Chapter 47: The Choir of the Dead
The bell tolled once.
Its sound wasn't carried by air.
It bloomed inside the mind a low, soul-deep hum that didn't fade.
It stayed.
Like grief.
---
Lyra clutched Kael's hand tighter, her breath shaking.
Maerin whispered behind them, "Where is it coming from?"
But she already knew.
They all did.
"It's the last bell," Lyra murmured. "The one that was never meant to ring."
The shadows stood in silence around the square.
People who no longer were.
But used to be.
Men and women frozen in their final shapes bakers, mothers, children, healers, lovers. Their features blurred by time, but their eyes?
Open. Aware. Afraid.
Kael moved closer to Lyra. "What are they waiting for?"
Then…
They spoke.
>All of them. At once.
In unison.
Whispering, not yelling.
Their mouths opened… and names poured out.
---
It was like a windstorm of history.
Names Lyra didn't recognize but felt in her blood.
Names of children buried without markers.
Names of women who died screaming under lies.
Names of men who were cursed to forget themselves until their souls split.
And beneath the names… a phrase, repeated again and again.
"We were the cost."
Lyra staggered back.
"No stop"
But they didn't.
Because they couldn't.
---
They weren't trying to hurt her.
They were begging her to remember.
To remember not just the curse…
But what the town really was.
---
One voice rose above the others.
A child's.
A little girl's.
Her form was faint but she looked like Lyra might have, long ago.
Dirty curls. Pale skin. Barefoot.
She held something in her hands.
A seed.
"You made the pact to protect us. But they twisted it."
"They fed us to it."
"You have to dig it up."
Kael whispered, "Dig what up?"
The child looked at him.
And in her eyes Kael saw himself.
Younger.
Weaker.
Tied to a post as someone whispered his name into the roots.
"They fed you too," the girl said.
"You just don't remember."
Kael's knees buckled.
Memories surged like knives:
A man's voice begging not to name him.
A girl Lyra? watching through a crack in a door.
A symbol being carved onto his spine while roots pulsed beneath him.
"Kael," Lyra breathed. "You were part of the pact too."
The whispering grew louder.
The shadows trembled.
They were trying to push something out.
A shape.
Beneath the town.
A form so massive it had become the foundation of Whisperwood itself.
---
The First Root.
Not asleep.
Just waiting to be remembered.
Not as a curse.
Not as a god.
But as a decision.
A wrong one.
-
The child dropped the seed at Lyra's feet.
It split open.
Inside — a folded note. Crumbling with age. Blood-stamped.
Lyra bent, hands shaking, and opened it.
Her mother's handwriting.
"In case I forget again
The First Root is not a curse.
It is a consequence.
We buried our sin to keep the town alive."
---
Maerin read over her shoulder.
"Whisperwood wasn't cursed by magic…"
Lyra nodded, numb.
"It was cursed by silence."
"By people too afraid to admit what they did."
---
The dead around them all dropped to their knees.
Their hands raised in supplication.
And one final phrase poured from every mouth:
"Free us."
Lyra collapsed forward, sobbing.
Not just grief.
Guilt.
Because deep down… a part of her had always known.
She had felt it in the soil. In the way the town watched but never spoke. In the names that clung to her skin like shame.
She had been born not just to break the curse.
But to confess it.
---
Kael pulled her to him, holding her tight.
"I remember," he whispered. "I remember being taken. I remember Oran… trying to protect me."
Lyra's voice was hollow. "And I remember… letting him."
Maerin watched them both, jaw set.
"Then there's only one thing left."
---
Lyra stood.
Eyes hard.
The seed in her hand.
She turned toward the center of the square.
Where the bell hung.
The place no one had entered in centuries.
The heart of the town.
The Root Chamber.
"We dig it up."
As they stepped into the square, the shadows parted.
And the bell tolled again.
The last time.
And beneath their feet…
The earth split open.
A stairway spiraled down.
Made of bone.