The Pale Choir
Introduction
They offer everything, and take only what you are willing to give them."
Kindness is rare in a broken world.
When life collapse into silence, when flesh rots and memories slip like ash through fingers, generosity becomes a forgotten language. Survival consumes all.
Moments of mercy shine like beacons in the suffocating darkness; temporary oases of comfort in a desert of despair. One such rare moment arrives in silence, walking barefoot and cloaked the colors of twilight.
They are drawn to the desperate, the forgotten, and the starving. Yet, they never force their help. Before they offer you their pale hand to lift you, they always ask permission.
If you refuse, they bow their heads and walk on, seeking the next soul fraying at the seams of the dark road ahead.
But if you accept…
The Pale Choir will sing for you.
It will ease your hunger and tend your wounds. It will listen to the ache behind your words and quiet the flames of fear that slowly devours the edges of your sanity.
It only asks for one thing in return.
A night spent around your fire.
A fair trade, as it seems.
Melody of Hope
It had been two days since the Immortals struck. The settlement lay in ruin, hollowed out by loss. The few survivors that remained moved like ghosts among the wreckage, fragile shapes that only barely remembered how to be human anymore. So many were gone, mostly the young and the women. He dared not imagine what fate had claimed them. Death would have been mercy. But he knew this was too much to wish for.
On the third night, a group approached the gate. Their movements were unnervingly synchronized, effortless as a shadow passing through the twilight. He wanted to warn the others, but a slow calm seeped into his bones, stifling the impulse. So he let the figures come without challenge.
One stepped forward, bare feet barely brushing the earth. They pulled back their hoods at the same time. Pale faces stretched tight like stitched parchment, held together by violet veins that traced fractures beneath the skin. Then, they spoke. Their voices were one - a harmonious unison - fragile and strange, threading through the quiet like a half-remembered lullaby,
“We can help.”
The words hung in the air, neither promise nor threat.
He looked back at the settlement. Broken walls, empty, starving eyes staring from ruined homes, the smell of blood still polluting the air. They had nothing left to lose.
He swallowed the cold knot in his throat and stepped aside.
The mysterious group moved inside like a quiet tide, folding into the shadows of the camp. One of them paused near the dying fire, voice soft yet still carrying the same melody as before.
“We ask only this,” it said, eyes black and endless, “a night spent by your fire, your stories and your silence. Nothing more”
Verse One: The Arrival
"They do not come when called. They arrive when the silence is ready to listen.."
The Pale Choir does not choose who to help by distance, logic, or need. In truth, no one can say when or where its members will appear. Their presence cannot be foretold, and yet it always feels, somehow, overdue.
Patterns have been observed, but never confirmed. Survivors claim their aid is reserved for groups drowning in suffering: settlements on the verge of collapse, hamlets haunted by famine, rebels shattered by Immortal retaliation.
The only constant is the number three. Three cycles after a calamity completes. It might be three hours. Three days. Three months. Even three years. But always, it is three. None can explain why. Some whisper that their presence requires the world to still itself: for ash to cool, for silence to take root, for fear to curdle into shape.
Usually, there is no warning. But their timing is always precise. They arrive not in haste, but in harmony. Their voices, when they speak, carry a perfect unison. Their steps fall in choral rhythm. Even their scent is a blend of complementary notes: distant spices, smoke, winter fruit, old paper and incense. A harmony of being. They seem to breathe as one. A choir of unparalleled cohesion.
Their help is not intrusive. They never impose; they ask.
It’s what sets them apart from monsters and survivors alike. Their request is simple. Their manner, gentle. And despite their eerie appearance, they do not lie.
If you refuse, they nod and vanish. And this will be the last you ever see of them.
But if you accept -
the next verse begins.
“Are you insane? We refused ‘em, of course. When they left… there weren’t no footprints on their trail. Just these weird spiral marks burned into the dirt where they walked. I’ve survived long enough to know, that ain’t normal.”
Verse Two: The Gift
"Relief came like a slow tide, soft as a whispered hymn."
Once their offer is accepted, the members of the Choir begin to work without complaint - often without speaking a single word. Their pale hands tend wounds without magic. Sometimes with bandages, herbs, and stillness. Other times, with nothing but the brush of cold fingers tracing the lines of broken bone. Each motion follows the rhythm of their silent harmony, each gesture part of a song no one can quite hear, yet all can feel.
Survivors begin to smile in their presence. Cautiously, at first. But wariness fades as the scent of blood and rot begins to fade away. As the wounds cease to throb. As water runs clear and cold once more. As food is gifted; warm, abundant, and fresh.
So what if the Choir seems unnatural?
Everyone is unnatural now, in some way. Twisted by loss, changed by hunger, hollowed by grief. What harm is there in quiet voices and shadowed eyes, when bellies are full and the night no longer bites?
By the time the sun slips beyond the ash-stained horizon, the camp feels softer. Kinder. Fires are lit, this time not in fear, but in welcome. And the survivors , thankful, invite their saviors to sit beside them. To share the warmth. To rest, just for a moment.
And in that moment, a quiet song stirs.
It hums beneath the laughter. It hums beneath the silence. It hums beneath the breath.
And in that space of comfort, stories pour out. The aching relief of being heard takes over and their past begins to unfold. The good, yes - but mostly the bad.
Regrets that were never spoken aloud. Fears long buried under survival. The cruelties they’ve done, the loved ones they failed to save. All of it surfaces gently, wrapped in the glow of the fire, softened by the lull of the unseen harmony.
Letting go is easy. In fact, it feels good. Natural. Right.
“Everyone drifted off but me. I couldn’t. I kept hearing it... that humming. It wasn’t coming from their mouths. It belonged to something not of this world.”
