She didn’t remember hitting the ground.

  Just a strange pressure around her that seemed to vanish the moment it arrived.

  She looked down at her body—only a blur now, her clothing lost in the haze. The sound of something ancient groaned beneath her, like a rusted gear refusing to turn. Then came the fog. Thick and velvet-black, it wrapped around her like wet cloth, smelling faintly of copper and smoke. There was no sky. No ship. No breath. Just the sensation of being suspended—between pain and peace, between now and never.

  The blue pulse was gone.

  Her fingers twitched, reaching for the locket that was no longer there.

  “Amelia! It’s been quite some time!”

  A loud, raspy whisper—suddenly bright and cheery. Not a voice, exactly. More like a feeling pressed into sound—like wind sifting through old cloth, brushing the inside of her skull.

  She turned slowly, sluggish, like someone moving underwater.

  Shapes moved within the fog—gentle, glowing outlines. One was tall, rigid, unmistakably mechanical, with twin eyes that flickered like dying stars.

  The other… was an owl.

  No, not quite. A man shaped like an owl. Or an owl shaped like a man.

  He stood at the edge of the darkness—majestic and terrible, like a monument fallen sideways. Half of his body flickered between flesh and chrome, the other cloaked in a tattered white coat, frayed with ash. His helmet—an avian skull—hung low over his eyes. Where feathers should have been, wires dangled like stringy vines.

  She staggered toward them.

  “Glassford?” she rasped. “No… Roy?”

  He turned. No longer the chirpy, curious Roy she remembered—but something quieter. His eyes no longer blinked yellow. They burned white.

  “Please understand. I killed you,” Roy said. “Similar to Erasmus… I was able to split my consciousness. The tiny security automatons triggered an explosion. The Pappy Long Legs is currently free from the grasp of the Whistlin’ Death.”

  “Died?” Amelia stuttered. “H-h-how’s this—?”

  “I was not alone in this plan,” Roy continued.

  Behind him, Glassford remained unmoving—large, towering, with a soft smile that would make even the moon jealous.

  Amelia blinked slowly, knees nearly buckling. “This is a dream,” she muttered, slapping at her face. Nothing. No sensation. “What is this!?” she cried out in panic. “Roy—I don’t feel the same! And this place—it’s familiar, like the gorges in the mines, but wrong. What plan? What is this?”

  “The Malice, known to you as the Devil Dog,” Roy said carefully, “sent you here. You escaped only by dying.”

  A condition, she thought suddenly—remembering Erasmus.

  “Roy… how do you know? About Erasmus? About me? About anything?” she blurted, floating in place, trying to reach him—but every motion only dragged her further away. “You’re supposed to be dead. Erasmus—he—”

  Roy stepped forward, reaching out his hand.

  “I was destroyed, yes. But I managed to infuse part of my consciousness into Glassford’s corpse. It was… accidental. Upon Rick’s death—and what may have been my own—I slipped into the core within Glassford’s chest.”

  “The metal bit,” Amelia whispered.

  Roy nodded. “Not quite sure how. But a piece of my mind… mended with his.”

  “Why did—”

  And then Glassford spoke.

  “Amelia,” he said, and the fog quaked with his voice.

  It was no longer the proud, measured tone of a Quadrant Leader. This was something deeper—lower. Like wind rustling through forgotten feathers.

  “I may have answers. Though truthfully, I’ll likely sprout more questions, too,” he added, almost casually. “Still—I trust you now understand your abilities a bit more, now that you’ve seen that we… the Quadrant Leaders… like you… can die.”

  His massive frame loomed closer.

  Glassford’s image snapped forward suddenly, surging through the fog with impossible speed. His towering form loomed over her, vast and blinding in the gloom. For a moment, it was as if the void itself had bent to make room for him. The hollow sockets of his owl-helm stared directly into her soul, and with a mechanical hiss, his chest opened—not violently, but like a blooming vault—revealing a core of living flesh encased in a pulsing ring of Gigarock. It hovered there, exposed and radiant, beating faintly like a heart preserved in crystal. Amelia flinched, the glow washing over her face in waves of blue and orange, making the air feel thick and reverent.

