From the watchtower woven of new, unnervingly eager roots, the Cleansed Basin was a sea of emerald. Lauri Vatanen stood beside Anastasya Orlova, his stillness a new and unfamiliar language. The growth below was too fast, a hungry, aggressive tide of life that had swallowed the grey dust of the Ashen Tracts in weeks. The air was thick with the scent of chlorophyll and damp soil, a perfume so rich it was almost cloying. It was the smell of a world reborn, but it was not the smell of peace.
— It is not a healthy green, — Lauri said, his voice a low rumble, free of the ragged edge of withdrawal that had defined it for so long. — It is the color of a fever.
Anastasya nodded, her gaze sweeping across the basin. Her Regalis training screamed at her that this was chaos, a system out of balance, a problem to be contained and corrected. But her experience in the Progenitor’s Cradle had taught her a new, harder lesson. This was not a problem to be solved with walls and laws. This was a duty to be performed, a garden to be tended, forever. The Photosynthetic Myxoids woven into the watchtower’s structure pulsed with a nervous, rapid light, their life-song a high, anxious hum. They felt the land’s hunger, too.
The war against decay was over. The war against life itself was just beginning.
Far away, in a place of cold, polished stone and unwavering light, Gerasim Frolov felt no such anxiety. He stood in a sterile, hexagonal chamber deep within a hidden Regalis facility, a place that had never known the touch of soil or the chaos of a growing thing. The air smelled of recycled oxygen and the faint, sharp tang of ozone from the humming power conduits. His defeat at the Dead Hill had not broken him; it had focused him. It had given him a new, purer purpose.
Before him, a data-slate glowed with a cold, blue-white light. On its surface scrolled the intricate, alien architecture of the Sunken Song’s control schema, the prize his technician had stolen in the final moments of the battle. His Judgement Rod was racked on the wall, a tool for a simpler, cruder form of purification. This slate was a far more elegant weapon. The multi-faceted crystal lens that replaced his eye whirred softly, its internal facets shifting as it cross-referenced the precursor data with Regalis engineering principles.
He had witnessed the Verdant Wave. He had seen the unfettered, chaotic torrent of creation that had erupted from the machine. Where others saw a miracle, he had seen a catastrophic failure of control. Life without order was a cancer. The Silvanus, with their tangled groves and their talk of freedom, were a symptom of that cancer. The Sunken Song, in its current form, was the disease itself.
But a disease could be studied. It could be refined. It could be perfected.
A junior technician stood silently by the door, his posture rigid with a mixture of awe and terror. Gerasim did not turn to look at him. His entire being was focused on the glowing lines of the schematic.
— The heretic’s song was an emotional outburst, — Gerasim stated, his voice a flat, gravelly monotone that the chamber’s acoustics amplified into an oppressive presence. — It produced a wild, inefficient bloom. A weed patch on a planetary scale.
He placed a heavy, deliberate finger on the data-slate, tracing a complex energy matrix.
— We will give it a new song. A chant of pure logic. We will strip the chaos from its resonance. We will create a wave not of wild growth, but of perfect, sterile order. A purification that leaves behind not a hungry forest, but a clean, silent slate upon which a proper world can be built.
The technician swallowed, the sound loud in the quiet room. — Justicar, the energy requirements… they are astronomical.
— The Bastion will provide, — Gerasim said, his crystal eye flaring with a cold, internal fire. — Order demands it.
He looked at the schematic, and for the first time in weeks, a thin, cruel smile touched his lips. He would not simply replicate the Sunken Song. He would correct it. He would forge a weapon of perfect, absolute purification, and with it, he would finish the work he had started. He would prune the wild growth from the world, once and for all.
Back in the vibrant, unsettling green of the Cleansed Basin, a Silvanus messenger arrived. He was young, his fur the color of wet stone, and he moved with the silent grace of his people. He carried no scroll, no data-slate. He approached Anastasya and offered her a single, smooth river stone, cool to the touch. It was a memory-stone, a simple Myxoid artifact used to carry a message.
Anastasya took it, her gloved hand closing around its organic smoothness. She closed her eyes and focused, a technique Lauri had taught her. The stone pulsed once, and a wave of information flowed into her mind. It was not a voice, but a pure, conceptual transfer from a Silvanus elder, one of the lore-keepers who had survived Gerasim’s purges.
The message was the lullaby. The song that had activated the Sunken Song. The melody she had recognized from her own forgotten childhood. The notes unfolded in her mind, clear and precise, the five rising and falling tones that had rewritten the world. But this time, there was more.
After the familiar melody, there was a final verse. A short, complex sequence of notes she had never heard before. It felt alien, dissonant, an appendage grafted onto the simple, elegant song she knew. It felt… wrong.
She hummed the new verse aloud, her voice quiet. The notes were strange on her tongue, the intervals unnatural. Lauri, who had been observing the new growth from a distance, turned his head, a flicker of confusion in his clear eyes. The sound was discordant, a sour note in the otherwise harmonious, if anxious, hum of the basin.
But as the last note left her lips, something happened. It was not a sound or a light. It was a feeling, deep within her. A low, resonant thrum that seemed to originate not from the stone in her hand or the air around her, but from her own bones. A warmth spread through her veins, a feeling of recognition that was ancient and profound. It was the feeling of a key turning in a lock that had been rusted shut for a thousand years.
The elder’s final message bloomed in her mind, a simple, devastating statement of fact.
The song is the key. The blood is the lock.
Anastasya opened her eyes, the memory-stone suddenly feeling impossibly heavy in her hand. The bird song in the forest. The lullaby. It wasn’t just a memory. It was an inheritance. Her bloodline, a lineage she had been taught was defined by its adherence to Regalis law and order, was something else entirely. It was a component. A piece of living, precursor technology.
The war against decay was over. The war for control of creation itself had just begun.
