CHAPTER 1576: STORY 1576: THROUGH THE RIFT

The scream tore the cavern apart. Not a single sound, but a thousand, layered and splintered, every note the Unborn had devoured flung back in rage. The walls pulsed so violently the red veins burst, spilling streams of light that bled like liquid fire.

Kael staggered, shielding his face as shards of the cavern fell around them. His blade quivered, glowing brighter than it ever had, fed not by its own cracked core but by the echoes it had stolen back. His chest heaved, every scar singing with pain. “It’s breaking,” he rasped. “We’re breaking it.”

Elara pressed the boy to her chest. His glow flared dangerously, as though it might burn straight through her arms. He trembled, torn between collapse and brilliance. His chant came in jolts, uneven, raw. She whispered fiercely into his ear, “Don’t stop now. Don’t stop. Even broken voices can tear open the dark.”

The widow stumbled to her knees, her throat spilling both blood and sound. Each scream she forced out was shorter than the last, but sharper, piercing cracks into the fog that clung stubbornly around the maw. Her eyes blazed with something almost joyful, even through the agony. “If this is its breath... then I’ll choke it with mine.”

The scarred woman dug her spear into the earth to stay standing. Her ribs clicked, broken beyond repair, but she bared her teeth in a feral grin. She dragged her bloodied palm across her face, smearing red over old scars. “Let it mirror this,” she spat, driving her spear forward into the fog. The wound it carved rippled outward, widening the cracks that already split the maw.

The farmer’s drumbeat slowed to silence. Then, with trembling hands, he struck it once—so softly it was almost nothing. The sound was imperfect, a hollow echo of what he had left. Yet it spread farther than all the others, slipping between screams and chants, prying into the rift like water through stone. He smiled faintly, though his lips were cracked and pale. “Sometimes silence carries heavier than thunder.”

The maw writhed, its vast rift distorting. The faces within shrieked, twisting in agony as the cracks spread wider, spilling raw unformed sound into the cavern. The Unborn’s voice thundered above it all, fractured now, like bones snapping under weight:

“You sing yourselves open. You wound yourselves raw. You bleed the silence you were given. Step through then—and be nothing.”

The floor split. A fissure yawned beneath the survivors, not down but inward, pulling toward the maw itself.

Kael turned, blood running down his face, eyes burning with something that looked like both fury and awe. “It wants us inside.”

Elara’s arms tightened around the boy. “Then we go through,” she whispered. “But not as nothing. As every scar, every scream it failed to erase.”

The survivors stood on the edge as the maw tore wider, its scream a storm that threatened to rip them apart. And together—bleeding, broken, defiant—they stepped into the rift.

Into the throat of the Unborn itself.