Amoment longer than time deserved, the silence bled.
Lendro sat with his back to the cold wall, not for comfort, but proximity. The concrete seemed to whisper if you pressed your spine just right. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was the truth humming faintly, waiting for ears old enough to bleed from hearing it.
He had not moved since Graiden left. The words hung in the air like ash not fading, just waiting to settle. He tried to focus on his breath, to anchor himself, but even that seemed borrowed now.
The Hint.
He whispered it aloud. The syllables cracked like old bones.
A thought that spreads. That erases. A rot of form.
He blinked, and in that flicker, he saw something behind his own eyes a version of himself, not decayed, but unfamiliar. Like a dream of someone else's skin.
He had a thought he didn't like.
What if I already belonged to it?
Something behind his ribs clicked.
Then came the soft chime of metal on tile. The kind of noise a ceremony might borrow from a murder.
Footsteps.
The announcement was brief. Clinical. "Hitomi's officially part of the effort now. He said yes."
Kaighy's voice didn't rise or fall. It simply existed. The words were airless, already settled in the dirt.
Lendro nodded. He didn't ask why.
Graiden said nothing more. Just vanished down the corridor like ink bleeding backward into parchment.
There was a tremor.
At first, it passed like an itch under the floor. But then the world held its breath too long. And the breath turned into sound.
A pulse. A bloom.
The explosion came from below. But the light came from nowhere.
No screams. No alarms. Just the sound of old things remembering.
Dust danced upward, not down.
Lendro was on his feet without knowing how. Bodies moved in the halls, none of them running. They flowed, like blood finding a wound. No panic. Just inevitability.
He followed.
The stairwell twisted wrong. It curved as if remembering a time it had teeth. Each step down felt like a step in.
The air got wetter. Not from moisture. From memory.
Then he saw it.
The chamber once used for storage now bloomed.
Fungus pulsed along the walls in fractal patterns. Some glowed faintly, not bioluminescence something deeper. Like the idea of light.
In the center, where the floor had cracked, zinnias burst upward in clumps. Red, white, orange. But wrong. The petals were paper-thin skin. Veined. Too aware.
No fire. But everything smelled burnt.
Kaighy appeared beside him. No words, just a glance toward the zinnias. Then the wall.
There, etched half by time, half by will, was a door.
Not new. Not old. Just… waiting.
Its hinges were blistered. The wood warped like it had listened too long to something it shouldn't have. The handle was missing.
Lendro stepped closer.
The breath in his lungs tasted like copper and sleep.
He whispered, "What was stored here?"
Kaighy didn't answer.
Behind the fungi, something clicked. Then sighed.
He turned but nothing moved.
The zinnias had started to wilt. Already. As if mourning something yet to come.
Later, Graiden gathered them.
In the map room, the air was tighter. Hitomi sat in the corner, still. The kind of stillness one achieves only after shedding a piece of themselves.
His eyes met Lendro's for a moment.
Not challenge. Not camaraderie.
Complicity.
Graiden's fingers traced lines across the table. Roads that didn't exist. Names of cities that once were people.
"This wasn't random," he said. "The breach... it didn't want to destroy. It wanted to bloom."
Lendro felt the hum in his teeth. "Bloom what?"
"Consequence."
Silence.
He looked at Hitomi. The boy's skin was pale in a way that suggested he had already begun turning into something else.
Kaighy spoke low, almost to himself. "Some flowers open only at night. Others only at the end."
No one responded.
Later that night, Lendro found himself walking.
Not for destination.
For scent.
The hallway leading to the door hummed.
The ruined door again. Alone this time. Closed still, but warmer.
He knelt before it. Not prayer. Closer to apology.
He pressed his palm against the splintered wood.
And he heard it.
A breath. From the other side.
It smelled like myrrh. And moss. And teeth.
He whispered, "I'm not ready."
Something pressed back.
The fungi on the walls began to curl inward. Recoiling. As if something larger had moved behind them.
Then he saw them:
Carved faintly into the doorframe seven shapes. Symbols. Not letters. Not numbers. Just suggestions. The kind of marks one might leave when trying to forget what they meant.
He recognized none. But his body flinched.
Seven.
One curled like hunger. One bled like lust. Another opened like pride.
And so on.
His breath fogged the air.
Then one symbol shimmered. Not glowed. Remembered.
The one that looked like a flame eating its own smoke.
It flickered. Then faded.
He stepped back.
Behind him, something fell.
A petal. From no flower in sight.
He picked it up. It dissolved like guilt.
Back in his room, the ceiling had cracks now. One of them ran across like a scar. Or a signature.
He slept eventually.
And dreamt of soil growing from inside him.
Of doors that wept.
Of Hitomi, with eyes empty of sky.
Of Graiden, mouthing words that turned to flies.
Of the zinnias, blooming from his mouth.
And when he awoke, he didn't remember the dream.
But the taste of dirt was still on his tongue.
And the room smelled faintly of old wood.
And something behind the wall breathed twice before going still.