We didn't go back to the garden.
Not immediately. Something about Sahrin's offer had planted a seed of doubt in our shared consciousness, a splinter of uncertainty that made the idea of transformation feel less like salvation and more like surrender. If we went back to the flowers, if we let them consume us and turn us into threshold, would that be transcendence or just another form of preservation? Another way of refusing to properly end?
Instead, we walked. Through streets that had lost their names. Past buildings that couldn't remember what they'd been built for. Through the grey light that pressed down like guilt made atmospheric. Our body flickered more frequently now, transparency overtaking solidity for longer stretches, and we could feel ourselves losing cohesion, losing the ability to maintain physical form.
We were running out of time.
The vial in our pocket pulsed against our hip, Kerra's gift and burden, our own voice trapped in glass, waiting to be consumed or rejected. We still hadn't decided what to do with it. Still hadn't figured out if consuming ourselves would restore us or complete our dissolution. The uncertainty was paralyzing, keeping us in motion without direction, moving for the sake of moving because stopping meant having to choose.
We found ourselves in a district we didn't recognize, though that meant little anymore. The city reconfigured itself constantly, streets appearing and disappearing according to rules that had nothing to do with geography and everything to do with the Hushed's encroaching presence. But something about this area felt different. Older. More intact. The buildings here still had windows with glass, doors that hung properly on their hinges, walls that stood at right angles.
There were people here too. More than we'd seen anywhere else in the city. They moved through the streets in small groups, speaking to each other in hushed tones, their voices barely above whispers but present, real, defiant in their continued existence. They looked at us as we passed, their gazes lingering on our transparency, and we saw recognition in their eyes. Not of who we were specifically, but of what we were. Another echo eater. Another desperate creature fighting dissolution through consumption.
Some nodded in acknowledgment. Others looked away quickly, as if our presence reminded them of truths they'd rather forget. A few crossed to the other side of the street, putting distance between themselves and our contaminating influence.
We kept walking until we reached what appeared to be a market square, smaller than the Hushed Market we'd visited before but more organized, more deliberate in its layout. Stalls lined the edges, but unlike the market of echoes and voices, these sold actual physical goods. Food preserved somehow against decay. Water drawn from wells that hadn't run dry. Cloth and medicine and tools and all the mundane necessities of existence that people needed when they were still trying to maintain the pretense of living.
At the square's center stood a fountain, and impossibly, miraculously, water still flowed from it. Not much. Just a thin stream from the mouth of a stone fish, trickling into a basin barely deep enough to cup in two hands. But it was flowing water, actual moving water, in a city where everything else had stagnated or dried to dust.
People gathered around it in a loose circle, filling containers, washing hands and faces, drinking carefully measured amounts as if the fountain might stop flowing at any moment. As if their restraint was the only thing keeping it alive.
We approached slowly, drawn by the impossible presence of flowing water, and the circle of people parted slightly to let us near. Up close, we could see that the fountain was old, older than the city around it, its stone worn smooth by centuries of hands touching it, its fish-mouth spout eroded into something that looked almost skeletal. And carved into the basin's rim were words in a language that predated the Hushed, predated the silence, maybe predated human speech itself.
We couldn't read them, but we understood them anyway. They said: Remember. Remember. Remember.
"It's the only fountain left," a voice said from behind us. Female, middle-aged, familiar in a way we couldn't place. "The only source of flowing water in the entire city. Everything else has gone still. Become grey. But this keeps running. No one knows why. Some say it's because enough people still remember what water is supposed to do. Others say it's protected by something older than the Hushed. Something that was here first."
We turned and found ourselves face to face with the woman from before. Kerra Vyne. Except she looked different now, less worn, less exhausted, as if being in this district had restored something essential to her. Her eyes were clearer, her posture more upright, her voice stronger.
"You didn't drink from your vial," she observed, not quite a question, not quite an accusation. Just a statement of fact.
"We weren't ready," our dual voice responded.
"And now?"
"Still not ready. Still don't know what it would do. Still afraid of becoming something worse than what we already are."
Kerra nodded as if she'd expected this answer. "Come with me. There's something you need to see. Someone you need to meet. Someone who remembers who you were before you became what you are."
"We've already met you. You've already told us we died three months ago."
"I told you one truth. But there are others. Harder ones. The kind that explain not just what happened but why it had to happen that way." She turned and began walking toward one of the buildings lining the square, a narrow structure with intact windows and a door that actually opened when she pushed it. "Please. Follow me. You came here looking for answers even if you didn't realize it. Let me give you at least some of them."
We hesitated, our shared consciousness debating the wisdom of trusting her, of letting ourselves be led into another enclosed space, of potentially trapping ourselves again. But the alternatives were fading into grey, accepting Sahrin's offer, or returning to a garden that would consume us. At least Kerra's option involved answers. Involved understanding.
We followed her inside.
