The Song ended without triumph.
No light to bask in.
No divine choir to mourn the death of a God
Victory was awarded with silence.
Vast, sudden, empty…wrong.
Sawyer felt this before he understood.
The pressure around him eased. Not in relief, but in vacancy. Something immense had been torn away. The Abyss no longer pressed back. What it had held down for so long was gone.
The air no longer danced.
For the first time in his life, the Abyss did not sing.
Black stone the size of buildings stood shattered around the ground, half sunken into the dark sea floor. Their edges sharpened by centuries of immense and impossible pressure. Ancient spires, imposing in their size and age, tilted downward as if to weep what they had lost.
Still aggressive.
Still furious—
the stone locked in an eternal pose of violence it could no longer finish.
At the centre lay the body of the Reaver.
Cold, dead, and lifeless.
No action.
No will.
No sound—
not even the distant groan of the deep that had never once failed him.
Only a deafening nothing.
Sawyer tightened his grip around the hilt of his blade instinctively. Discord metal no longer hummed in dissonance. His armor was shattered in more places than one. Pain gnawed at him with every breath, yet there he stood. He felt his hand beneath the gauntlet shake. Not from pain. Not from fear or anger—only disbelief. The only anchor he had was the cold, punishing rain of the storm.
Around him lay the dead.
Abyssal Hunters—men and women trained since childhood to fight where the Song was strongest—lay motionless upon the damp floor.
Some were torn apart by forces no man could parry. Others bore little to no wounds at all, kneeling where they had fallen, faces frozen in expressions of enlightened terror—souls departing with the Song itself.
Sawyer turned slowly, counting out of habit.
One.
Two.
Three.
He kicked a dead body to check.
Four.
Seven.
Twelve.
In the distance, familiar faces grazed his vision.
Twenty-four.
Twenty-nine.
Thirty-one.
His chest tightened, yet his voice remained steeled.
Thirty-six.
Forty.
Forty-seven.
He looked up at a body impaled on a spire.
Forty-eight.
He stared into empty space and spoke to no one.
"Sawyer Domhainn reporting.
Forty-eight members deceased."
In that moment, what he felt was not grief—not yet. It was something colder. Certainty. The kind that only decades of constant war could forge.
"I should be dead."
The Reaver had been bound beneath the waves long before memory, its Song seeping upward into the world like poison through stone. It destroyed nations, twisted kingdoms, warped flesh, and rewrote the laws of nature itself. The Abyssal Order had existed for a single purpose: to reach it, to endure it, and to end it.
Humanity—no.
Reality itself needed this cancer removed.
At the cost of everything, they finally succeeded.
Sawyer looked again at the mangled corpse of the Reaver.
"No," he murmured, his voice swallowed instantly by doubt. "We didn't."
The Song had not died. It had stopped.
The carnage that danced with the melody stayed.
A tremor ran through the space around him—not a shockwave, but a slow shift. It was as though the world above had exhaled for the first time. Sawyer staggered, his steps heavy as his boots scraped against the fractured ground. He realized the current was changing.
The crushing weight that had once gripped every movement as an act of defiance loosened. Only then did Sawyer finally loosen his own, finally putting his worn blade to rest.
A pale light filtered down from above as the nigh-eternal storm finally broke. The rain ceased. The sky cleared, revealing a sight never before seen—an open expanse of night, vast and unguarded.
The abyss was releasing him.
And the world was thanking him.
He turned one last time to face his comrades.
"I'm sorry."
White petals drifted down around him. He looked toward the exit
"And thank you"
He hobbled away to the surface.
The maw mourned his comrades in his place.
Slowly, he rose up from the bottom of the world. The Stormwind Acacia—the symbol of the Order—revealed its majesty to the weary hunter, filling the hollow base and the barren land with purpose one final time.
He passed through the silent halls, fixing himself and replacing his equipment for the journey back to the mainland. Gathering adequate supplies, he prepared the solo sloop and embarked. Leaving the maw once and for all.
Now that the Song was gone, would the world finally know silence?
And if not—what would rise to fill the void?
Sawyer pressed on.
And the world, finally freed from its oldest chain, began to change.