Winter had begun to rot.
The ice that once blanketed the fields north of Reims now melted in uneven patches, revealing a scarred landscape beneath: mud-furrowed roads, spent shells, bones pale as ivory half-buried beside crater lips. The war hadn't stopped — it had simply gone quiet.
And that, Emil Laurant believed, was more dangerous than noise.
Cormicy's underground complex buzzed with life. A dozen new engineers had arrived, some by secret Ministry endorsement, others from the fringes of academia, called not by duty but by curiosity. They came to see what silence looked like when shaped by steel and echo.
But Emil wasn't interested in followers.
He was chasing a shadow.
In the deep chamber beneath the third vault, Emil replayed the Nachtwind crystal's resonance cycle again and again. Each time, he stripped back another layer of vibrational interference, isolating frequencies no human ear could detect.
Lisette Arban stood at the terminal beside him, arms crossed.
"That voice again," she said. "Velatonya."
"It's not a name," Emil muttered. "It's a codeword. Buried beneath the main frequency. Layered like a cipher."
"Encrypted in sound?"
"In structure."
He turned, eyes sunken from sleeplessness.
"If this stone remembers everything Nachtwind ever heard… then someone was sending it messages through its own resonance. And we've only heard a whisper."
"What does it mean?"
Emil didn't answer.
Because a part of him feared it was not a warning.
But a call.
Elsewhere in France, the German front had stalled.
Not because of supply. Not because of morale.
Because of uncertainty.
Nachtwind's defeat had sent ripples through the High Command. Machines were no longer invincible. Silence, once their shield, had become a weapon in enemy hands. Infantry patrols reported hearing low pulses at night — not gunfire, not mortars, just a hum beneath the earth.
Sometimes, men disappeared.
No blood. No struggle.
Just a coat left on a road and a faint impression in the soil.
Amélie Moreau arrived at Cormicy unannounced.
She passed through the gates without resistance. Emil had left standing orders that she was never to be turned away. Rousseau met her at the lift with a nod.
"Still growing, I see," she said, surveying the expanded facility. "You've built an empire out of ruins."
"We've built a forge," Rousseau said. "For weapons you don't yet have a name for."
Amélie smiled faintly. "Not yet. But I'm here to deliver one."
She reached into her satchel and handed him a sealed folder marked with the Ministry's obsidian seal.
"Operation Canticle."
They reviewed the contents in the war room.
Satellite sketches. Strategic maps. Intelligence assessments from aerial scouts. At the center of it all: a town called Schönwerth, nestled near the Rhine, partially evacuated after an unexplained energy surge flattened three surrounding hamlets.
The source?
Unconfirmed.
But the Ministry believed another resonance engine had gone online.
Lisette leaned in. "A new Nachtwind?"
"No," Amélie said. "Worse. No name, no origin, no pattern. Just disappearances. Civilians, soldiers, entire buildings. Swallowed."
Fournier's hands shook slightly. "They're experimenting with erasure."
Emil didn't blink.
"Then we're going in."
Four nights later, Unit Null moved again.
For the first time since its activation, it left Cormicy, cradled in a transport cradle under thirty layers of reinforced alloy. The convoy rode through the dark, silent, taking back roads, avoiding spotter planes.
The Ministry had authorized the operation under deep black clearance.
Canticle was not an attack.
It was a reclamation.
Emil sat beside Rousseau in the command vehicle, visor darkened, eyes fixed forward.
"I need to know what it's saying," he murmured.
Rousseau glanced at him. "What who is saying?"
"The stone. The frequency. The voice behind it all."
"You think it's a person?"
Emil shook his head.
"I think it's something older."
They arrived at Schönwerth just before dusk.
The town had been abandoned. Not destroyed — deserted. The buildings were untouched. No rubble. No signs of battle. But every street, every window, every church pew was empty.
As if everyone had stood up and walked out in unison.
Or vanished.
Unit Null was deployed in the town square. Its hovering array adjusted to the subtle vibrations in the air. Emil stood before it with a portable interface unit, hands shaking slightly as he keyed in the sequence derived from the Nachtwind stone.
The machine vibrated.
Then pulsed.
Then listened.
And then—
Echo.
A reply.
Not from the town.
From beneath it.
The resonance map returned a topographical distortion centered beneath the old monastery at the edge of town. A cavity—perfectly spherical, twelve meters wide, filled with harmonic residue.
They moved fast.
Emil, Rousseau, and a six-person engineering team entered the monastery ruins, descending through the collapsed chapel into the catacombs below.
At the heart of the cavern, they found it.
Not a weapon.
A chamber.
Circular. Polished smooth as glass. The floor hummed with a low, cyclical note — not natural, not architectural.
A machine had sung here.
And whatever it had summoned… was gone.
Rousseau stepped toward the center.
His foot touched the central ring — and vanished.
Not his leg.
Just the sound of it.
No step.
No crunch.
Just absence.
Emil grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back.
"Sound vacuum," he whispered. "They're testing selective erasure. Not people. Presence."
Lisette scanned the walls with a portable echo mic.
"Look at this," she whispered.
Dozens of symbols — carved into the stone, etched with impossible precision — lined the chamber's circumference. And in the center of the ring, written in that same carved script, was a word:
VELATONYA.
Fournier, watching the live feed from above, felt his blood go cold.
"What does it mean?" he asked.
Emil stared at the word, fingers brushing its edge.
"I think it's not a warning."
He turned toward Rousseau.
"I think it's a name."