Dust motes danced in the single shaft of light slicing the gloom of the archive. Old Man Tiber, hunched like a question mark over a brittle scroll, traced a finger across faded ink. The parchment felt like dried skin under his touch. He hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks, not since the tremors started—the ones that weren’t earthquakes.
He coughed, a rattling sound in the cavernous room. The air tasted of decay and something else…something like ozone after a storm, but ancient.
“Find anything, Tiber?” Elara’s voice echoed from the stacks. She moved with a dancer’s grace, a splash of color in the monochrome world of forgotten texts.
“Fragments. Just whispers.” He didn’t look up. “Melodies. They spoke of…guardians. Beings of light.”
“Light? In *this* darkness?”
“Not just light, Elara. *Luminous* things. The scroll claims they answered a call. A song. One that’s been lost for epochs.” He tapped the fragile paper. “It warns of a silence that…eats at things. A hunting echo.”
Elara stopped beside him, her brow furrowed. She ran a gloved hand over the stone floor, a habit she’d picked up from her grandmother, a stonemason who believed every surface held a memory.
“The tremors. They’re getting worse, aren’t they?”
“They follow a pattern. A dissonance. Like a broken chord.” Tiber rolled the scroll tighter. “It says these guardians defended against…something *born* of that silence.”
“Born of silence? That’s… poetic.”
Tiber snorted. “Poetry won’t save us when whatever slumbered awakens.” He pointed to a crude map sketched on the scroll’s edge. “See this place? The Sunken City of Aethel. It’s marked here. A nexus of the old song, they claim.”
“Aethel… I’ve heard the stories. They say the sea swallowed it whole after a single night.” Elara traced the map with a fingertip. “A punishment for…what?”
“For forgetting. For letting the song die.” He pulled a tarnished silver locket from beneath his tunic. Inside, a miniature painting depicted a woman with hair like spun moonlight, humming a tune. “My grandmother claimed our family held a sliver of that song. Kept it alive, however faintly.”
“And you can’t remember it?”
“Just…fragments. A cadence. A feeling.” Tiber closed his hand around the locket. “But Aethel…that city. If the legends are true, the echoes are strongest there. Perhaps we can find something. A way to rekindle the song.”
“Rekindle it? You think that’s enough?”
“What else do we have, Elara? Swords? Prayers? Those didn’t stop the tremors from cracking the foundation of the archive.” He met her gaze, his eyes clouded with worry. “We need to remember. *They* need to remember.”
“Alright.” Elara straightened, a determined set to her jaw. “Let’s go to Aethel.”
“It’s not a journey for the faint of heart.”
“Never been one.” She turned toward the exit, a lone figure against the oppressive darkness. “But bring the scroll. And the locket. I have a feeling we’ll need every echo we can find.”
