The tone that emerged from the back of the chamber was wrong.
Not a mistake.
A challenge.
It moved against the grain of the room, like a single twisted thread unraveling a perfectly woven tapestry. The orbs belonging to the Echo Parliament dimmed slightly, retreating into lower frequency tones. The sound-threads withdrew from Aouli like a breath held too long.
Then the air cracked.
A vertical ripple split open near the chamber's curved rear—silent at first, then followed by a low, growling reverberation like a cello string being bowed backwards.
From the shimmer stepped a figure.
She wore no sound-skin.
No harmonic robes.
Only a cloak of matte silence, trailing behind her like absence given shape.
Her hair floated as though submerged, constantly shifting. Her skin—if it could be called that—was covered in smooth, shifting patterns of audio-wave sigils. She had no visible mouth. But her eyes—
They were like copper coins dropped into oil.
Still. Piercing. Patient.
Aouli recognized her before anyone spoke.
Because his bones reacted.
Kaero whispered, "That her?"
Aouli nodded.
"Cynara."
The Architect of Dissonance.
The rogue Echo who had fled the Harmony Citadel before Gaia fell. Who had, according to Elysia's broken memories, sought not to balance worlds, but to remind them what they tried to forget.
The Parliament Echoes shifted.
But none moved to stop her.
Cynara walked calmly into the center of the chamber and stared at Aouli with a gaze so still it bordered on gravitational.
Then she spoke.
Not with sound.
Not with tone.
With compression.
A shift of pressure in Aouli's ears that became meaning.
"You are what they feared. Not because you carry legacy. Because you listen and refuse to obey."
Aouli stepped off the pedestal slowly.
The threads had already retracted.
He stood face-to-face with her.
"What are you doing here?"
Cynara turned slightly—just enough to regard the Echoes at the edge of the chamber.
Then turned back.
"I'm not here for you. I'm here for them. Because they called me."
A low, shameful hum passed through the Echoes.
Cynara smiled—without a mouth, only through the tilt of her head and the resonance of dark amusement.
"They did not know how to tune you. So they summoned the dissonant."
Kaero snorted. "Of course."
Aouli frowned. "Then why not attack? You're stronger than them now, aren't you?"
Cynara turned slowly, her cloak hissing across the smooth floor.
"I don't destroy harmony. I remind it of what it buried."
A beat.
Then she approached Aouli again.
"You carry seeds. But there is one more."
She reached into her cloak and withdrew something small, black, and jagged. Unlike the others, it did not pulse. It radiated void.
Not a seed of memory.
A seed of rupture.
"This comes from the Shrike," she said.
Aouli blinked. "The what?"
"A creature born of silence and scream. It sings in reverse. A consequence of Gaia's death, forged in the collapse of tonal symmetry."
Cynara extended the shard to him.
"It haunts the outskirts of Resonatia. It sings into the wind and draws the broken to it."
Kaero shifted uneasily. "Sounds like an invitation to madness."
Cynara smiled again, head tilted.
"It is. And it's also your next test."
Aouli didn't move to take the shard.
Cynara let it hover between them, held by some unseen gravity.
"If you do not face the Shrike, this city will eventually fracture. Its resonance will fail. Not from violence. From neglect."
Aouli looked at the seed.
It trembled faintly. A rhythm without beat. A tone without pitch.
A broken thing that remembered everything and sang in terror of it.
He took it.
Cynara leaned in.
"You are not harmony. You are not chaos. You are the ear between them. If you do not listen, you will become echo without substance."
Then she stepped back.
The ripple reopened behind her.
And she walked through.
Gone.
The silence she left behind didn't settle.
It waited.
Kaero was the first to speak.
"Well. That was warm and cuddly."
Aouli looked down at the rupture-seed in his palm.
"I think we're supposed to go find the Shrike."
Kaero nodded grimly.
"I'll get my knives."