Chapter 3: The One-Way Gate
Scholar's Log, Entry 8,408
Date: Cycle 249,200 PD. I... I think. Time feels broken here.
Subject: Arrival. The Silence.
I am here. I am on Avalora. The transition was... violent. But the calculations held. The harmonic anchor worked. I am alive.
But the silence, the silence... The Magi's notes did not, and could not, prepare me for this. It is not an absence of sound. It is an absence of everything. The song of life, the hum of magic in the earth, the feel of the stars, the presence of other souls—it is all gone. It is a crushing, deafening void. I can hear the wind in the trees and the skittering of insects, but these are crude, lonely sounds. They are not life. They are just... noise.
I tried to cast a simple light cantrip. Nothing. My magic, my connection—it's gone. Severed. I am as mute as this world. I am utterly, terrifyingly alone. It is beautiful, and it is horrifying, and I do not know if I can survive it.
Valeriana's hand was resting on the central activation rune back in the tower on the eve of the Summer Solstice. It was difficult to breathe because the study's air was so heavy with stored energy. A faint, angry heat radiated from her machine's copper coils. The alignment's phantom third moon had fully appeared through the large circular window, illuminating the floor with an odd tri-shadowed glow.
It was time.
She didn't look back. She pushed all of her will, all of her focus, all of her intent into the machine, pressing her palm flat against the rune.
Nothing happened for one silent second.
Then, the ten resonant accumulators discharged at once. It was not a grand explosion but an awful, inward lurch. The sound of the city's song, stored for decades, was pulled from the devices in a single, agonizing gasp. The machine itself came to life with a high-pitched, metallic scream that was purely physical, a sound of metal and crystal pushed beyond all known limits. The air smelled of melting iron and ozone as the copper coils flared from dull red to a blinding white-hot.
The large diamond lens at the center of the machine trembled. Before it, the air tore rather than shimmered. In the middle of the room, a ragged, vertical rip of unadulterated, non-reflective blackness emerged. It was not a doorway of light. It was a wound in the world—a patch of absolute nothing that seemed to drink the light from the study.
This was the energy discharge she had planned for—the catastrophic, unavoidable announcement.
Miles away, in the central spire of Silverwood, the City Wardens felt it. Silent and violent, a shockwave of untuned, raw magic swept through the city. The streets were lined with luminous conduits of crystal that dimmed and flickered. Like a broken harp string, Silverwood's ambient hum went horribly flat. Alert gongs began to sound, deep and resonant.
In the festival gardens below, Lyren froze, a half-lifted cup in his hand. He felt the wave hit—not the chaotic energy of an attack, but the focused, desperate signature of one specific, impossible theory. His face went pale. "Valeriana... no..." With a terrible, cold dread in his heart, he started to run, calling out to the wardens.
The machine's shriek was deafening back in the tower. Despite the intense heat of the rune beneath her hand, Valeriana did not recoil. The black portal crackled and snapped, releasing raw energy sparks that melted the floor beneath them. Already, the strain was tearing the machine apart, causing it to destroy itself. It would be over in a minute.
She picked up her sturdy pack and slung it over one shoulder. She glanced at the preservation case on her desk, the logbook for Lyren safe inside. Her final word.
She heard the sound of the Wardens' gongs, closer now. She had perhaps thirty seconds.
Valeriana clutched the strap of her pack and breathed the humming, magical air of Elysiuma one last time. Then she dashed into the tearing, black emptiness, her elven grace diminished to a physical, desperate sprint.
It was not a journey through the transition. It was an attack.
The initial feeling was one of simultaneous stretching and crushing. It was the sensation that her body, mind, and soul were all being pushed through a hole that was infinitely smaller than itself. The second was a glacial cold that seemed to freeze her very being. There was only a sense of violent, screaming momentum—neither light nor sound.
Then she felt it. One small, hardly noticeable thread in the midst of the un-space between worlds. The faint, lingering magical trace of Avalora was the "whisper" on which she had staked her life. Like a drowning woman clutching a single thread of silk, her spirit, her magic, refined by her attunement, clung to it. The only thing keeping her moving forward rather than tearing her apart and scattering her into the endless emptiness was this tiny thread, which served as the anchor. After guiding and pulling her, it threw her out with one last violent shove.
She landed with a painful, breath-stealing impact after being thrown out of the void. She landed hard on a bed of soft, damp earth, leaves, and sharp twigs after crashing through branches that whipped her face. She lay gasping for a full minute, her entire body screaming in a way she had never experienced before. Magic served as a natural cushion in Elysiuma, a delicate field that lessened the impact of the outside world. The ground was just... hard here. Unforgiving. It was a brutal, raw shock.
The pain in her shoulder where she landed was the first thing she noticed when she eventually managed to roll onto her back. The silence was the second thing she noticed.
It was not "quiet." It was absolute.
The constant, background hum of life, the song she had known since birth, the symphony she had found so distracting—it was gone. Its absence was not peaceful. It was a terrifying, hollow amputation. It felt like the sky had been ripped away, leaving a black, gaping vacuum. She gasped as she tried to sense the energy in the air or the pulse of the earth, to hear the magic in the old trees surrounding her.
Nothing was present.
Only the physical, savage sounds of this new world. The sound of wind rustling leaves. An owl hooting in the distance. The ragged sound of her own breathing in panic. There was no single, cohesive song—just a world of isolated, disjointed sounds.
It was terrible. It was empty.
She expected to see the black, tearing wound she had jumped through when she turned to look behind her. Nothing was present. Just more trees. The portal, its anchor dissolved, had snapped shut, the connection completely severed. There was no going back.
She sat up, her body aching. She still clutched her pack. Her logbook was safe. She was alive. She was alone.
She groaned and forced herself to stand, resting against an oak tree's coarse bark. The air was damp and cool. She tried to conjure the most basic of cantrips—a spark, a tiny mote of light that any Elven child could make to read by—while glancing at her hand, the skin of which was pale in the moonlight. She concentrated her will and summoned the strength she had always sensed inside herself.
Nothing.
Her hand remained just a hand, pale and trembling slightly.
The realization hit her with a force greater than her physical fall. The song wasn't just inaudible to her senses. For her, the magic was gone. Her connection to the ambient energy of Aetheria had been cut. She was as muted as the world she had so desperately sought.
On the damp forest floor, Valeriana, the pioneer who had broken through the void and the scholar who had mastered cosmic equations, fell to her knees. The utter, crushing silence overcame her. She had done it. She had proven the Muted World was real.
And she was trapped in it.