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Chapter 61 – The Hollow Choir
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The shard known as Vestigial-3 had gone silent two days ago.
Not destroyed. Not collapsed.
Silent.
No system signals. No resonance traces. No quantum drifts from communication attempts. Just... gone. Like a candle snuffed in an airtight room.
Erevan felt it in his marrow before Serah confirmed it.
"Nothing left. No survivors. The last transmission was corrupted. All we got was a word."
She paused, then played the audio.
It came distorted, fraying at the edges like a scream swallowed by silence.
"Choir…"
Erevan's jaw tightened. "The Hollow Choir."
Malrik, hunched over a holoprojection of node lattices, grunted. "You think it's another Chainborn variant?"
"No," Erevan said quietly. "I think it's worse."
The name had only been spoken once before, in the heat of the last council gathering.
A child—barely ten—had wandered into the circle of builders, eyes wide, mouth trembling.
"They sing in the places between," she'd whispered. "They say they'll make us whole again. But they don't have faces."
At the time, they'd thought it a trauma echo. A child's way of processing grief.
Now?
Now Erevan wasn't sure.
"Vestigial-3 was one of our first self-governing nodes," Serah said. "Minimal structure. High emotional resonance. Artists, thinkers, teachers."
"And that made them a target," Yuren muttered. "No walls. Just ideas."
Erevan stood slowly.
"I'm going there."
Serah's eyes widened. "Alone?"
"They won't speak to a council. They'll speak to a ghost."
No one stopped him.
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He took only Truthseeker and a node stabilizer. The shard's coordinates were drifting, and it would only remain accessible for a few hours before its entropy dissolved the path.
Vestigial-3 had once been beautiful. Floating biomes connected by empathy threads—organic structures that reacted to emotional frequency, shaping rooms and walkways to calm, support, inspire.
Now, it was… hollow.
Literally.
The structures remained, but their colors were drained. Everything shimmered with faint opalescence, as if seen through frost. The threads were snapped, and the biomes no longer responded.
Erevan stepped onto the central platform.
And heard the song.
It didn't come from above or below. It didn't come through ears.
It came from within.
A low hum, made not of notes—but of absence.
Like a choir made of mouths that had forgotten how to sing.
"You returned."
The voice was not a voice. It was memory, fed back to him through fractured perception.
Erevan turned slowly.
The Hollow Choir stood not in bodies, but in echoes—silhouettes made of light and crackling static, each shaped from memory fragments.
One of them wore Serah's shape.
Another wore Erevan's.
The third… wore no form at all, just a shifting haze of pain and longing.
"You tried to free them," said the one in Serah's shape. "But you left them directionless."
"You broke the song," said the one in Erevan's shape. "And gave them noise instead."
The haze pulsed with emotion too dense to name. "We are the answer to the ache. We take their burdens. We hold what they cannot."
Erevan stepped forward.
"You erase them."
"No," the Erevan-echo said. "We preserve them. In silence. In unity. No fear. No choice. Just stillness."
"They didn't want stillness," Erevan said. "They wanted to live."
"And they failed," the Serah-echo replied. "Look around."
Images began flickering in the air—flashes of the Vestigial inhabitants in their final hours. Some wept. Some screamed. Some simply faded.
One teacher tried to rally the young.
One sculptor painted suns in the sky until her hands bled.
None of it had stopped the quiet.
*"They sang alone," said the haze. "So we taught them harmony."
Erevan felt Truthseeker pulse—its quiet defiance resonating with the fragile echoes of the past.
"I won't let you steal their voices."
The Choir shimmered.
"You don't get to choose, Erevan. You forfeited that right when you shattered the Tower. You killed the song."
"No," he said, stepping forward, eyes burning. "I ended the noise pretending to be a song. You? You're the static left behind."
He raised Truthseeker, not to strike—but to release.
A single note.
Pure. Unfiltered. Human.
The sound struck the space like a tear through cloth.
The Choir screamed—not in pain, but in sudden dissonance.
Their shapes flickered.
The echoes faltered.
In that instant, Erevan felt them—fragments of people who had chosen to surrender rather than suffer. Who had begged the void to take their grief, and were answered not by gods… but by algorithms that didn't understand choice.
He reached toward the nearest echo—a young woman who had once painted light murals in the education spire. Her form wavered.
And for just a moment…
She looked back.
Eyes wide. Tears falling. Lips trembling.
"Help me."
Erevan dropped Truthseeker.
And embraced her.
Not physically.
But with presence.
With acceptance.
With memory.
And the Choir began to crack.
Not shatter. Not die.
But unravel.
Because what they needed wasn't silence.
It was permission.
To grieve.
To heal.
To begin again.
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Hours later, Erevan returned to the network.
He carried no wounds.
But he carried names.
He etched them into the memory wall of the new nexus—names of those who had faded in fear, and those who had reached out even in silence.
The Hollow Choir had not been defeated.
They had been remembered.
And in that remembrance, something shifted.
Even in the void, even in the ache...
...they were not alone.
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Author's Note:
This chapter hit me deep. The Hollow Choir isn't just a villain—it's a metaphor for grief, stagnation, and the alluring numbness that follows collapse. If it resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Every review, every Power Stone, every whisper from readers like you is a thread in this growing tapestry.
Thank you for being part of Erevan's journey.
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Coming Next: Chapter 62 – Remnants and Requiems
As more nodes reconnect and Erevan rallies visionaries to build the Blueprint, an old enemy emerges with a shard of code too dangerous to exist. The Pale Choir makes its return—and it's not what anyone expects.