  She stumbled back. Her gaze landed on the pulsing material encased in Gigarock—fleshy, alive—exposed, floating in front of Glassford’s chest like a glowing wound.

  Her breath hitched. “Is this where the pieces come from?” she asked quietly. “The… heart things? Where you went. When you died?”

  Glassford tilted his avian head.

  “This is where they return,” he said. “Where my twelve siblings and I must end up eventually.”

  Amelia looked down.

  The fog had parted at her feet, revealing tiny bronze flowers blooming up from the darkness. Their petals unfurled one by one, and each pulsed with blue light—soft, steady, like heartbeats.

  And somewhere deeper—beneath it all—she heard it.

  A hum.

  The beginning of a song.

  A low hum stirred beneath her again. Not the song. Not yet.

  But something like it.

  Then—

  The ground vanished.

  Amelia gasped as her body dropped into open nothingness. No floor. No gravity. Just fog peeling away like silk.

  Then, with a strange clang—she landed.

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  Not hard.

  She hit something soft, but not like cloth or cushion.

  It pulsed beneath her. Warm. Metallic. Alive.

  A massive flower—its petals bronze and brassy, blooming outward in slow motion—cradled her gently as it drifted downward.

  Down… down… endlessly down.

  She lay there for a moment, breath held, heart stunned, letting the flower carry her.

  Above, the fog thinned. Light trickled in.

  Not starlight.

  Daylight.

  But wrong.

  The sky overhead melted into a rolling expanse of pale blue… except scattered across it were stars. Dozens. Hundreds. Not twinkling—but burning. Like tiny suns stitched into the daylight itself.

  The clouds parted like theatre curtains, revealing a sprawling panorama unlike anything she had ever seen.

  All thirteen Quadrants.

  Beneath her.

  Not as a map. Not as a memory.

  Real.

  She sat up slowly on the flower’s trembling surface, watching it drift through the false sky. Her breath caught as her eyes traced the outlines: the towering needle-spires of Quadrant Zero, the layered entertainment rings of Quadrant Two, the toxic black shimmer from Twelve’s mines, the green-glow orchards of Quadrant Five.

  They were all there—every machine-ruled sector, living and crawling like circuits in a sleeping beast.

  And then she saw it.

  Beneath it all.

  A shape.

  No—a skeleton.

  Green. Faint. Translucent like an x-ray projected through the crust of the earth. It stretched across the entire width of the city like a slumbering titan, its arms folded inward, curled like a child in a steel womb.

  Yerro.

  Sleeping.

  Not dead.

  And somehow… still growing.

  She saw gears embedded in bone, pistons in vertebrae, long spindled fingers twitching in slow, unseen rhythms. A machine-colossus beneath the crust of New Dwarden. Its ribcage wrapped around the Quadrants like armor. Its head—enormous and crowned with rusted antlers of copper wire—nestled beneath Quadrant Zero.

  The sight of it made her throat tighten.

  “By the goblet and green,” she whispered. “Yerro’s more than alive. It’s asleep. Not just a heart chamber under Quadrant Zero…”

  Her voice dropped to a hush.

  “Every Quadrant. A piece.”

  As the flower slowed its descent, leveling out, the sun overhead began to dim—not from nightfall, but from something else.

  A shape in the daylight.

  A circle.

  Like an eye, half-lidded, gazing down.

  And somewhere in the back of her mind—the hum returned.

  Low. Melodic. Off-beat, but familiar.

  The beginning of Yerro’s song.

  The hum deepened.

  It wasn’t coming from below her anymore. It was rising from the city itself.

  The Quadrants began to move.

  Not just the people, not the trains or the gears or the steam vents—but the entire architecture. Whole districts shifted like clock hands, rotating on unseen axles, buildings sliding across platforms like teeth of an enormous gear. Towers folded inward. Bridges unwound like ribbons. Streets spiraled slowly into coils and rings.

  All thirteen Quadrants—each one reshaping itself as if choreographed by something ancient and unseen.

