He saw Anastasya fall. The crystal spear, a shard of Gerasim’s absolute order, had found its mark. It punched through the interlocking plates of her Crystalline Myxoid armor, a brutal violation of its perfect, glowing geometry. She was a crumpled shape of grey and blue against the cold metal floor, a broken line in the Justicar’s perfect diagram. Lauri felt the impact in his own bones, a sympathetic shock that had nothing to do with biotics and everything to do with the fragile trust they had forged in fire and desperation.
All other options vanished, burned away in the white-hot agony of that single moment. Gerasim Frolov, the avatar of control, was advancing on him now, his Judgement Rod humming with contained power. To his left, the Justicar’s technician was frantically copying the Sunken Song’s control schema, stealing the very language of creation. Behind him, Jukka and Mikhail were pinned down, their own desperate efforts failing against the disciplined advance of the black-armored guards. There was no escape. There was no tactical retreat. There was only the machine.
The choice was not a choice. It was a duty. The final, terrible duty of a warden.
Lauri turned his back on the battle, an act of supreme faith or ultimate foolishness. He ignored the whine of incoming energy bolts and the booming commands of the Justicar. The chaos of the fight faded to a dull roar at the edge of his hearing. His entire world narrowed to the pulsating core of the Sunken Song suspended before him. It was waiting. It had been waiting for a thousand years.
He placed his hands on its surface. It was not cold metal, but something else, a fusion of living tissue and precursor alloy that felt like cool, smooth stone with a faint vibration deep within. The machine responded to his touch, its dormant hum rising in pitch, a question asked in a language of pure resonance. It was asking for a catalyst. It was asking for a battery.
He had nothing left to give it but himself.
This was the cost. Not his pain, not his grief. Those were just fuel. The price was the fire itself. He pushed his own life force, the quiet, steady song of his own biotic signature, into the machine. It was an irreversible act, a final turning of a key in a lock from which there was no return. The sensation was not one of pain, but of a profound and terrifying draining. It was the feeling of a deep well being emptied in a single, greedy gulp. Warmth fled his fingertips, then his arms, replaced by a spreading, absolute cold. The vibrant colors of the chamber began to fade, the pulsing lights of the conduits dimming as if seen through a thick grey veil.
The names surfaced in his mind, not as ghosts of guilt, but as the litany of his purpose. Matti. Kaisa. Elina. He was not dying for them. He was offering the final, active maintenance for the memory of their lives. This was the only act of stewardship he had left to give.
He opened his mouth, and the song came out. It was not the gentle lullaby Jukka had taught him, the melody Anastasya remembered from a forgotten childhood. It was a scream. He screamed the five rising and falling notes, tearing them from his throat with all the grief from the mountain pass, all the despair from the cave, and all the terrible, fragile hope he had found in Anastasya’s trust. The song was the key, but his raw, unfiltered soul was the force turning it.
The Sunken Song answered.
The core flared, its light shifting from a dormant pulse to a brilliant, blinding emerald. A new sound filled the chamber, a deep, resonant thrum that vibrated through the very foundations of the precursor facility. It was the sound of a great heart starting to beat. Outside, in the Ashen Tracts, the machine began to drink. Lauri could feel it, a vast and powerful drawing-in. The black, stagnant water of the Blight Swamp, the concentrated poison that had pooled for centuries, was being pulled through massive, unseen conduits, feeding the awakened core. The machine was filtering the blight, consuming the decay, converting a thousand years of corruption into raw, untamed energy. The emerald light of the core intensified, the hum rising to a deafening, world-shaking chord.
Then, it exhaled.
A tidal wave of shimmering, wine-green energy erupted from the peak of the Dead Hill. It was not a wave of destruction, but of pure, unbridled creation. It swept across the grey, dead landscape, and where it passed, the blight vaporized. The fine ash that coated everything turned to rich, black soil. Petrified trees exploded into clouds of fertile dust. The very air tasted clean and sharp. It was the scent of a world being born.
Gerasim Frolov stopped his advance, his crystal eye wide with horror. This was not Order. This was chaos. This was the unfettered, explosive, unpredictable torrent of life he had dedicated his existence to containing. It was anathema to his entire being. He stared at the wave of pure vitality as if it were the face of his one true enemy.
— Retreat! — he bellowed, his voice for the first time holding a note of something other than absolute certainty. It was fear.
He grabbed his technician, who had successfully copied the schema, and fled back through the ruined archway, not even bothering to retrieve his fallen soldiers. He ran from the miracle, clutching the stolen blueprint for a power he could never truly understand.
Lauri felt them go. He felt everything. The green wave of life washing over the land. The retreat of the enemy. The sudden, quiet peace. The last of his strength poured into the machine, a final, flickering ember. The emerald light filled his vision, beautiful and absolute. The cold that had started in his hands now reached his heart. His connection to the world, to the song of life he had sworn to protect, severed.
The chamber was silent but for the soft hum of the reborn land. The song had ended.
The singer was still.
