Chapter 40: The Singers

I LEARNED ABOUT the Singers on a night when the wind forgot which direction to blow.

It came from everywhere at once—north and south and east and west, swirling through the Maer’s gardens in confused spirals that set the hedges shuddering and the ornamental trees thrashing like drowning men. The servants closed the shutters and bolted the doors and made signs to Tehlu, because wind like that was unnatural, and unnatural things were becoming increasingly common in a world that no longer knew its own rules.

And in the distance, through the chaos, I heard screaming. Not from the estate—from the town below. Something was happening. Something the wind had brought with it.

But I stood in the garden and listened.

Because there was something in the wind. Not a voice—voices can be identified, located, understood. This was something else. Something between voice and vibration, between language and music, between intent and accident. The wind was carrying a sound that my ears couldn’t quite parse but that my sleeping mind recognized with a shock of familiarity so intense it made me stagger.

Someone was singing.

Not near. Not in Severen. Not in Vintas. The singing was far away—impossibly far, as if it were reaching me from the other side of something that distance couldn’t measure. But it was there, woven into the wind like a thread in a tapestry, and it was beautiful.

Beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with necessity—the beauty of something that exists because without it, something else would collapse.

The singing lasted perhaps ten heartbeats. Then the wind died, the garden fell still, and the silence that followed was deeper than any silence I’d ever known.

I went to find Bredon.

He was in the hidden chamber. Waiting, as if he’d known I’d come. His face was pale, and his hands—usually so steady—trembled slightly as he closed the ancient book.

“You heard it,” he said. Not a question.

“What was that? And what’s happening in the town?”

“The wind brought them through. Just for a moment—a gap in the boundary, nothing more. But long enough.” His voice was tight. “We have perhaps an hour before the Maer’s guards come looking for explanations I cannot give them. So listen quickly.”

“The Singers.” He was sitting at the stone table, the ancient book open before him, his fingers tracing lines of text I couldn’t read from where I stood. “Also called the Tahl. Also called—in the oldest records, in languages that no longer have living speakers—the Rethani. The ones who remember.”

“Remember what?”

“The song.” He looked up, and his eyes held something I hadn’t seen in them before: reverence. Not the pale, performative reverence of a man in a temple. The real thing. The awe of someone who has spent his life studying something he can never fully understand. “Sit down, Kvothe. This is the part of the story that changes everything.”

I sat. The stone chair was cold, but I barely noticed.

“The Amyr and the Chandrian,” Bredon began, “are two sides of a conflict. One trying to keep the doors sealed. One—or parts of one—trying to open them. But there’s a third force. A force that’s older than either. Older than the doors. Older, perhaps, than the world itself.”

“The Singers.”

“The Singers.” He turned the book toward me. The page showed an illustration—not a painting, but a kind of diagram, rendered in ink that had faded from black to a deep, ancient brown. It depicted three concentric circles.

The outermost circle was labeled in Siaru: The Mortal World.

The innermost circle was labeled in Yllish: The Fae Realm.

And between them—in the space that separated the two—was a thin band, labeled in a script I didn’t recognize. Bredon translated.

“The Between,” he said. “The space that is neither mortal nor Fae. The membrane that separates the two realms. Most people—most scholars, even—believe the mortal world and the Fae are separate places. Like two rooms divided by a wall. But that’s not accurate.”

“They overlap.”

“They interpenetrate. Every point in the mortal world corresponds to a point in the Fae, and vice versa. The difference is not location but… frequency. Vibration. The mortal world resonates at one pitch. The Fae at another. And the Between is the space where the two pitches nearly meet.”

“Like harmonics,” I said, understanding blooming. “Two strings tuned to different notes, but close enough that they influence each other. The interference pattern between them—”

“Is the Between. Exactly.” Bredon’s eyes lit with the particular pleasure of a teacher whose student has grasped something difficult. “The Singers exist in the Between. They are beings of that space—not quite mortal, not quite Fae, but something else entirely. Something that exists only because the two realms coexist.”

“What do they do?”

“They sing.”

I waited for more. It didn’t come.

“That’s it? They sing?”

“You say that as if singing were a small thing.” Bredon’s voice sharpened. “You, of all people, should know better. You’ve called the wind with a word. You’ve seen Denna’s skin written with Yllish knots that reshape reality. You’ve spoken the name of stone and felt the world answer. And you still think of singing as entertainment?”

The rebuke landed. I deserved it.

“Music,” I said slowly, “is a form of naming.”

“Music is the original form of naming. Before words, before written languages, before the first Namer spoke the first name—there was song.” Bredon’s voice dropped into the register of recitation. “The world sang itself into existence. Vibration giving birth to form. Melody becoming matter. Harmony becoming law.”

“The Singers maintain that song.”

“They are the instruments through which it continues to be played. When the world was whole—before the Creation War—the harmony was self-sustaining. Then the Shapers tried to impose their own melody. They succeeded in creating the Fae, but it didn’t harmonize with the original. The dissonance grew.”

“And the Singers?”

“Emerged in the space between the two melodies. They were born from the dissonance itself—beings whose purpose was to bridge the gap between the original song and the Shapers’ addition. To harmonize what had been broken.” Bredon met my eyes. “They’ve been singing ever since. Constantly. Without pause. For three thousand years, the Singers have been maintaining the fundamental harmony that keeps both worlds from collapsing.”

“What happens if they stop?”

“What happens when you stop breathing?” Bredon’s answer was flat. “The worlds collapse. Not slowly. Not gradually. The mortal world and the Fae realm slam into each other like two objects occupying the same space, and everything in both realms is destroyed.”

I sat with that for a while.

The Amyr maintained the seals. The Chandrian were the seals. And the Singers maintained the fabric of reality itself — the underlying harmony that made seals, and doors, and worlds, and people possible.

Three forces. Three purposes. All dependent on each other.

I had a dozen questions. They stacked up behind my teeth like logs in a river jam.

“How does this connect to—”

Bredon raised a hand. “I’ve shown you the shape of it. The three circles. The Between. The Singers. That is the frame.” He closed the ancient book with a sound like a period at the end of a very long sentence. “The rest you will need to find yourself.”

“The world is fraying. You said it yourself—”

“Then you had better learn quickly.” Something shifted in his expression—not pity, not fear, but a sorrow that knew exactly what it was sorry for. “You are Edema Ruh, Kvothe. Your people have always known how to find the truth of things. Trust that.”

He left the hidden chamber. I stayed.

I sat alone with the ancient book and the diagram of three concentric circles, and I listened.

Beneath the silence — so faint I might have been imagining it — there was something. A hum that seemed to live in the space between my heartbeats. I had heard it before. Every time I played music, every time I called the wind. I’d thought it was emotion. Inspiration.

I pressed my hand flat against the stone table. Felt its coolness. Its age.

And beneath all of that — a vibration.

As if the stone were singing. As if everything were singing.

I left the hidden chamber with more questions than answers and a hum behind my breastbone that I couldn’t ignore. Three forces. Three circles. And somewhere in the Between, the Singers were pouring everything they had into a harmony that was slowly, terribly failing.