The dust motes danced in the single shaft of light piercing the ruined temple. It smelled of wet stone and something else…something like burnt honey and regret. Old Man Tiber, they called him, though he wasn’t *that* old—more weathered, like the basalt columns around us. He traced a finger over a sigil, gold leaf flaking onto the floor. Each glyph pulsed faintly, a heartbeat in the silence.
I shifted, the weight of my pack digging into my shoulders. “You really think it’s here?”
“Here, beneath our feet, child. The Songslinger’s crypt. The place where they whispered immortality into being.” Tiber didn’t glance up. His voice, a dry rasp, barely carried over the drip of water. “Siggillar. Each one a verse. A story. Binding the old gods.”
“Binding? Sounds less ‘delicious’ than you made it.” I scanned the chamber. The walls were covered in these carvings, a dizzying chorus of forgotten narratives.
“Delicious is…a matter of taste.” He finally looked at me, his eyes, the color of storm clouds, holding a peculiar glint. “For those who understand the price of a song.”
“What price?”
Tiber chuckled, a brittle sound. “Oh, a little thing. A voice, perhaps. A memory. A piece of yourself.” He ran a hand over a particularly elaborate carving, one depicting a figure playing a lute with strings of what looked like captured starlight. “The Songslingers didn’t *give* immortality. They *exchanged* for it.”
“Exchanged with who?”
“The ones who slumbered before the music. The ones who hunger for it still.” He reached into his pack, pulling out a tarnished silver flute. The metal felt cool even through my gloves. “The echoing fall. That wasn’t a collapse, child. It was a silencing.”
He lifted the flute to his lips.
“Don’t,” I blurted.
The first note, a crystalline chime, fractured the silence. It wasn’t beautiful. It was *wrong*. It tasted like iron on my tongue.
“You warned me not to play,” Tiber murmured, not stopping. “But some doors must be opened. Some songs *must* be sung.”
The carvings began to glow, the gold intensifying. The air thrummed, thick and heavy. A low hum resonated from the floor, vibrating through my boots.
“What have you done?”
“Called them home.” A smile stretched across his face, a disturbing, brittle curve. “They’ve been so quiet for so long. Imagine the melodies we’ll unearth.”
The ground lurched. Dust rained down from the ceiling. The light flickered. A shadow, impossibly large, stretched across the chamber, and a voice, ancient and hollow, echoed through the ruins.
“A song for a song.”
