CHAPTER 1564: STORY 1564: RHYTHM OF CINDERS

The ash pressed tighter, smothering sound and sight. Each breath seared like swallowing embers, every note of their song dragged down into silence. The lattice quivered, chains snapping one by one beneath the weight of suffocation.

Kael staggered to his knees, the fused blade sinking into the ground like a broken pillar. He tried to roar again, but the ash swallowed it, turning his voice into a muffled rasp. The others bent low, choking, their lights dimming.

The boy convulsed in Elara’s arms, lips blue, glow sputtering like a candle drowning in smoke. His small hand clawed weakly at the air, as if reaching for a voice he could no longer hear.

Elara wept, her throat shredded from the lullaby. “I can’t... he can’t...” She pressed her face to his hair, whispering fragments of song that dissolved as soon as they left her lips.

The Unborn’s whisper slithered through the suffocating haze. “Every fire dies without air. And here, there is no air. Only ash. Only me.”

The scarred woman slammed her spear butt against the ground, sparks leaping in the suffocating dark. Her voice tore through her throat, ragged, furious. “Then we don’t sing. We strike!”

She slammed the spear again—once, twice, thrice—each impact echoing faintly through the lattice. A rhythm. Harsh. Crude. But it cut through the ash where melody could not.

Kael lifted his blade, slamming it against the earth in counterpoint. The dull thunder of steel on stone answered the spear’s cadence. The farmer followed, pounding his fists against his chest, each blow a hollow drumbeat. The widow scraped her nails across the lattice itself, jagged sparks crackling with each stroke.

The ash writhed at the intrusion.

The boy gasped, his chest convulsing, then—weakly, tremblingly—his voice joined the rhythm. Not melody, not harmony, but a broken chant: jagged breaths turned to sound, a child’s defiance against suffocation.

The lattice flared in jagged pulses, each beat hammering against the cloud of ash. The survivors no longer sang—they pounded their grief, rage, and scars into rhythm. Their voices were ruined, but their bodies became the choir.

The fissure shuddered. The Unborn shrieked, its laughter warping into fury. “Barbarians! You think to outlast me with noise? You turn your death into percussion, and still believe it is life?”

The scarred woman spat blood into the ash. “Noise is enough... if it keeps him breathing.”

The boy’s glow flickered brighter for a heartbeat, his chant threading into their rhythm like a fragile drumbeat at the center of war. Kael leaned into it, every slam of his blade a vow. “As long as it beats, we do not fall.”

The ash recoiled, thinned by their relentless cadence. The battlefield became an anvil, each survivor a hammer striking against the dark.

The fissure pulsed, retreating, but its voice hissed with venom. “Strike your drums until your bones break. I will be waiting when your rhythm fails.”

For now, the ash parted just enough for breath. Just enough for the boy to live. Just enough to carry the war forward.