Chapter 5 – The Prison of Voices

The first thing Katakana felt was silence, but it wasn’t true silence. It was the kind that comes right after thunder, when your ears ring and the air feels heavy, waiting.

His body ached. Every breath burned. The ground beneath him pulsed faintly, like the skin of some sleeping giant.

He tried to stand, but his legs trembled. The fog here wasn’t gray. It was black, shimmering with faint veins of crimson light, drifting like smoke under a ceiling he couldn’t see.

Then came the whispers.

At first, they were soft, just echoes that brushed the edge of his hearing. But as he moved, they grew louder, thousands of overlapping voices murmuring in unison, rising and falling like an ocean tide.

“We are the forgotten.”
“We are the Choir.”
“We sing, and the world survives.”

Katakana stumbled backward, heart hammering. His pulse synced with the rhythm of their whispers. The fog parted slightly, and he saw them.

Hundreds of figures knelt in rows that stretched endlessly into the darkness. Each one was human once. He could tell by the faint glint of eyes, the curve of mouths. But their bodies were now translucent, half-dissolved, bound together by strands of shadow like puppet strings. Their mouths moved constantly, singing a wordless hymn that made the air vibrate.

And at the center of them all stood the figure from before, the shadow made of bone and voice.

It loomed high above the Choir, its skeletal frame draped in torn veils of black silk. Inside its ribs were flickering lights, maybe souls, glowing like trapped fireflies.

When it spoke, every other voice fell silent.

“Another offering joins the symphony.”

Its voice was beautiful and horrifying, deep and melodic, echoing as if the sound came from everywhere at once.

Katakana forced himself to speak, his voice breaking.
“Where am I?”

The figure leaned forward slightly, bones creaking like the hull of a sinking ship.
“In the heart of the song,” it said. “The place between silence and remembrance. You are now part of the Choir.”

“I don’t belong here!” Katakana shouted, backing away. “I offered myself. I didn’t ask to be this!”

The ground pulsed beneath him, and the figure’s laugh rippled through the air like a shattering chord.
“All who offer themselves belong to the hunger. You fed it with your voice. Now, it feeds on you.”

He felt it then, a pull deep inside his chest, as if invisible hands were reaching into his lungs and throat, trying to drag his very voice out of him.

“No!”

He fell to his knees, clutching his throat. The air around him shimmered. Faint strands of light, his breath, his soul, began to rise from his mouth. The Choir’s collective hum intensified, drawn to him like predators.

But something inside him pushed back.

A pulse of power, cold and sharp, erupted from his spine. The air cracked, and for a moment, the Choir stopped singing.

The bone figure tilted its head. “What is this?”

Katakana’s body glowed faintly, a dim silver light threading through his veins. His shadow lengthened across the ground, shifting into a strange silhouette that didn’t look human.

He gasped, eyes wide, the pain turning into fire.

Something deep inside him whispered, not in words, but in pure instinct.

“Not yet.”

He staggered to his feet, breathing hard. The Choir’s whispers returned, but this time they were confused. Some voices screamed. Others trembled, as if afraid.

The shadow creature took a single step back. The earth beneath them cracked open, spilling faint, glowing blood.

“Impossible…” it said softly. “No offering resists the song.”

Katakana wiped the blood from his mouth and glared at the creature. “Then maybe I’m not an offering.”

He turned and saw them.

Other souls, people who hadn’t yet vanished completely, huddled in the cracks between the Choir’s ranks. They looked at him with hollow eyes. Some mouthed words he couldn’t hear. One, a young woman, reached toward him.

“You don’t have much time,” she whispered. Her voice somehow reached through the noise. “The Choir consumes you piece by piece. If you don’t learn to control it, you’ll become part of the song forever.”

He stared at her, trembling. “Control it? What do you mean?”

She shook her head. “The power that answered you, it’s inside the hunger, but it’s not from it. It’s older, deeper.” Her voice broke. “Find the heart of the Choir. That’s where the truth waits.”

Before he could ask more, the ground split open beneath her. Black tendrils dragged her screaming into the dark.

Katakana lunged forward, but it was too late. She was gone.

Then the bone figure raised its hand, and the Choir began to sing again.

The song was unbearable this time. Every note cut like glass, every word burned through his skin. He fell to his knees again, teeth clenched, as the realm shook.

Through the agony, his vision blurred. He saw flashes of the real world, his sister crying, St. Williams smiling, the fog twisting above the town square.

He reached out blindly, trying to hold on to that memory.

His whisper was barely audible over the song.
“I’ll come back for you, Aiko.”

And then, faintly, beneath the roar of the Choir, he heard something new, not part of the song, not part of the screams.

A voice.
His own.
But deeper.

“When the fifteenth bell tolls, the skeleton wakes.”

The Choir froze for half a second. Even the bone figure looked startled.

Katakana’s eyes snapped open, glowing faintly silver again.

The realm trembled. The hum faltered.

The code had been spoken, and something ancient stirred within him.