  Then came the wind.

  Not a natural breeze. No birds. No clouds stirred. This wind had rhythm. Intent. It moved through the bones of the city—through chimneys and ducts and massive brass tunnels that unfolded like blooming instruments. Spires widened into horns. Alleyways constricted into thin reed-mouths. Entire buildings shifted to form the walls of enormous pipes, air rushing through them like a god’s exhale.

  Yerro’s song had begun.

  A haunting, low tone shivered through the atmosphere—so deep it made the flower beneath her tremble. It was not just music. It was feeling. Notes dragged like grief, stretched across impossible octaves. Each breath of wind pressed sorrow into shape, bending sound into ache.

  The city was a colossal aerophone. A wind instrument of bone and brass. The exhalation of a machine soul dreaming beneath its own skin.

  Amelia gripped the edge of the flower’s petal, eyes wide, throat tight.

  The music wasn’t beautiful.

  It was too beautiful.

  Too vast.

  Too sad.

  She felt it claw at her ribs, squeezing something tender beneath the armor of her thoughts. Images rose unbidden in her mind—her brothers laughing in the garden, her mother’s quiet hands brushing dust from old gears, her father’s silhouette across the dinner table, always facing away, always speaking to someone else.

  Tears welled in her eyes without permission.

  She hated how quiet her heart felt now. How still her breath had become.

  Yerro's song swelled—not loud, but large. It filled the sky, the city, the memory of the city. It was mourning something. Not a death.

  A forgetting.

  And as the wind howled through New Dwarden’s engineered lungs, Amelia realized:

  The machine wasn’t just asleep.

  It was lonely.

  The wind grew colder.

  The song twisted—less melody now, more ache. Each breath from the city felt heavier. The kind of sound that made bones want to bend.

  Amelia gripped the petal’s edge harder, her knuckles blanching. Her chest tightened—not with fear, but grief. She didn’t know why. The music didn’t speak in words, but every note felt like loss. Like leaving something behind you didn’t realize was precious until it was too far gone.

  She hunched forward, eyes blurry with tears she hadn’t meant to shed.

  And still… the music climbed.

  Richer.

  Deeper.

  Louder.

  It filled her lungs, pushed into her throat. Her ribs felt brittle. Like something inside her wanted to shatter just to join in.

  Then she saw it.

  Far below New Dwarden—deeper than the roots of the city, beyond the reach of light or machinery—something moved in the darkness.

  Two points of green light.

  Not glowing.

  Watching.

  Eyes. Enormous. Patient. Unblinking.

  Yerro.

  They blinked once, slowly—a motion that rippled through the crust of the world like a landslide made of breath.

  And then she heard it.

  Not music.

  Not wind.

  Not gears.

  A voice.

  Not in words, but in sheer presence.

  It filled her head like an avalanche—so loud it didn’t make sound. Just pressure. Like all of New Dwarden was pressing into her skull at once.

  It didn’t speak her name. It didn’t have to.

  It reached for her.

  Her hands clutched her ears, but it didn’t help. The hum became a scream—not angry, not violent, but infinite. Like sorrow had turned into gravity and was pulling her under.

  She gasped, choking on the silence between notes.

  Her mind began to fray.

  The flower trembled.

  “Amelia!”

  Roy’s voice snapped through the pressure.

  She felt arms—small but unyielding—wrap around her shoulders. Then another set of hands—larger, gentler, feathered with wire—lifted her by the waist.

  Glassford.

  The flower recoiled as if struck, petals curling inward to shield her. The massive bronze bloom lurched backward, upward, pulling her away from the green-eyed abyss far below.

  “No!” she screamed, even as her lungs failed to hold air. “I—I almost—”

  “You almost fell,” Roy said, voice shaking with more emotion than she’d ever heard from him. “You almost joined. That… that’s not a song you survive.”

  Beneath them, Yerro’s eyes remained—staring, somehow oozing water and oil from it’s widening eyes.

  Still.

  Empty.

  Endless.

  And as the wind died, the song fractured into silence, like a funeral cut short.