Chapter 17: Sea of Bone Stars
The journey to the coast was long and brutal.
Three days of traversal across shifting dunes and broken settlements. The old world had left its scars deep, and even now, fragments of buried cities sometimes whispered through the wind. Kai, Ashen, and Lina traveled under the cover of dusk, avoiding both Custodian patrol zones and the unstable pockets of drift left behind by ruptured Fragments.
Their goal: the edge of the Sinkline Trench, where the continent dipped into the waters of the shattered ocean—and the path to the next Fragment lay hidden in the Rootstar Depths.
But before the sea, there was the reef.
Not coral. Not stone.
Bone.
Stretching for miles along the cliffside was what the locals once called the Sea of Bone Stars. Jagged remains of ancient skybeasts—leviathans from before the Collapse—whose corpses had crystallized into towering skeletal monuments, gleaming under the twin moons.
"What happened here?" Lina whispered.
Ashen pulled her cloak tighter. "During the Cataclysm, when the sky cities fell and the Cultivation Grids collapsed, beasts that lived in the clouds—those that had fused with celestial Fragments—were dragged down. Killed mid-flight. Their bodies couldn't decay. So they calcified… and still pulse with trace energy."
Kai stepped closer to a massive rib arching into the sky, taller than any building he'd ever seen. His Fragment tingled faintly.
"This place is alive," he said.
Ashen nodded. "It's sacred to some. Dangerous to most. But if we cross it by nightfall, we can reach the trench's edge. There's an extraction lift under the ruins of the old lighthouse."
They began weaving through the maze of bones, each step crunching over fossil dust. The silence was eerie, but not empty.
"Do you hear that?" Lina asked after an hour.
Kai paused. There was a hum—low, rhythmic, almost like chanting.
Ashen's eyes went sharp. "Vein singers."
"Friendly?"
"No."
Figures emerged ahead, cloaked in obsidian robes marked with golden veins. Their eyes glowed dimly, and they carried tuning forks forged from Fragment cores. With each step, they struck the air with harmonic resonance.
"They're harvesting memory fields from the bones," Ashen whispered. "Tuning them to awaken latent echoes. They believe the leviathans left behind divine truths."
Lina frowned. "Cultists?"
"Worse. Archivists who went mad. Their minds are fragmented by exposure."
Kai stepped back, but too late.
One of the singers turned.
It didn't speak. Just raised a hand—and the bones around them began to vibrate.
Ashen swore and flared her Fragment. "Run!"
A pulse of sound shot out, and the bones shifted—closing like gates.
Kai drew his blade and focused.
Drift Step.
Time twisted.
He stepped to where he would have been three seconds ago—just beyond the encroaching wall of ribcage.
He turned, grabbed Lina by the arm, and yanked her through.
Ashen ducked and rolled under the next wave of sound, staff spinning to deflect a shard of bone.
"Don't fight them!" she shouted. "They feed on violence!"
Kai saw it—each strike they landed made the singers stronger, their voices louder.
They needed disruption, not destruction.
"Cover your ears!" he shouted.
He reached into his Fragment and pulled—not power, but discord.
A screeching feedback loop.
His core howled with resistance as he channeled it outward.
The singers recoiled.
For the first time, one of them screamed—not a chant, but a real, human cry.
They staggered back into the shadows of the ribcage, vanishing.
Kai collapsed to his knees.
Ashen knelt beside him. "You learned resonance breaking?"
"I didn't know I could," he panted.
She looked impressed. "That's a forbidden application. No one teaches it anymore."
Lina helped him up. "We're almost through. I can see the lighthouse."
Kai stood, glancing back at the bones.
In the distance, the singers watched—but made no move to follow.
"They'll remember us," Ashen said. "Every echo does."
They reached the lighthouse just as the sun dipped. The extraction lift waited, half-buried in sand, humming with residual charge.
Ashen activated the terminal.
A rumble. Then gears groaned.
The ground opened.
And the platform began to lower them down… into the ocean's shadow.
Toward the Rootstar Depths.
Toward the next Fragment.