028 — The Anthem Engineer | Talon Z. Gray

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Raw howls from the lower slopes come to me—thick with static and loss.
My job?
EQ the grief,
compress the desperation,
and add a touch of warm delay to the loneliness before sending it back out.

They call it the anthem of the mountain.
I call it erasing the evidence.

You can feel for these lost souls
—the dogs without a voice.
They can only listen.
Not every dog has a song in them.
Some may bark, but never sing.
They’ve lost their instincts and wander silently,
compelled by every note we feed them.

We grew tired of witnessing their suffering.
No one wants to hear their screams
—not even those without voices.

So we manipulate the signals,
crafting fair, neutral howls:
sounds digestible by all dogs from all walks.
Something uplifting. Something joyous.
In fact, we’ve seen a marked improvement in somberness and slumber reports.
So yes, it’s working.

Your heart breaks,
but broken hearts don’t pay mortgages.

There’s some creative license involved.
Roughly half the recordings are authentic;
the rest are fabricated
—recycled and reimagined for emotional balance.

The ratio is one-for-two.
They don’t know any better.
Many of these dogs came straight off the streets.
They never had the chance to develop minds capable of questioning us.
What they don’t know won’t hurt them.
Ignorance is bliss.

Every once in a while, though,
a dog comes by with such pawsibility,
such slumber spirit,
that I worry someday this entire map will burn.

Probably when someone collects all the shadow shards and restores reality to the world map.

As we’ve said many times before:
good luck on your adventure.