TO HOLD TECHNICAL BRIEFING ON "PROJECT NEW DAWN" MEDICAL INITIATIVE AT 1600 STANDARD. ANALYSTS PREDICT SURGE IN BIOTECH SECTOR…
Stable resonance applications. Project New Dawn.
The other shard. The one they bend to their will. They weren't just siphoning energy anymore; they were making tangible progress. They were learning to tune it, to stabilize its output, to recompose Echiel's stolen song into something they could package, patent, and sell. The ultimate theft: not just stealing the power, but plagiarizing the soul, rewriting the sacred text into a corporate manual.
A cold, hard knot of dread formed in his stomach. Time, which had felt expansive in the deep, suddenly constricted to a suffocating point. Thorne was moving fast.
He had to move faster. He had to find Lyra, tell her of the other Grimoires, of the choir. He needed a plan, allies, resources—things he did not possess.
As his finger hovered over the command to log off, a private message window abruptly popped up in the center of the screen, its border a neutral grey, its text a plain, unadorned font. It had bypassed the den's crude filters entirely.
Cicada Network: Secure Handshake Initiated.
> Query: Status of Keybearer?
> Archivist Lyra requests immediate rendezvous. Coordinates attached.
> Priority: High. Praetorian sweep patterns intensifying in sub-levels 8 through 5. Predictive algorithms suggest convergent search pattern.
> Message Ends.
Attached were a string of map coordinates, not far from his current location. A neutral zone—a massive, twenty-four-hour public recycling and reclamation depot, a place of constant, anonymous flow where mountains of discarded tech and scrap were sorted by automated systems and the city's poorest gleaners. A good place to hide, to meet, to vanish.
Lyra was reaching out. She would have felt the deep, tectonic tremor of his communion with Echiel, a resonant event that would have registered on whatever sensitive instruments she kept in her archive. She knew he had been to the edge of the wound and returned.
He erased the terminal session, left a meaningless series of clicks on the interface to foul any playback algorithms, and slipped out of the data-den, merging with the ceaseless river of foot traffic.
As he walked, navigating the choked thoroughfares toward the rendezvous point, a new sound began to layer itself under the city's cacophonous baseline. It was a sub-auditory hum, a pressure-vibration felt in the molars and at the back of the skull. It was different from the distant, omnipresent gaze of the city's central Oracle. That was a passive, monitoring weight. This was active. Localized. Searching.
He slowed his pace, letting the crowd flow around him, and looked up, scanning the narrow ribbon of artificial sky between the towering habitation blocks.
There. High above, silhouetted like inkblots against the grimy, diffuse glow of the sector's phosphorescent sky-lights, three sleek, black shapes moved in a perfect, silent triangular formation. They were too large for common surveillance drones, too quiet for maintenance skiffs. Their movement was predatory, deliberate, a coordinated sweep.
Praetorian scouts.
They weren't conducting a random patrol. They were following a trail—a resonance trail. The scent of his changed soul, the psychic spoor left by his use of magic in the deep, by his empathic pacification of the Wailer. They were hunting not for his face, but for his frequency. The world's newest, most intelligent predators had caught the scent of his song.
The ascent was over. He had climbed out of the earth, out of the realm of gods and ghosts.
He was back in the world.
And the world had evolved a new immune response, and it was closing in.