Janko secured the leather straps across Yulva’s chest, then her thighs, pulling them taut until the buckles clicked with chilling finality. Her paralyzed body offered no resistance, a dead weight in his surprisingly strong hands. The faint, phosphorescent glow of the chair illuminated the shadowed alcove, casting dancing shadows that made the snaking wires appear to writhe. Each coil, thick as a finger, hummed with a low, hungry drone, already drinking from the city's grid, preparing to drain her dry. “A snug fit,” Janko mused, stepping back. His gaze, usually alight with nervous twitching, flattened into stagnant grey. He ran a hand over the polished armrest of the chair, his fingernail tracing a series of etched runes Yulva couldn't decipher. “The Apex Engine. Built to harvest acoustic reserve. And you, Yulva, sit upon a reservoir so deep, it borders on myth.” He pulled a small, silver-plated contraption from his coat pocket, its surface covered in an intricate network of crystalline tuning forks. With a soft click, he attached it to a thick cable extending from the chair’s headrest. The hum deepened, prickling along Yulva's temples and descending along the vertebrae of her neck. Her mind, usually padded in drowsy apathy, registered every sharp rasp of the brass fittings. “Don’t worry,” Janko said, a placid smile on his face that was far more terrifying than any snarl. “The Hollowing isn’t painful, not truly. Just… an emptying. A quiet transition. You’ll become a part of something grander, Yulva. The very pulse of Vrost.” He reached for a dial on the chair’s control panel. “I expect full yield within the hour. The city grid has been… hungry, lately.” Just as his fingers brushed the polished brass, a furious roar, raw and ragged, tore through the silenced hall. A blur of movement erupted from the floor beside them. Liska, bruised and dishevelled, her face streaked with tears and grime, launched herself from the ground. She was a broken thing, utterly devoid of magic, yet her desperation lent her a terrifying, desperate strength. “No!” Liska shrieked, her voice hoarse from crying, utterly devoid of its usual saccharine lilt. She slammed into Janko, her body a frail projectile, catching him off guard. He stumbled back, his hand pulled away from the dial at the last second. The silver contraption on Yulva’s head pulsed, but the initial jolt hadn’t been sent. Janko snarled, his placid mask cracking. He whirled, a single, sharp wave of focused sound blasting from his outstretched hand. It hit Liska full in the chest with the force of a battering ram. She cried out, a sound of pure agony, and was flung backwards, crashing against a stone pillar with a sickening thud. Her body crumpled to the ground, unmoving. A thin trickle of crimson began to seep from the corner of her mouth. Three seconds. That was all Liska had bought her. Three precious, agonizing seconds. Janko didn’t spare Liska a second glance. His gaze snapped back to the chair. He reached for the dial again, his movements precise and swift. This time, there would be no interruption. Yulva could feel the tingling intensify, a pressure building behind her eyes. The humming grew louder, coalescing into a single, high-pitched chord that began to bore into her mind. Her magic, what little remained, instinctively recoiled from the invasive drone. This was it. The inevitable end. Her body was paralyzed, her voice stolen, her mind assaulted. There was no fighting, no grand counter-spell. No clever trick or hidden talent she could suddenly deploy. Only the deepening hum, preparing to scour her very essence. *You cannot forcefully take what is freely given.* The old adage drifted up from an introductory lecture on acoustic reciprocity. Every time the Siphon had tried to steal her genius, it had failed when she hadn't resisted, when her apathy had been absolute. This apparatus sought to *extract* her power, to *pull* it out. But what if there was nothing to pull *against*? What if she simply… let go? Drop the tension. Drop the effort. Her entire student career had been a campaign for uninterrupted dormancy; confronting this contraption was far too much work. In the teeth of lobotomy, exhaustion became her shield. The invasive whine bored deeper, probing for an active pitch to latch onto and strip away. Yulva closed her eyes. She didn't struggle. She didn't tense. Instead, she surrendered. Completely. Utterly. She imagined herself sinking, not into oblivion, but into the softest, quietest moss bed she’d ever found. The hum of the coils functioned as a lullaby, a heavy drone drawing her under. Her locked joints felt weightless against the straps. Her mind took the harsh vibration and treated it like a rhythmic rocker. She tipped into an unshakeable, deliberate stupor. Not the brief catnaps stolen behind pipe organs, but a heavy plunge into complete dormancy, where ambient tone turned soft as down. Her internal pitch, instead of bracing against the rig, dissolved into the silence. The stone vault, the copper lines, Janko's face, Liska on the flags—all receded. Only the steady drone of the seat remained, rocking her lower. Her lungs settled into slow, heavy cycles. A rhythmic rattle rose in the back of her throat, vibrating across the floorboards. It started as a low, steady snore. Then another, thicker and lower. Each exhalation rolled out from her palate, devoid of tension. The apparatus, built to suck away desperate friction, gorged itself on this dead-weight vibration instead, looping the tone through its copper coils and firing it back outward. The snore deepened, rattling the iron rivets of the headrest. The foundational hum of the siphon wavered. Yulva’s rumbling breath locked directly onto the apparatus's baseline pitch, matching every crest, doubling every trough. Sympathetic vibration surged through the brass frame, rattling the masonry of the alcove. The ceiling began to groan. Cracks spiderwebbed along the damp blocks, lit by the seat's pale blue moss lamps. Plaster rained onto the flagstones. The hum broke into a violent, shuddering rattle as the circuit choked on the feedback loop, spitting sparks from frayed copper braids. Janko staggered back, jaw slack. The masonry shuddered under foot. Above them, limestone flags bowed downward. Yulva's rhythmic rasp, rattling at the resonant frequency of wet mortar, shook the archway loose stone by stone.

The Harmonic Slumber