The day of the Festival rose like a promise and fell like a prayer.
By dawn, the entire city of Eversong trembled with anticipation. The streets were draped in silk and copper threads that caught the wind, ringing faintly like chimes. Hundreds of resonant discs had been mounted along the towers, amplifying sound into radiant waves that would fill the air once the choirs began.
This was meant to be a renewal — the Chorus's attempt to rebind the city's fractured frequencies. For one day, every citizen would sing, every surface would vibrate in harmony, and the Pattern itself, they hoped, would remember them kindly.
Taren stood in the plaza among the gathered crowds, the Resonant Compass heavy around his neck. Seren and Aron flanked him, watching from the edge of the tiered steps that led toward the Grand Stage. Above them, banners shimmered with the dawn.
"Feels wrong," Seren murmured.
Taren glanced at her. "You think it shouldn't happen?"
"I think it's desperate. Trying to drown silence with noise."
Aron was squinting at the towers, tapping readings into his wrist console. "The upper harmonics are unstable already. When the Chorus activates, the feedback might overload the whole system."
"Then why go through with it?" Seren asked.
Aron shrugged. "Because people are built to sing, not listen."
The bell towers began to ring — deep, resonant, and rich enough to shake the plaza. The sound rolled through the city in waves, awakening the reflective glass of the buildings. Every surface glowed faintly in response, and for a moment, Eversong looked whole again.
The High Conductor, Maerin Vale, stood on the stage at the city's heart, arms raised. Her voice, when she spoke, carried effortlessly across the crowd.
"Eversong endures," she said. "Even when the world forgets its tune, we remember."
A roar of applause, relief, hope.
Taren felt none of it. The compass against his chest was trembling faintly, emitting a low hum beneath the city's song — a counter-frequency.
Maerin lowered her arms, and the music began.
Thousands of voices rose together, layered in perfect intervals. The streets shimmered. The towers responded, projecting waves of sound that pulsed through the air. The Pattern's resonance, once broken, seemed to knit itself anew.
Taren felt it like warmth against his skin. For a heartbeat, he thought perhaps it would work.
Then the hum deepened.
It started subtle — a faint vibration beneath the melody, an undertone that didn't belong. People kept singing, unaware at first. But Taren heard it clearly. The Pattern was answering, but not in harmony.
It was mirroring them.
Every note the singers produced came back inverted — reversed, hollow, distorted. The music of Eversong began to echo itself backward, folding in layers until melody became noise.
Maerin turned sharply, signaling the engineers. "Compensate for the feedback!"
The technicians scrambled to adjust the controls. The amplification towers glowed brighter, pushing more power through the harmonic field. The sound surged again, momentarily stabilizing.
But the Pattern didn't retreat. It roared.
The counter-frequency rose like a wave of thunder. The air shivered. Glass cracked. The banners tore free from their lines.
The Chorus kept singing — because to stop was to admit defeat.
Then came the scream.
Not human. Not mechanical. It was the city itself, tearing from within. Every resonant surface howled at once. The songs shattered into noise. The ground trembled beneath thousands of feet.
Seren shouted, "Taren!"
He barely heard her. The compass had come alive, its sphere spinning violently. Symbols flared across its face — looping glyphs that matched those he'd seen in the Glass Desert.
Aron grabbed his arm. "It's syncing! The Pattern's hijacking the amplification field!"
Taren forced the compass off his neck and dropped to his knees, pressing it to the stone. The hum beneath the city was deafening now.
Maerin's voice carried through the chaos, desperate. "Shut it down! All frequencies— shut it—"
Her words dissolved into static.
Light exploded from the stage — not fire, not energy, but pure resonance turned visible. Sound became shape. Notes hung in the air as shards of color. Then the shards began to fall.
Taren shielded his face as glass rain cascaded from the towers. The music collapsed entirely. In its place came whispers — hundreds of them, layered like wind through reeds.
Too loud, they said. Too loud.
The crowd screamed.
Taren pushed himself up. The compass was glowing white-hot, the hum reverberating through his chest. He looked around and realized something impossible: the reflections in the shattered glass were moving.
The mirrored fragments scattered across the plaza no longer showed the chaos of the crowd. They showed stillness — people standing calm, serene, gazing upward as if in prayer.
Then, in unison, the reflections turned their heads and looked directly at him.
"Taren," Seren shouted, "we need to move!"
He couldn't. The air itself felt heavy, thick with recognition. The mirrored people opened their mouths and began to sing.
It wasn't noise. It wasn't harmony either. It was the silence, given voice.
Every note carried the weight of memory — loss, longing, mercy, despair. The reflections sang the Pattern's grief.
Aron pulled him back. "We have to go!"
The three ran as the plaza fractured. Resonant glass burst from walls, creating whirlwinds of sound. The city's towers pulsed like hearts in arrhythmia.
They reached an alleyway, ducking beneath the collapsing walkways. Seren fired her weapon at a falling beam, shattering it midair before it crushed them.
When they emerged into the outer districts, the sound had already begun to fade. The screams were gone. The air hung heavy and dim.
They stopped, gasping, covered in dust and shards.
Taren turned back toward the plaza. Through the settling haze, he could see Maerin still standing on the stage, her silver mantle torn, one arm raised. Around her, hundreds of citizens stood motionless, their reflections on the broken glass floor perfectly still — not mirroring them anymore, but watching.
Aron wiped blood from his forehead. "It's over," he said.
Taren shook his head. "No. It's begun."
Seren followed his gaze. The light above the Hall of Echoes was pulsing again, faint but steady — a rhythm that matched the heartbeat of the compass in Taren's hand.
"What is it doing?" she whispered.
Taren listened. The hum was no longer chaotic. It had shape, a strange, calm structure. He could almost make out words.
"It's rewriting the song," he said softly. "The Pattern's learning how to sing alone."
The compass flared once, then went dark.
They stood in the silence that followed. The city of Eversong, once the heart of harmony, was utterly still. No wind, no voices, not even breath seemed to disturb it.
Seren lowered her weapon. "Is it… dead?"
Taren shook his head slowly. "No. It's listening again."
The last light flickered out. Across the plaza, the mirrored fragments glowed faintly, showing faces that no longer belonged to anyone alive.
And in the distance, faint as the breath of memory, came a sound — not song, not speech, but the rhythm of something vast remembering how to breathe.