CHAPTER 1470: STORY 1470: THE BREATHING EARTH

The tunnel stretched before them, narrower now, as though the stone itself had tightened in the marrow’s absence. Dust rained in lazy drifts, catching the faint glow that leaked from Elena’s veins and Mira’s fractured ribs. Their light had become their torch, but also their burden—neither woman could forget what it meant, what it cost.

Every step felt heavier than the last. The silence pressed on them, not empty now, but listening.

“Elena.” Mira’s voice was thin, fragile. “Do you hear it?”

Elena slowed. At first, only their footsteps and their ragged breathing filled the air. Then—beneath it—something else. A faint, rhythmic sound, steady as a heartbeat. Not theirs.

The walls.

The tunnel itself was pulsing, like a vein struggling to remember blood.

Her stomach twisted. “It’s alive.”

Mira touched the stone with her crystalline hand. The surface trembled beneath her fingers, almost recoiling. “No... it’s remembering. Without the Monarch, the marrow doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be.”

As if to prove her point, a ripple ran down the passage. The walls flexed, expelling a gust of warm, damp air that carried the smell of rot and iron. Far ahead, a faint glow answered—greenish this time, and not their own.

Elena tightened her grip on Mira’s hand. “We can’t go back. We move.”

They pressed on, the tunnel narrowing until they had to hunch, ribs scraping against damp walls. The glow ahead thickened into a haze, a luminous fog that clung to their skin. It smelled sweeter now, cloying, almost like spoiled fruit left too long in the sun.

Shapes began to emerge within it. Not worms. Not Monarch skulls. Something else.

Figures.

They were human in outline, but only barely—translucent bodies stitched together from marrow-light, faces featureless except for wide, gaping mouths that opened and closed soundlessly. They hovered in the haze, tethered to the walls by veins of glowing tissue.

Mira froze, her body trembling. “The lost vessels...”

Elena’s chest tightened. She recognized some of the outlines—shapes of the prisoners who had tumbled from their sacs before shriveling into dust. They weren’t gone after all. The marrow had held onto them, reshaping them into these silent phantoms.

One of the figures drifted closer, its jaw unhinging wider than it should. Its mouth didn’t scream—it sang. A broken hum, fragments of the Monarch’s hymn, twisted and incomplete.

The others answered.

The tunnel filled with a fractured chorus, rising and falling like a dirge sung by the dead. The sound scraped across Elena’s bones, stirring the ember inside her until it flared, hungry. Mira cried out, clutching her chest as her crystalline veins shivered with light.

“They want it back,” Elena realized, her teeth clenched against the pull. “They want us.”

The phantoms surged forward, mouths yawning wide, the broken hymn swelling into a suffocating storm.

Elena grabbed Mira’s arm, dragging her through the haze. Their lights burned brighter as the phantoms pressed closer, reaching with hands of marrow-fire.

Every note of their song was a claw in Elena’s chest, urging her to surrender, to give herself back.

But she refused.

Her grip on Mira was the only anchor she had left.

And as they stumbled deeper into the breathing earth, the song of the dead rose higher, chasing them into the dark.