He touched his temple. "It's like reading a recipe for bread without knowing that bread exists. The information remains. But the experience is being…"
"Eaten," I said.
"Eaten," he confirmed.
The humming of the souls around us rose in pitch, a single, terrible note. Three of the nearest shades simply winked out. No fanfare. No goodbye. Just a slight shimmer, and then a smooth patch of air where a person used to be.
I heard Flynn make a sharp, wounded sound behind me.
The Devourer tightened its circuit.
I looked up at the dissolving skyline. I looked at the smoke where the palaces used to be. I looked at the grey void where the golden fields had been.
I looked at Master Theron's face, at the specific terror of a scholar watching knowledge drain away, not from the books, but from the body that loved them.
Something cracked open in my chest.
It wasn't the star-metal. That stayed solid. It was the part of me that was still the girl who had pressed wildflowers in a hidden alcove, who had hoarded small beautiful things against the grey certainty of duty. That part rose up, fierce and aching, and it refused to let these people die forgetting the smell of rain.
I walked to the center of the fountain.
I stepped into the shallow basin. The remaining water was cold around my boots, shockingly, brutally cold, the last real thing in the dissolving plaza.
I opened my throat, and I sang.
I had no musical training. The Citadel had not considered it necessary. But the star-metal did not care about training. It cared about frequency.
The first note was wrong. It came out small and cracked, a human sound, fragile and ridiculous in the vast dying quiet of Elysium. One of the shades turned its blank face toward me. The Devourer's circling slowed.
I ignored them both. I reached inward, past the exhaustion and the fear, past the golden crack seeping at my neck, past the dull throb of the Phlegethon crossing and the temple floor and all the other costs that had been levied against my body in this realm.
I reached for the things the Devourer could not eat. Not yet. Not while I was still here to hold them.
I reached for the courtyard of the Citadel on a wet morning. The specific smell of cold rain hitting warm stone, rising in a steam that smelled green and clean and alive. I reached for the feeling of sun hitting closed eyelids, turning the dark red. I reached for the texture of grass under bare feet, the way individual blades bend and spring back, a thousand tiny resistances.
I reached for wind.
The second note was different.
It rose from my chest, through the lattice of star-metal and bone, and it resonated. The runes on my left arm flared violet, then gold. The light spread upward, into my shoulder, up my throat. My voice changed. It became two voices, one human and one that was the sound the star-metal made when the Forgestruck it, a ringing, harmonic pitch that sat at the frequency of memory itself.
I sang a melody describing the smell of rain, but without words.
I sang of the weight of sunlight.
I sang the particular hush of wind through long grass, the way it builds and breaks in waves, the way it carries warmth and cold together in the same breath.
I poured every sensory memory I possessed into the sound. The ozone before a storm at the Citadel. The gritty warmth of the stones in the courtyard in summer. The smell of Master Theron's tea, chamomile and dust and old parchment, the smell of safety.
I poured them out, and the star-metal amplified them, transforming personal memory into something universal.
The song built. It wasn't loud. Loudness was the wrong word. It wasdense. It filled the plaza without echoing, saturating the air, displacing the grey, pressed-paper smell of the Devourer.
Master Theron's head came up. He stopped humming.
One by one, the other souls turned. The blank, searching terror in their faces shifted. Some of them were crying without knowing why, the tears running down faces that had forgotten they were capable of tears.
A woman in the middle of the huddle pressed her hand to her mouth. I felt, through the song, the specific thing she had recovered. A summer afternoon. A garden. Children.
