The air in the ruins was thick and wet, tasting of green things growing and grey things dying. Garran moved through it like a ghost, his feet making no sound on the damp earth and moss-covered polymer of the old city. He was a hunter. It was his purpose, his shape in the world. His hand rested on the smooth, cool shaft of his spear, the obsidian tip a shard of black glass hungry for a heart. Ahead, through a curtain of hanging vines that dripped with yesterday’s rain, a deer picked its way across a clearing. Its coat was the color of dried leaves. It was perfect.
He was part of the world and the world was part of him. The beat of his own heart was a slow, steady drum that matched the rhythm of the jungle. He could feel the weight of the humid air on his skin, smell the sweet rot of a fallen log fifty paces to his left, see the almost invisible shimmer of a spider’s web strung between a chrome strut and a tree branch. This was the great song of his home, The Wild, and he knew his part. He was the silence between the notes, the tension in the air before the strike. He was a necessary violence.
Then, another sound. A new one.
It was a low, persistent hum, a sound that did not belong. It was not the buzz of insects or the whisper of wind through the skeletal remains of the precursor towers. This sound was inside his head, a thin, metallic whine like a fly trapped in a jar. It was the spirit song, the name the elders had for the strange new madness that sometimes touched the tribe. A ghost in the skull. He paused, his body a statue, and tried to place it. He listened past the familiar chorus of the jungle, straining to find a source. There was none. The sound was coming from the meat of his own mind.
The hum grew, a line of visual noise flickering at the edge of his sight, a crack in the world. A static glitch in the otherwise perfect green. For a half-second, the forest shimmered, as if seen through heat haze. The deer’s head snapped up. It had felt his focus break. The moment was gone. The animal, a promise of food and warmth and life, vanished into the undergrowth with a flash of its white tail. The price for his distraction was a week’s worth of meat, gone. The silence it left behind was heavy and accusing.
He stood there for a long time, the useless spear heavy in his hand. The spirit song faded back to a barely audible buzz. It had cost him. The invisible thing had reached out and stolen food from the mouths of his people. He felt a surge of hot, helpless anger. How do you fight a sound? How do you kill a ghost that lives behind your own eyes? There was no answer. There was only the walk back to the camp, a walk he would have to make with empty hands.
The journey home was a slow, deliberate torment. Every familiar landmark—the fallen tower shaped like a claw, the stream that ran red with mineral deposits, the grove of glowing fungi—seemed to watch him with silent judgment. He was Garran, the provider. He was the one who read the land and brought back its bounty. Today, he was just a man taking a long walk, his only prize a story of failure. The sun dipped below the canopy, painting the sky in shades of orange and deep, bruised purple. The colors were beautiful, and he hated them for it.
He could smell the camp before he could see it, the familiar scent of woodsmoke and roasting meat. Someone else had been successful today. The thought was both a relief and a fresh sting to his pride. He emerged from the dense green into the central clearing, a wide space ringed by the communal huts and the crumbling facades of the old world. Heads turned. Conversations paused. The eyes of his tribe fell on his empty hands, and the story was told without a single word. His failure was a public record.
He saw her then, sitting by the main fire. Inara Zale. The matriarch of his tribe, her face a roadmap of seasons and sorrows, her back as straight as the spear he carried. She did not look at him. She stared into the flames, her presence a weight that settled the air around her. He knew he had to approach, to present his failure to her authority. It was the way. He walked toward the fire, each step heavier than the last. The crackle of the burning wood was the only sound in the world.
He stopped a respectful distance from her, waiting. The silence stretched, pulled taut between them. Finally, she looked up, her dark eyes holding no anger, only a deep, ancient weariness. She had seen this before. She had seen the spirit song touch others, tangling their senses and stealing their focus.
— The spirits are loud today, — she said, her voice a low rumble, the sound of stones shifting deep underground. — They make the world forget its shape.
He had no words to offer. She had given his failure a name, a place within their world of spirits and omens. It was a kindness, but it felt like a lie. This was not a spirit. It was something else, something cold and new and sharp. It was a machine-sound in a world of flesh and leaf. But he could not explain this. He could not describe the feeling of a wire buzzing in his soul. So he just nodded, a single, curt dip of his chin. It was an admission and a surrender.
He moved away from the fire, away from the eyes of his people, and found a place at the edge of the clearing. He sat with his back against the cool, smooth surface of a ruined wall, the spear laid across his knees. He looked up, past the jagged silhouettes of the precursor buildings, to a sky now filled with stars. The spirit song was a faint hum again, a ghost at the edge of his hearing. It was waiting. He felt a frustration so deep it was almost a sickness, a powerlessness that gnawed at his gut. He was a hunter in a world he understood, defeated by a whisper from a world he did not. The hum was a question, and he had a terrible feeling that an answer was coming.
He did not know the ghost was about to get a body.
