The trail ended at a monolith of bleached stone. It stood ten feet tall, a jarring spike of white marble driven into the gray ash like a needle in a wound. As the shepherd approached, he felt a new kind of pain. This was not the prickly heat of the ground or the deep, humming vibration of the buried fires. This was a high, thin shrieking that felt like a sliver of ice being driven into his ear canal.

  The pillar was a Tithe-Post of the Kingdom. Rows of precision-cut runes spiraled around its surface, glowing with a pale, rhythmic light. It emitted a sound that was perfectly clean and perfectly hollow. It was a Chordan Hymn: an artificial order meant to drown out the world’s natural, dying pulse. To the shepherd, the sound was nauseating. It felt like a lie told in a language of glass.

  A man sat at the base of the pillar, leaning back against the white stone as if the ice-needles did not bother him at all. He was covered in layers of dusty gray canvas, his face obscured by a heavy leather filter mask that hung around his neck. He was busy cleaning the grit from a set of brass calipers.

  "You have the look of men who do not belong here," the man said. He did not look up from his work. His voice was a dry, professional rasp. "Travelers usually avoid the Tithe-Posts. The sound tends to make the uninitiated vomit."

  Kael stepped forward, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. "We are moving north."

  "Everyone is moving north," the scavenger replied. He finally looked up, his eyes sharp and unimpressed. He sniffed the air, his gaze drifting to Kael’s pack where the hidden bronze scrap lay. "You have something heavy in there. Old world metal. High resonance."

  "It is just salvage," Kael said.

  "It is a death sentence," the scavenger corrected. He went back to his calipers. "The Sound-Hunters from the capital are thick on the ridges this week. They can hear a fragment like that from a league away. They do not like competition. They call it stealing from the Crown. I call it being too loud to live."

  Before Kael could respond, the man suddenly froze. He pulled his filter mask up over his mouth and gestured toward the jagged rocks above the trail. In the distance, a low, metallic baying echoed through the haze. It was the sound of a Sound-Hound: a construct of brass and captured breath used by the Kingdom to track those who disturbed the artificial peace of the Hymn.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  "Patrol," the scavenger whispered. "Quiet yourselves, or you will be part of the ash by sundown."

  The shepherd felt the baying as a physical blow. The hound’s cry was tuned to the same ice-needle frequency as the pillar. It was searching for a ripple in the silence. The shepherd looked at Kael, then at the white stone pillar. He knew that the sound of their breathing, the clink of their gear, and the screaming bronze in the pack were like beacons in the dark.

  He closed his eyes and reached for the stone behind his ribs.

  He did not push the pressure away this time. He pulled. He imagined his body as a hollow vessel, a deep well with no bottom. He drew the humming of the ground and the shrieking of the pillar into his marrow. He invited the vibration to settle inside him, turning his skin cold and his limbs heavy.

  The air around them seemed to thicken and go flat. The light from the pillar’s runes dimmed, the glow flickering as if the power was being sucked into a vacuum. The shepherd felt a sudden, sharp chill in his lungs. A trickle of warmth ran from his nose, over his lip, and tasted of copper.

  The baying of the hound grew closer, then stopped. There was a long, agonizing minute of silence where the only sound was the thudding of the shepherd's own heart. He felt as though he were carrying the weight of the entire mountain on his shoulders. His vision blurred at the edges, the white stone of the pillar turning into a smear of gray.

  Eventually, the sound of hoofbeats and the metallic scraping of the hound receded into the distance. The patrol had passed.

  The shepherd let out a ragged breath and collapsed against the base of the boulder. The ice-needles returned to his ears with a vengeance, but he was too exhausted to flinch. His chest felt like a cavern of ice, and the fatigue that washed over him was so heavy he could barely lift his head.

  The scavenger watched him with a new, guarded expression. He looked at the blood on the shepherd's face and the way the air still seemed to shiver around him.

  "You are a strange one," the man muttered. He packed his calipers away and stood up. "The Kingdom spends a fortune on those pillars to keep the world under a shroud. They call it Order. They call it the Law of Silence."

  The shepherd wiped his nose with his sleeve, looking at the glowing runes on the Tithe-Post. He realized then that the Priesthood was not just trying to survive the silence. They were trying to own it. They were building a world where the only song allowed was the one they dictated, and anything else, even the truth of the land's pain, was a crime.

  "The road ahead is worse," the scavenger said, turning to disappear into the gray haze. "Watch your noise. The Order does not like anomalies."

  Kael reached down and hauled the shepherd to his feet. The weight of the pack felt twice as heavy as before, but the shepherd did not complain. He looked at the white pillar one last time before they turned away. The struggle was no longer just against the heat and the dust. It was against a Kingdom that wanted to stitch the world’s mouth shut.