Chapter 29 : voices below

Since birth, the infection had been present ? That's nonsense, I was a normal human before all of this...I was infected during my first delivery. The transformation wasn’t chosen.

The air shimmered with raw mana, like the charged stillness before a lightning strike.

Lara stood frozen, the revelation hanging in the silence like a blade at her throat.

They were sent to take the children's place.

Across the room, Ryo trembled, hands braced against the stone floor, claws half-formed and twitching. His breath came in ragged gasps, and his pupils—those once kind, storm-blue eyes—were slitted now. Not human. Not entirely.

“Ryo,” she whispered, reaching for him.

He flinched, a growl slipping from his lips—not at her, but at Mira.

Mira turned her back. “Touch him now and you’ll unleash it. He’s too close.”

Lara’s voice cracked. “You sent Vix and Aldah to die.”

“No,” Mira said quietly. “I sent them to buy time.”

The villagers murmured, some lowering their weapons. Others crossed themselves, whispering rites older than the mountains. No one moved to help Ryo. No one looked at Lara.

And suddenly, she understood: they had all known.

They’d all known.

The glyphs carved into doorways, the forbidden paths marked with frost-sigil, the offerings left at the mouth of the mines each winter solstice. It hadn’t been superstition.

It had been maintenance.

“Why not tell us the truth?” Lara demanded.

Mira didn’t answer. She stepped toward the hearth, holding the shard aloft. In its glow, shadows flickered and retreated as if afraid.

“You wouldn’t have believed it,” she said at last. “You’d have tried to fight.”

“And now I will,” Lara hissed, mana flaring from her palms—only to gutter out, choked by the same ward Mira had cast over the room.

Ryo looked up, his voice ragged. “Lara—don’t.”

But it was too late.

Lara launched herself at Mira with nothing but her bare fists.

The old woman didn't flinch.

With a flick of the crystal, she cast Lara into the far wall. The impact stole her breath. The villagers didn’t move. They watched.

Ryo forced himself upright, one foot planted, the other dragging. His claws had retracted, but barely. He held onto himself by a thread, every muscle quivering.

“You think you’ve controlled the beast,” Mira said, “but you’ve only slowed its rise. When the hunger returns, and it will, it won’t whisper anymore. It will scream.”

She turned to the door, and the villagers parted before her.

“When the mines go dark,” she said softly, “pray the sacrifice holds.”

And she left.

---

The silence after the humming faded was not quiet. It throbbed.

Aldah pressed her back to the tunnel wall, eyes fixed on the darkness ahead. Some force in the air that made her blood feel wrong.

Vix crouched beside her, still as stone.

He hadn’t spoken since naming the thing.

> Nhar'zel.

The name coiled like ash in the throat.

They had stopped singing. The ghost-choir. The broken children. Whatever remained of them.

But something had replaced it.

A sound beneath sound. Like bones grinding beneath soil. Like breath drawn through a corpse.

“I don’t think we’re alone,” Aldah whispered.

Vix didn’t answer.

Instead, he touched the wall. His fingers hovered over the pulsing mana vein.

“…They’re not just voices,” he said slowly. “They’re in the crystals. Trapped.”

He turned to her, face pale.

“They never died.”

Aldah’s stomach turned. “That’s impossible.”

But she remembered the helmet. The child-sized gloves turned to stone. And the song—the way it had seemed to vibrate the very walls.

“It’s the mana,” he said. “It didn’t just attract the beast. It fed it. And when they sealed the shaft, the mana preserved what was left. But not alive. Not dead.”

“Suspended,” Aldah said, breath fogging in the cold. “Like insects in amber.”

Vix nodded. “And we just walked into its nest.”

They moved, slowly, deeper into the tunnel. Every step took them closer to where the veins grew brightest—and where the air felt most alive.

Then they saw it.

A chamber opened before them, vast and circular, with a pit at its center. Dozens of crystal pillars jutted from the floor and ceiling, humming softly. Some were cracked. Some bled faint light. And inside each—

Eyes.

Faces.

Children.

Aldah staggered back, bile rising.

But Vix moved forward.

He stared into one of the crystals. A boy looked back. His mouth was open, singing soundlessly. A pick hung frozen in his hands.

The boy’s eyes moved.

Just slightly.

Just enough.

Vix fell to his knees.

“They’re alive,” he breathed.

And then, from the pit—

A sound like thunder.

The mana veins along the walls lit up, one by one, a circuit awakening.

From the pit, something climbed.

It didn’t have a shape. Not at first. Just a mass of shadow, flickering with fragments—an arm here, a jaw there, a scream that had no mouth. But in the center, deep and burning, was a heart of crystal. Black. Beating.

Aldah yanked Vix to his feet. “We have to run!”

“We can’t,” he said, voice flat. “It’s not after us.”

She turned to him. “Then what—?”

The answer came from below.

The beast opened its mouth.

And from it came the voice of a hundred children.

“…Where is Mira…?”

The chamber screamed.

---

Back in Mira’s home, Lara woke with blood in her mouth.

Ryo was gone.

The scrolls were burning.

She crawled to the desk, dragging herself through ash and broken sigils. Her fingers closed around a single page—half-burned, curling at the edge. The ink was Mira’s, but the writing wasn’t a spell.

It was a map.

A second mine. A deeper vein. One never sealed.

Drawn in red.

And scrawled beside it, as if written in haste:

> “If Nhar'zel breaks free, this is the only place it can be killed.”

Below that:

> “But it will cost everything.”

The door slammed open behind her. Snow swirled in. A figure stood in the doorway.

Nhar'zel

He didn’t speak.

And he didn’t come alone.

Behind him, in the blizzard—

Voices.

Humming.