The fracture widened.
No cry split the air. No tremor shook the earth. But within the buried cathedral beneath Cael'Belen, the silence deepened—alive, pulsing, aware. It was not absence. It was pressure. And within that pressure, the Tongueless One stood still as time forgot him.
His shadow did not follow his movements anymore. It flowed ahead of him, curving against the walls like spilled ink that refused to dry.
From the altar of the shattered chapel, where divine blood had once anointed saints, a sliver of dark glass pulsed with memory.
The Shard of Silence.
It had not been forged. It had been born—torn from the very moment the boy's tongue was taken, when agony met defiance and formed something new. A relic, yes, but not of the gods. It belonged to no pantheon. It had never been consecrated. It was silence weaponized—memory forged into stillness so potent it could slice through time, truth, and mercy alike.
The boy approached it.
He did not kneel.
He reached out, and the shard hummed in response. Not a sound, not exactly. But a resonance behind the ears, beneath the ribs, like the stillness before lightning strikes or the breath held between words.
Lazhar stirred within him, coiling like smoke through thought.
"Oh, you do remember," the presence hissed, half-laughter, half-lament. "Even I had forgotten the pain was this… exquisite."
The boy's fingers grazed the shard.
And the world tilted.
Not outward, not downward—but inward.
---
The Mirror of Futures cracked.
It had no surface, not in any ordinary way. It existed in that interstice between self and consequence. Between action and the shape of things to come. And when the Tongueless One touched the shard, that boundary rippled like water struck by thunder.
Visions unfolded in splinters.
A city in flames, with angels crucified in their own halos. A child screamed from within a cathedral of salt, clutching a dead dove.
Eliara, wings torn, kneeling before a faceless tribunal. Her voice was mercy, but her eyes were rage.
Telvar, blind no longer, staring into a void that stared back—his body covered in blood not his own, chanting a name no god dared utter.
The Tongueless One himself, standing atop a spire of bone, holding the Shard of Silence like a blade. Around him, crowds knelt—not in worship, but in terror.
And beneath them all… laughter.
It was not Lazhar's.
It was older.
Hungrier.
---
He stumbled back from the shard, breathless though breath never truly came. The pressure had pierced through the veil of what-was and what-might-be, and it left something behind—a wound in the air, invisible but bleeding intent.
Telvar felt it from miles away.
Within the Ashmount Monastery, his eyes snapped open. Sightless still, but burning with light.
"It has begun," he whispered, grasping the cold floor. "He has touched the future—and it bled."
Around him, bells tolled without sound. The monks, most long since dead or dreaming, stirred in their graves. One by one, the prayers etched in the stone beneath the monastery began to glow. Lines of old verses, forbidden even in sacred tongues.
He did not smile.
There was no comfort in prophecy fulfilled.
---
Back beneath Cael'Belen, the boy turned.
The Shard hovered behind him, anchored in a loop of memory now corrupted. It followed, like a moon caught in a mad orbit. Every step he took now left echoes, brief shadows of possibilities that flickered and died as quickly as they bloomed.
"Do you see it now?" Lazhar's voice dripped with ecstasy. "What you could become? What they'll force you to become if you do nothing?"
The boy said nothing, but his gaze lifted.
And the walls of the ancient cathedral shifted.
They did not fall. They reformed. Columns twisted into arches of bone. Statues became open-mouthed, weeping things. What had once been holy restructured itself around the presence of its unmaking.
The Spokesman was no longer a vessel.
He was a lens.
And the world was beginning to focus through him.
---
Far, far away, on a floating isle unseen since the Age of Fire, an old being stirred. It had no name, only a title long stripped from history: The Witness Before the Word.
It had been the first to hear creation.
And it would be the last to hear its undoing.
Its eyelids—each the size of mountains—peeled open as it whispered a phrase to no one.
"The Shard has remembered."
Then it began to weep—not from grief, but from awe.
The Silence was no longer passive.
It was a voice.
And it had found its wielder.