The melody arrived like the morning mist.

  Soft at first—so faint it could have been mistaken for memory—yet impossibly clear once it settled into the air. A slow, winding tune unfolded around the ruins, each note placed with delicate care, echoing off stone and leaf alike. It did not come from one direction. It moved, threading between broken walls, curling through the grass, slipping behind the ear and returning just as quietly.

  It was beautiful.

  Lina realized distantly.

  The tune carried no urgency, no violence in its shape. It rose and fell in gentle intervals, repeating itself just enough to feel intentional, yet never quite the same way twice. A phrase ended where another might have begun, the pauses between notes filled with listening silence rather than absence. The air seemed to hold it willingly, as though afraid to interrupt.

  The Song was not fading.

  It was composing itself.

  Lina stood very still, breath shallow, afraid that moving too quickly might shatter the fragile progression. The grass at her boots leaned subtly toward the sound. Even the distant birds had gone quiet, their calls swallowed by the slow, drifting harmony.

  Gabriella lowered her hand from her satchel inch by careful inch.

  The melody shifted again—sliding upward, looping back on itself before traveling outward, up the overgrown slope beyond the broken wall. It brushed past them as it went, close enough that Lina felt it graze the edge of her awareness, not touching, not pulling—inviting.

  A quiet curiosity stirred beneath the unease.

  Whatever shaped the tune was not hiding.

  It was exploring.

  Lina swallowed, heart beating in time with the piece before she could stop herself. “It’s coming from up there,” she said.

  Gabriella didn’t answer right away. Her eyes followed the sound into the brush, measuring distance, terrain, consequence. When she finally spoke, there was no humor in her voice—only that familiar, dangerous calm.

  “…No, Lina. We have to go back and report this to the guild.”

  The melody continued, patient and unbroken, winding its way up the ancient mountain slope as if confident they would follow.

  After a moment, Lina stepped forward.

  The tune did not falter.

  It simply carried on—beautiful, eerie, and waiting to be understood.

  Gabriella caught her arm.

  Not hard enough to hurt. Just enough to stop the second step.

  “Lina,” she said, and this time there was no edge to it at all.

  The melody drifted on, unbothered by the interruption. A soft turn in the phrase, a gentle climb, as if it had already accounted for hesitation and decided it did not matter. The sound slipped between them and the slope, widening the space it wanted them to cross.

  Gabriella stepped closer, lowering her voice despite the emptiness of the ruins. “This isn’t normal,” she said quietly. “We need to go back.”

  Lina didn’t pull away. She couldn’t. The Song pressed against her senses, warm and distant and achingly right, like a half-remembered dream she was certain she’d had before but could never place.

  “It’s not threatening,” Lina murmured, more to herself than to Gabriella.

  “What,” Gabriella said at once. Almost like a shout, but much too suppressed.

  Her grip tightened, fingers curling into Lina’s sleeve as if afraid that letting go would mean losing her entirely. “You hear that and you think to go off,” she continued, voice dropping lower. “Lina, hey. Look at me!”

  The melody shifted again, a subtle variation on its earlier theme. Closer now. Not louder—just more present. As if pleased by the attention it was receiving.

  Gabriella swallowed. Lina felt it through her arm.

  “Please,” Gabriella said.

  The word landed wrong. Too bare. Too honest.

  “We’re not equipped for this,” she went on, the calm finally cracking. “Not you, not me. This isn’t a training exercise or a field anomaly. The guild needs to know before you decide to answer it properly.”

  Lina finally turned to look at her.

  Gabriella’s expression wasn’t fear, exactly. It was something older. Much more grounded. The look of someone who had seen what happened when curiosity outpaced caution—and carried the names of those who hadn’t come back.

  The Song curled upward again, its progression unfurling with serene confidence, climbing the slope in slow, patient measures.

  It did not stop.

  Lina’s chest tightened.

  “…If we walk away now,” she said, “then we are no better than them.”

  For a moment, the world seemed to tilt backward.

  The ruins blurred into something else—another place, another path that had ended too early.

  A memory rose uninvited: a report filed too late, a Song that had gone unanswered, a name scratched out of a ledger with a hand that hadn’t stopped shaking. Lina remembered the silence afterward most of all. How loud it had been. How final.

  Gabriella remembered it too.

  She stiffened, breath catching as if the word them had found a precise and painful mark. Her gaze dropped, not to the ground, but to a point far closer—hands slick with rain or blood, a choice already made by the time anyone realized it mattered. The kind of moment that stayed, no matter how many years were stacked on top of it.

  Gabriella shook her head once, sharp and desperate. Yet, understanding. “Lina.”

  For a heartbeat, the only sound was the melody and the fragile space between them.

  Then Lina eased her arm free—not abruptly, not cruelly. Just enough.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Trust me.”

