CHAPTER 10, PART 3 — "When Drums Forget Their Masters"
The heartbeat of Zerune faltered.
Not once, but twice—like a god had coughed beneath the earth.
Nakala lifted her gaze from the city square, her breath shallow. Every torch along the avenue dimmed, their flames shuddering in unison as if afraid of something older than light. The air carried a vibration — low, formless, wrong.
> "Serah," she whispered. "Do you feel that?"
Serah's expression darkened. Her right hand twitched, tracing invisible sigils across the air, but no rhythm answered her call. The Histinak had gone mute.
> "It's not the city," Serah said. "It's beneath it."
Nakala's pulse quickened. She closed her eyes, trying to listen—not with ears, but with the rhythm buried in her chest.
The world fell away.
And there, beneath the stone layers of Zerune, she heard it—a heartbeat that did not belong to man, demon, or god. It pulsed once every thirty breaths, slow and deliberate, dragging the world's rhythm down with it.
The N'gai's silence was no longer distant. It was breathing with them.
---
They followed the vibration through the lower districts, past markets that had fallen still, past fountains where water hung midstream, unmoving.
The people were frozen in rhythm, their Histinak severed.
Serah clutched her chest. "If the rhythm stops, their hearts will too," she murmured. "They are their beats."
> "Then we move quickly," Nakala said, her tone steel wrapped in sorrow. "Before silence remembers their names."
They descended through an abandoned archway—the same one Nakala had crossed weeks ago when she first entered Zerune. Now it groaned with living sound. The stone breathed, faintly at first, then deepened into a haunting hum.
Every breath Nakala took echoed back in whispers of her own voice.
> Esh'ra… the walls called softly, using the goddess's name.
Esh'ra, devourer of yourself.
She froze.
The goddess's memory—her memory—shouldn't have existed in the mortal world.
And yet the stone knew her name.
Serah noticed her hesitation. "What do they mean? Devourer?"
> "It was the only way to remain alive," Nakala murmured, voice trembling. "When the gods began to fade, Esh'ra consumed herself to keep the rhythm breathing. But I didn't know the world still remembered that name."
Serah's lips parted, realization dawning. "Then this silence—it's not random. It's seeking you."
> "Or what's left of me," Nakala replied quietly.
---
At the heart of the lower sanctum, they found it—a vast chamber filled with glass pillars, each one containing faint motes of light suspended mid-motion. Thousands of them, like stars trapped in water.
> "Bound Names," Serah said in awe. "But these aren't human—they're Histinak itself."
Each mote was a captured rhythm, a person's life-song condensed to a flicker. Some pulsed faintly, others dimmed, nearly gone. Nakala stepped closer, her reflection rippling across the glass. Her touch sent a wave of vibration through the entire chamber.
The stars began to sing.
Low at first, then louder—each note harmonizing, forming a melody of grief.
But something was wrong. Beneath the song, Nakala felt it again: that alien pulse, patient and cold, resonating under every note.
> "They're not singing to us," she said. "They're warning us."
A fissure split across the chamber floor, and from it rose a faint shape of bone and mist—neither alive nor dead, neither rhythm nor silence.
It looked like a figure trying to remember its own form.
Serah instinctively raised her staff, but Nakala held out a hand to stop her.
> "No," she said softly. "It's listening."
The figure tilted its head, empty sockets flickering with faint silver flame. It opened its mouth—and no sound came.
Only silence.
The kind that consumes memory, leaving nothing behind.
The Bound Names began to dim one by one.
> "Serah," Nakala said, steadying her voice. "If silence can devour rhythm… then it's already inside Zerune."
---
And with that, the goddess within her stirred—Esh'ra's pulse awakening from its dormancy.
The divine and mortal rhythms collided, rippling across the chamber like waves meeting shore.
The figure of bone flinched as the first true rhythm Nakala had ever summoned since her rebirth pulsed through the ruins.
But she knew it wasn't enough.
Something larger—something beneath all sound—had begun to awaken.
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