Chapter 2: The Boy Who Spoke Without Sound
The village of Elun'dar remembered him not as a prodigy, but as a ghost that walked among the living.
Seryth Kha'Zar had grown quieter with age, if such a thing was possible. He no longer used words at all. Instead, his gaze—silver-ringed, calm as stillwater—spoke volumes. And somehow, people listened.
They didn't know why. Not truly.
When the healer Nala attempted to scold a child for stealing herbs, Seryth merely looked at the boy—and the child broke into sobs, returning the flowers with trembling hands. When the local magistrate accused a beggar of theft, Seryth tapped the ground once with his foot—and the truth spilled from the magistrate's own mouth, revealing his corruption before he realized what he was saying.
There was no spell. No command. Only a resonance.
A frequency beneath speech, born from something older than language itself.
One day, while exploring the stone orchards near the outer rim of Elun'dar, Seryth stumbled upon a ruin not marked on any map. A circular dais, cracked and moss-covered, lay beneath trees that never bore fruit.
In the center: a hanging bell made of unpolished obsidian.
He reached for it, and before his hand could touch the rope, the bell swayed.
It did not chime.
The air around him warped. Sound vanished. His breath was still, heart silent. And then he heard it—
—not with ears, but with something deeper.
A message. Not words, but...memory.
A girl's voice, echoing from a time not his own: "You must find the Vox of the Broken Gate. Before they come."
Then the silence ended. The bell stopped. And the moss around the dais had withered to ash.
The name haunted him for weeks: Vox.
He did not know what it meant. Books held no answers. The Archive was silent. Even Rhain, who had once walked the dreamways of the elder realms, recognized nothing.
But Seryth knew it wasn't merely a word. It was a piece of him.
He began sketching it—compulsively. On stone. On paper. On skin. Spirals nested in squares, a sigil he could not name. Each time he drew it, he felt lighter. Like it was unsealing something.
Until one day, it changed.
The sigil began to pulse. Ink crawled. It bled light.
And his voice—long dormant—finally returned. But it was not his voice. It echoed with ten thousand harmonics.
The walls of his chamber cracked.
He fell unconscious for three days.
When he awoke, he remembered the name of the Door.
Time fractured.
Not in the world. In him.
Seryth began dreaming events before they happened—but in reverse. He would wake with memories of things that had not occurred, only to watch them unfold backward throughout the day.
He saw Rhain fall to a poison not yet brewed.
He saw Melethra cry for a child she hadn't yet lost.
He saw stars collapsing, then birthing themselves anew.
Each vision drove him closer to the truth: the Door was not in the future. It was in the before. In the space beneath memory, where time flowed like ink bleeding back into the quill.
And the Vox was its key.
On the edge of the village stood a temple long sealed by vine and time. No one entered. None remembered why.
But Seryth walked through its shattered archway one stormy dusk.
Inside, flame hovered above a dais of mirrored stone. It did not flicker. It breathed.
The moment he stepped near, the flame whispered: "You are one of us."
Images poured into his mind: hooded figures speaking without tongues; hands raised to moons that bled gold; the hollow star splitting open like an egg.
"You were not born," the flame said. "You were recovered."
He reached toward it.
The flame entered him.
And the temple vanished.
Only ash remained.
(To Be Continued)
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