  Gabriella searched her face, looking for certainty, for restraint, for something to hold onto.

  The Song drifted on, waiting.

  “…That’s not what I’m afraid of,” Gabriella whispered.

  Lina took another step forward.

  The melody welcomed her without pause.

  She didn’t look back.

  Not because she didn’t feel Gabriella there—she did, sharply, like a weight pressing between her shoulder blades—but because looking back would have been an answer. And she already knew what she was going to do.

  The ground rose unevenly beneath her boots as she climbed, stone breaking through the soil in old, crooked ribs. Thorned brush snagged at her cloak, then seemed to part more easily the farther she went, stems bending just a fraction before she reached them. She registered none of it. Her attention stayed fixed on the melody ahead, on the way it carried itself forward with unhurried confidence.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Behind her, Gabriella did not follow.

  The space she left behind felt wrong. Not empty—unfinished. Like a chord left unresolved.

  The mountainside grew steeper, the ruins falling away until only rock, moss, and the low, patient Song remained. The air changed as she climbed, thinning slightly, cooling against her skin. The melody threaded through it all, never louder, never closer in the way sound usually was—only clearer. As if distance no longer applied to it the same way.

  Lina stepped over a jut of stone, and the world subtly adjusted.

  She didn’t notice how the slope eased just enough to guide her footing. How loose gravel rolled aside before it could betray her balance. How the grass no longer leaned merely toward the sound, but angled, its blades aligning like quiet indicators pointing the way forward.

  The Song progressed.

  A gentle rise. A settling cadence. Each phrase nudged the space around her into agreement, the mountainside responding in minute, cooperative shifts. Shadows stretched where they should not have. Light caught edges that had been dull moments before. The land did not change outright—it rearranged.

  Lina felt only that walking felt… right.

  The melody curved left, and she followed without thinking. It dipped, and the path dipped with it. Her breathing fell into step with the rhythm, her pulse aligning so neatly she might have sworn she’d been walking to this tune her entire life.

  The slope narrowed ahead, rock folding inward. The vegetation thinned abruptly, giving way to bare stone slick with dark moisture. The Song slowed there, its phrasing elongating, notes stretching just a little longer than before—as if savoring what came next.

  Lina stopped.

  Before her yawned a cave mouth.

  It was wrong in ways that had nothing to do with size. The opening twisted inward, not wide but deep, the stone curling as though the mountain itself had been turned slowly by hand. The edges bore faint striations, not claw marks, not tool-work—something smoother, repeated, almost… practiced.

  The melody seeped from within.

  Here, at last, it settled. The progression resolved into a quiet, sustained line that filled the entrance and spilled gently around her ankles, warm as breath. No triumph. No warning.

  An invitation completed.

  Lina stepped closer, peering into the dark.

  Behind her, far down the slope, Gabriella stood frozen among the ruins, ledger forgotten at her side, watching a place the mountain itself now seemed intent on hiding.

  Ahead of Lina, the cave waited—twisted, listening, and very much awake.

  Lina took one step toward the cave—

  —and the world lurched.

  “Lina—STOP!”

  Gabriella’s voice tore through the melody like a blade through silk.

  The Song fractured.

  For a single, horrifying instant, Lina felt the harmony slip—its careful progression stuttering, notes collapsing inward on themselves. The warmth at her feet vanished. The sense of rightness cracked apart, and the air rushed back into her lungs like she’d been holding her breath without realizing it.

  She froze mid-step.

  The ground beneath her boot was not stone.

  It was nothing.

  Lina’s stomach dropped as she looked down and the illusion peeled away all at once. The twisted “cave” dissolved, its curling stone folding backward into empty air, the darkness unraveling into depth—sheer, sudden, and vast.

  A cliff.

  Not a slope. Not a descent.

  A steep, jagged plunge of broken rock and exposed stone that vanished downward into shadow, the mountain torn open like a wound. Loose shale clung to the edge in fragile layers, one misstep away from cascading into the abyss below.

  Lina staggered backward, heart slamming so hard it stole her breath.

  The Song screamed.

  Not in sound—but in pressure. The beautiful progression collapsed into a dragging, warped resonance that pulled at her senses, clawing to reassert itself. The melody no longer explored.

  It hungered.

  From below, something shifted.

  A wet, distant sound echoed up the cliff face—flesh dragging against stone, slow and massive. The Song twisted around it, feeding it shape and intent it could not have formed on its own. Lina felt it then, unmistakably:

  The call of the Great Olm.

  Man-fish, the guild texts called them. Ancient things buried deep in the mountains and waters, corrupted beyond form or thought. Barely sentient mounds of flesh and instinct, incapable of desire—until the Song found them.

  Until it used them.

  The melody she’d followed so willingly had never come from the “cave.”

