The skyborn did not leave.
For three days and three nights, they remained in the plaza before the Citadel. Unmoving. Unbreathing. Radiating the quiet pressure of a thousand eyes made of song and memory.
Citizens brought offerings. Children whispered their awe. Priests knelt in confusion, unsure if they were witnessing prophecy or punishment.
But Callan knew.
They weren't here for show.
They were waiting.
The fourth morning broke with crimson clouds and a whispering wind.
Callan walked into the plaza, Ashendrix strapped across his back. The moment his boots touched the stones, the skyborn moved.
They didn't speak—not in words.
Instead, they opened their mouths and released a hum, deep and harmonic. The song carried no language, but its meaning was clear to Callan.
Lead.
Command.
Restore.
The skyborn were ready to march.
And they wanted their Conductor.
Councilor Vern strode toward Callan, flanked by guards.
"This is madness," he spat. "We don't even know what they are."
"They are fragments," Callan replied. "Remnants of a war the world pretended to forget."
"You can't seriously intend to use them."
"I don't intend to use them," Callan said evenly. "I intend to answer them."
"You're playing with forces that almost destroyed this world once—you destroyed this world once!"
Callan didn't flinch.
"Then I'm the only one who knows how to stop it from happening again."
Outside the capital, across the Hundred Realms, the Choir was assembling.
At first, it was dismissed as a strange cult revival. Then, as caravans moved together in rhythmic footfalls, and entire villages began humming in unison, it became clear.
The Song was not just in people.
It was guiding them.
Toward a central point.
Toward Callan.
And from the far edges of the realm came reports of something worse.
The Dissonant.
Not all remembered the Song with harmony.
Some had warped it.
Twisted it into screams and disarray.
They called themselves the Broken Verse.
And they were marching too.
Inside the Mirror Sanctum, Solenne watched the flickering reflection of Callan.
But this time, it wasn't him in the glass.
It was them—the Broken Verse.
They had mirrors too.
They had seen him.
And now, they sang back.
But their song was jagged. Discordant. Made of screams and blood.
One of them—a pale man with teeth like glass—stepped forward in the vision.
He smiled.
Then spoke.
"He sings your name, Zareth-Kal. But we remember your silence."
Solenne recoiled. The mirror cracked.
And the last thing she saw before the shard fell was the pale man blowing her a kiss.
Callan stood before his soldiers, both mortal and skyborn.
His voice carried across the courtyard.
"Listen well," he began. "There is a war coming—not of steel or politics, but of memory."
"The enemy we face will not conquer us with armies, but with forgetting—they want to erase what we once were, and twist what we could be."
He paused, meeting each pair of eyes.
"But we are not fragments. We are the full song."
"They fear it. Because it remembers. Because it binds."
He raised Ashendrix high.
"And I say—let it bind us."
The skyborn lifted their hands. The mortal soldiers followed.
And together, they sang.
A single note.
Perfect.
Whole.
In the far North, the Broken Verse screamed.
A storm of black mirrors erupted in their citadel. The discordant ones, born from hatred of harmony, howled at the unison forming in the world.
The Pale Man—their leader—watched from a throne made of forgotten names.
"So he returns," he whispered. "Then let the second symphony begin."
Back in the capital, the earth trembled.
A new note had entered the song.
Lower.
Older.
Not dissonant.
But not familiar.
Callan turned westward.
From beneath the sands of the drowned desert, something was rising.
Something even he had forgotten.
The Deep Choir.
And their conductor had no face.