1077: Story 1077: The Eldritch Choir 1077: Story 1077: The Eldritch Choir In the hollowed remnants of what once was the city of Haldenbridge, a sound echoes nightly—neither human nor machine.
Survivors call it the Eldritch Choir, a song that seeps through fog and bone, peeling sanity like dead skin.
The melody arrives at dusk.
It is beautiful.
It is ruin.
Priya Vale, a deaf archivist turned apocalypse runner, was immune to the song… at first.
Where others clutched their skulls or bled from the ears, she walked through the ruins untouched, guided by instinct and the faint thrum of silence.
But that changed when she found the echo stone.
A polished shard of onyx, smooth as sleep and singing without sound, buried beneath a shattered church organ.
When she touched it, she didn’t hear with her ears—she felt with her bones.
“Do you hear us now, vessel of quiet?”
The Choir had found her.
They weren’t ghosts.
Not spirits.
Not even eldritch gods.
They were notes given flesh—singing entities shaped like inverted choirs, stitched mouths gaping in harmonic agony.
Each being emitted a different frequency of madness: sorrow, wrath, ecstasy, hunger, and silence.
The Conductor, their faceless leader, stood atop a makeshift altar of skulls and rusted tuning forks, waving a baton carved from a seraph’s spine.
The Choir did not sing to praise.
They sang to reshape.
Haldenbridge twisted each night they sang.
Buildings bent into crescendos.
Streets arranged themselves into staves and clefs.
Flesh and metal alike softened into chords, merging into the great Composition of Unbeing.
Priya watched it all through the filter of the echo stone.
Her deafness was no longer protection—it was now a key.
“You are our missing harmony,” the Conductor whispered into her bones.
“Become our final note.”
The survivors left in Haldenbridge had become instruments—literal, grotesque perversions of human anatomy.
Ribcages like harps.
Vocal cords stretched between lampposts, played by wind.
Eyes plucked like strings to emit shrill, blood-soaked vibratos.
Priya knew she had one chance.
She climbed the altar, echo stone clutched tight.
Instead of fleeing the Choir, she conducted them.
Mimicking their gestures, she reversed the resonance.
The city screamed.
The notes shattered.
The Choir began to unravel.
Their skin peeled into pages.
Their voices cracked into silence.
One by one, they fell into themselves, singing their own undoing.
The Conductor clutched its chest, mouth open in an eternal, silent aria.
The song stopped.
But not entirely.
Now, when Priya closes her eyes, she still hears it—a lullaby woven from void.
She carries the echo stone still, though it hums softer.
And when she sleeps, the world around her pulses with the remnants of a melody older than flesh.
And far beneath Haldenbridge, deep in the buried halls of lost gods…
The Second Choir begins to warm up.