  It had risen from below.

  From something that could not climb…

  but could sing just well enough to make a human step forward.

  “Lina—move!” Gabriella shouted, already running uphill, boots skidding on loose stone. “Don’t listen to it! Don’t—”

  The Song surged again, desperately rethreading itself, trying to rebuild the illusion, to smooth the cliff’s edge back into welcoming stone. Lina felt it press against her mind, not intelligent enough to reason, not aware enough to hate—

  only aware enough to want.

  Assimilate.

  Her foot slipped.

  A spray of pebbles rattled into the darkness below, their echoes swallowed far too quickly.

  Lina screamed—not in panic, but in defiance—and threw herself backward, hitting the ground hard as Gabriella lunged forward and grabbed her wrist with both hands.

  The Song broke.

  Not cleanly. Not completely.

  But enough.

  Below them, something vast and unseen shifted once more, its malformed body reacting to the loss of its guiding melody. The sound it made was not anger.

  It was confusion.

  The cliff fell silent.

  Above it, Lina lay shaking against the cold stone, Gabriella’s grip locked around her arm like an anchor, breath ragged, eyes wild.

  “…It wasn’t a cave,” Lina whispered.

  Gabriella hauled her back another step, then another, until there was solid ground beneath them both.

  “No,” she said hoarsely, never looking away from the edge.

  “It never was.”

  Water dripped somewhere nearby.

  Slow. Steady. A hollow sound that echoed too long before fading, as though the cave could not quite remember where its walls were supposed to be. The air was thick with damp heat, heavy enough to cling to skin and breath alike.

  Gabriella held Lina in her arms.

  Cold stone pressed into her knees as she knelt, back braced against a slick cavern wall. The ground beneath them was uneven, soft in places, pulsing faintly as if the earth itself were breathing. She paid that no mind. Her focus was fixed entirely on the weight she was holding—the familiar curve of Lina’s shoulders, the warmth of her body shaking with delayed fear.

  “You’re okay,” Gabriella whispered again, rocking them gently. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

  The Song filled the cavern.

  It no longer wandered. It no longer explored. Here, deep beneath stone and root and forgotten paths, it settled. The melody oozed from the walls themselves, thick and resonant, every note layered with a wet undertone that vibrated through bone rather than air. It wrapped around thought as much as sound, smoothing it, guiding it, ensuring it stayed where it belonged.

  Gabriella did not notice when the tune threaded itself behind her eyes.

  Did not feel it when doubt surfaced—How did we get down here?—and was gently corrected before it could finish forming. The Song answered before the question did, reshaping memory so cleanly it felt like relief.

  Of course they had fallen.

  Of course she had caught Lina.

  Of course this was the cave beneath the cliff.

  The Great Olm did not deceive.

  It reassured.

  The body in her arms shifted, and Gabriella tightened her hold instinctively. Lina had always clung like this after close calls. Always breathed a little too fast. Always—

  Something was wrong.

  Lina knew it the moment she tried to move her legs.

  They were gone.

  Not numb. Not trapped. Gone—swallowed past the hip into yielding, pulsing flesh that closed around her lower body with patient certainty. Every slow contraction drew her deeper into the cavern floor, into the vast, pale mass that filled the chamber like an unfinished god.

  The Great Olm.

  She tried to scream.

  The sound never made it out.

  The Song caught it mid-formation, pulling it apart, threading it into harmony before it could become noise. Her voice became material, repurposed into the melody that filled the cave.

  Lina’s hands clawed uselessly at stone that softened beneath her fingers, losing definition the longer she touched it. The walls were not walls. They were boundaries the Olm had learned to imitate.

  Her eyes burned as she looked up.

  Gabriella was there.

  Holding her.

  Except—no.

  Gabriella was holding something else.

  The shape in her arms was close enough to be cruel. The right weight. The right warmth. The right tremor. A perfect mental construct maintained by the fleshy Song humming through the cavern. The Olm sang gently there, close to Gabriella’s mind, adjusting the illusion whenever it threatened to slip.

  Gabriella smiled down at it, tears tracking clean lines through the grime on her face.

  “We’re going home,” she whispered, pressing her forehead to empty air.

  The Song agreed.

  Lina felt it then—not hunger, not malice.

  Assimilation.

  The Great Olm did not kill. It included. It folded human shape and human Song into itself, adding definition to a body that could never hold one on its own. Her thoughts began to blur at the edges, her awareness stretching thin as the melody guided her mind inward, toward a place where fear dulled and identity softened. They had long wished to become human. The Song granted them the means.

  Her eyes stayed on Gabriella.

  She tried to say her name.

  The cave sang instead.

  Above them, the mountain remained silent.

  Below, the Great Olms completed another measure.

  And somewhere in the dark, harmony settled into place.

  A whistle rang.