The Hollow Choir

For a long time everyone agreed the Abyss was silent. Silence was the whole point of it. It was the place where the map stopped and the tree's light gave out, and silence is what you expect from the place where things give out.

Then the path grew an eighth step, and a ninth, and the stones began to hum.

Teodor Vane heard it first. He was a bell-maker by trade, which meant he had spent his life listening to metal decide what it wanted to say. He knelt beside the newest stone and pressed his ear against it, and he heard, very faintly, a chord. Not one note. Several, stacked on top of each other, slightly out of tune in a way that made them sound alive.

He came back every night for a month. The chord grew. Each time someone new set a stone at the end of the path, a new voice joined it. Some were high and thin, some low enough that he felt them in his teeth before he heard them. None of them sang words. They sang the shape of a decision: the small rising sound a person makes in the moment before they step onto something that might not hold.

Teodor understood then that the Abyss had not been silent. It had been empty of voices, which is a different thing. It had been waiting for someone to give it something to repeat.

On the last night of the month he tied a rope to the roots of the tree and lowered himself over the edge, past the last stone, into the place where the path had not yet reached. He took no lantern. He wanted to hear, not see.

What he found, he wrote later, was a hollow as large as the tree is tall, shaped like the inside of a bell. The chord filled it completely. And at the very bottom, where the sound was densest, he heard a voice he recognised. It was his own, from the night he had first knelt by the stone and decided to come back. The Abyss had kept it. It had kept all of them.

He climbed back up before dawn and did something no bell-maker had ever done. He went home and melted down every bell he had ever cast. When he was asked why, he said that he had heard the only instrument worth building, and it was not his to build. It was everyone's.

Travellers who sit at the end of the path today, quietly, sometimes hear the chord. It is louder than it used to be. If you listen long enough, they say, you can hear the exact moment a new voice joins.

It is always the voice of whoever is listening.