And so they drift, full and unburdened, into a blissful, deep sleep - free of nightmares for once.
The Pale Choir watches, unspeaking, their faces turned gently toward the flames.
And so, the third verse begins.
Verse Three: The Price
When morning comes, the Pale Choir is gone.
They leave no trace behind. No belongings, no footprints, no farewell. Only silence. And a strange clarity, like the air after a storm. The food is still there. The wounds stay closed. The fire still burns. All they gifted remains and yet, something else does too.
Some survivors wake with tears on their cheeks, unsure why. Others smile without knowing the reason, a laughter soft and slow like echoes from someone else’s throat. A few speak less. Not out of fear, but because words feel heavier now, like they must be earned. And with each passing day, things begin to feel even weirder.
Not wrong. Not foul. Just... altered.
A phrase caught unknowingly on the tongue. A dream that returns each night with more detail and less meaning. A verse hummed while cleaning ash from the floor, in a language no one recognizes. None of it seems dangerous.
Over time, people begin to forget small things. A sibling’s eye color. A scar on their own hand. The sound of a lover’s voice. Their father's last words; something they kept so far like a charm. Regrets they once wore like armor fade away. Then vanish, leaving them oddly weightless.
And a few, just a few, begin to speak in verses. Completing each other’s thoughts. Finishing rhymes and poems no one recalls learning. Smiling when the fires burn low.
Some say they’ve been healed too deeply. Others that guilt was sung into the Choir’s skin, traded, willingly, for peace.
They say the Choir took nothing.
And that is mostly true.
The Silent Chorus
I wasn’t planning to follow them, but when they left, I couldn’t stay behind.
I told myself it was gratitude, that I just wanted to thank them. Or maybe to understand. But the truth is, the silence they left behind was too loud to bear. The fire felt colder after they were gone, like whatever warmth I’d found had gone with them.
I walked for three days. I had no direction, yet somehow I knew where they were. They didn’t speak when I caught up. They looked at me behind their hoods - if you can call it that - and nodded in acceptance. Since then I walk with them. Trying to understand their meaning.
The Pale Choir are not merely wanderers. They are the hands and mouths of something far older - an entity without form or face. A voice that never spoke until the Cataclysm cracked the world wide enough to let it hum through the marrow of the earth.
An Amorphus, known only as the Silent Chorus.
Its purpose is neither destruction, nor salvation. It seeks only to compose; threading sorrow into melody, stitching regret into harmony, tuning the bones of the world until the song is right. It does not issue commandments. It does not enforce order. It simply resonates, and those attuned begin to harmonize, without knowing when or why. To serve to carry sorrow as song. To become a note, a vessel of verse; part of a music sheet created before sound.
Living Verses
Their bodies no longer move with personal intention, but in harmony with the Chorus. Every breath, every gesture, every blink is part of a rhythm far beyond human coordination. Some say they are all fragments of the same being, stretched across many forms.
But what truly marks them is their skin.
Carved into their pale, parchment-like flesh are memories that do not belong to them: sorrowful confessions, long-buried regrets, whispered truths given freely in the night - always by the warmth of a welcoming fire. These appear as inkless scars, as if burned or carved by unseen hands. The more they carry, the more alien they become. Limbs grow elongated. Faces tighten. Eyes blacken, like ink bleeding through wet paper.
They do not age. They do not speak unless singing in unison. And they do not sleep. Occasionally, when a Hollowed passes into a state only known as final silence, their skin is flayed and dried, preserved by the Choir as a reminder that this is now part of the song crafted by the Silent Chorus. A verse of sorrow, distilled in the song of the cosmos.
The Echoes
Not everyone who joins the Silent Chorus is a Hollowed.
Some never wanted to.
Others never got the chance.
Most of those who follow, do it because they could not bear to be alone again. These are called the Echoes: ordinary survivors who at some point received the Choir’s gift and found they could no longer live without it. They are not transformed overnight. They don’t surrender. They drift. Slowly. Quietly.
At first, they simply walk. A week. A month. For Years. They follow the Choir from place to place, carrying wood, tending fires, fetching water, offering silence. With time, they speak less. Sleep less. Some begin to hum unconsciously, their voices harmonizing with no apparent source.
Their eyes become glassy and reflective. Some begin to forget the faces of loved ones, the names of those they’ve buried, or the shape of their own handwriting. Yet the gaps do not remain vaccant. They are filled with the song.
Within the cult, these followers are sometimes referred to as the Bass. They are the quiet resonance beneath the Chorus' melody. The weight of presence that lets the harmony rise. Without them, the song would falter.
Because their melody is the only thing making sense.
Or simply because somewhere in the quiet that lives in the cracks of desperation, you hear your voice begin to harmonize with the world once more.
And that might be the first note of salvation.
The First Note
“They always ask permission. But how do they always arrive where people are ready to say yes?”
It began with a single voice.
No one remembers whose. A mother mourning her children. A soldier burying a friend. A scavenger humming into the hollow of an abandoned church. The world was already too broken to care about beginnings. But someone sang - softly, a single note pulled from the marrow of despair - and something heard it.
Now, the song moves without origin, passed like breath, echoing through blackened forests and scorched ruins. A lullaby for sleepless souls. A hymn for those haunted by memory. It arrives when the fire has burned low and no one dares to speak.
And when the Pale Choir steps out from the twilight, you won’t remember the moment you let them in.Because in that silence, in that brief unbroken peace, you hear your own grief sung back to you.
And it’s beautiful.
And it’s unbearable.
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Hot damn. This got some emotions brewing!
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Han!! Thank you so much <3