The journey through the High District was a descent into an ivory nightmare.
Every street was a corridor of frozen lives. Kian led the way, his jagged iron stone glowing with a faint, rebellious heat that warded off the creeping calcification.
They passed a group of Scholars who had been frozen mid-debate, their fingers pointed at scrolls that were now sheets of slate.
The horror was not in their deaths—it was in the fact that they were still aware.
As a Truth-Bearer, Dante could see the electrical impulses of their brains trapped behind the stone masks.
"They're screaming, Kian," Dante choked out, covering his eyes.
"Inside their heads, they're screaming. The stone doesn't kill the mind; it just removes the voice. Silas isn't making art. He's making a prison of a billion cells."
"Then don't listen to the screams," Kian snapped, though his own jaw was tight with a cold, Shakespearean fury.
"Listen to the Pulse. If we falter, we join them. Sion, give me a bearing. Where is he?"
Sion stood in the middle of a bridge, his arms outstretched.
He was no longer just a boy; he was a Lightning Rod of Grief.
He was absorbing the terror of the frozen city, his body trembling with the kinetic energy of a million suppressed panics.
"He's at the Great Altar of the Reservoir," Sion gasped, black ink leaking from his eyes.
"He's using the water as a conductor. He's turning the city's lifeblood into liquid stone. Kian... the weight... it's too much. I can't hold the dam forever."
"You don't have to hold it," Kian said, his eyes fixated on the massive spire rising from the Reservoir.
"You just have to aim it. When we reach him, I want you to release everything. I want you to drown the Sculptor in the very emotions he tried to silence."
Suddenly, the ground beneath them shifted.
Not an earthquake, but a Sculpting.
The marble tiles rose like waves, forming jagged hands that reached for their ankles.
"The Masterpiece is incomplete!"
A voice boomed from the air—a voice that sounded like a mountain cracking.
"Why do you insist on being the dust that ruins the finish? Come, little Pulse."
"Let me give you the gift of permanence."