Chapter 1 – The Last Dream

Katakana woke in the middle of the night.

The air was heavy, the kind of stillness that pressed down on his chest and made the room feel smaller than it was. He lay on his straw mattress, staring up at the ceiling beams, trying to understand what had dragged him from sleep.

No dogs barked. No crickets sang. The silence itself was unnatural.

He sat up slowly, eyes adjusting to the thin shaft of moonlight leaking through the shutters. Across the room, his younger sibling slept soundly, curled beneath a patched quilt, their face turned toward the wall. Katakana almost envied them.

Then he heard it.

A sound so faint he thought it was the blood rushing in his ears. But no, this was different. A vibration, a hum. At first it was only one voice, then two, then dozens, rising and falling like a tide. It seeped through the walls and floorboards, through the marrow of his bones.

A song.

His breath caught. He had never heard it before, but he had been warned all his life about what it meant. The townsfolk never dared to say its name at night, never admitted how it haunted the dark. They only whispered in daylight, in hushed tones, as though the words themselves might summon it.

The Hungry Choir.

Katakana gripped the edge of his blanket. He wanted to wake his sibling, to shake them from the dream that was making them whimper softly in their sleep, but his body wouldn’t move. The sound pinned him to the mattress, heavy and suffocating.

The voices wove together, not quite words, but full of meaning all the same: sorrow, hunger, inevitability. Shadows in the corners of the room shifted, stretching like claws across the floor. The shutters rattled, though no wind stirred the trees outside.

And then the voices whispered, as if leaning close to his ear:

“It begins again.”

Katakana’s stomach lurched. His pulse hammered in his throat. He forced himself to look at his sibling, afraid they might already be gone, but they only turned over, sighing, still asleep.

The song cut off. The shadows stilled.

Silence fell again. Too deep. Too heavy.

Katakana pressed his hands against his face and tried to tell himself it had been a dream. A trick of exhaustion. Nothing more.

But some part of him already knew the truth. The century was turning. The Choir was waking.

And soon, it would want a voice.