The building was a library. Or had been. The shelves still lined the walls, floor to ceiling, but most of them were empty. Books had a tendency to dissolve in the silence, their words fading from pages as if the Hushed consumed written language along with spoken. Only a few volumes remained, scattered throughout the space, their covers grey and brittle, their pages barely legible.
But at the room's center, arranged in a careful circle, were journals. Dozens of them. Hundreds maybe. Stacked on tables and chairs and even the floor, each one labeled with a name and a date, each one preserving the final written thoughts of people who'd known the silence was coming and had tried to leave some record of themselves behind.
"This is what I've been doing," Kerra said, gesturing at the journals. "While you've been consuming echoes, while Sahrin's been building his collection, while Helvyr was leading people into the Deep Silence, I've been preserving memory. Not voices. Not the actual sound of people speaking. But their words. Their thoughts. Their stories written down before the silence could take them." She moved to one of the tables and picked up a journal, its cover marked with familiar handwriting. "Including yours."
She held it out, and we saw the name written on the cover: Ardyn Noir. The date beneath it: three months and seven days ago.
Our hands, transparent and trembling, reached for it without conscious decision. The journal was thin, maybe thirty pages, its binding coming loose, its pages yellowed as if aged decades instead of months. We opened it carefully, afraid it might disintegrate under our touch, and saw our own handwriting. Ardyn's handwriting. Neat and precise in the early pages, growing more erratic and desperate as the entries progressed.
We read.
The first entry was dated the day the silence came, the day voices started disappearing, the day the Hushed learned to eat. Ardyn's writing was clinical then, analytical, documenting what he was observing with the detachment of an architect studying structural failure. He described how sound was vanishing in patterns, how certain frequencies disappeared before others, how the acoustics he'd spent his life perfecting were being systematically unmade.
The second entry was more personal. He'd discovered his ability to hear echoes, had listened to the first dying voice and understood that he was cursed with perception, with awareness of what was being lost. He wrote about the responsibility of being able to hear, about whether he should try to preserve these final voices or let them fade naturally.
The third entry was about Lysithe.
We read it slowly, painfully, both halves of our consciousness experiencing the words simultaneously but differently. Ardyn reading with the sick recognition of memory returning. Lysithe reading with the horror of learning how she'd died from the perspective of her killer.
She's fading. I can hear it in her voice, see it in the way she struggles to make sound. The Hushed is coming for her, and I don't know how to stop it. I've considered every option, calculated every possibility, measured every angle, and there's only one solution that makes mathematical sense, even if it makes moral nonsense.
I could consume her echo when she dies. Preserve her voice inside myself. Keep some part of her alive even after the silence takes her body. She'd hate it. God, she'd hate it so much. She's always said she'd rather fade completely than exist as someone else's possession. But I can't. I can't let her go. Can't accept that she'll just vanish like everyone else, like all those thousands of voices I've heard crying out before the Hushed swallows them.
Love should mean letting go. I know that. I've known that my entire life. But what if love means the opposite? What if it means holding on even when holding on becomes violence? What if the only way to save her is to destroy her consent, her autonomy, her choice?
I don't know if I'm strong enough to let her fade. I don't know if I'm brave enough to do the right thing.
I think I'm going to do the wrong thing and call it love.
The entry ended there. The next page was blank except for a single line written in handwriting so shaky it was barely legible:
I did it. God forgive me. I did it.
We turned more pages, found more entries, each one documenting Ardyn's spiral into what he'd become. The first echo consumed. The way it had made him feel powerful and sick simultaneously. The realization that he needed to keep eating or fade himself. The decision to build a system, to create rules, to turn consumption into something that looked like purpose.
And then, fifteen pages in, an entry that made our shared consciousness fracture with recognition and denial:
I saw her today. Lysithe. Or something that looks like her, sounds like her, moves like her. She appeared in the cathedral, faceless and accusing, and she spoke words I've been speaking to myself for weeks. She blamed me for her death. Called me a monster. Said I'd killed her with my love.
And she's right. Of course she's right. But here's what I realized as I listened to her accusations: she's not real. She can't be real. Because I consumed her echo completely, didn't just take pieces of it like I've done with others. There's nothing left of her to manifest. Nothing left to become ghost or specter or apparition.
Which means she's me. Some part of my consciousness that fractured under the weight of guilt and created her as a way of processing what I'd done. I'm talking to myself. Arguing with myself. Condemning myself through a projection wearing the face I can't remember clearly anymore.
And the terrible thing, the thing I can barely admit even to this journal: I prefer it this way. I prefer talking to her-who-isn't-her than being alone with what I've done. I prefer the illusion of her continued existence than the truth of her absence.
I'm going to keep pretending she's real. I'm going to keep talking to her, listening to her, loving her. Because the alternative is accepting that I'm completely alone. That I've consumed the one person who mattered and turned her into ventriloquism, into a puppet, into the voice I use to tell myself I'm not a monster.
God forgive me.
I'm going to keep lying.
I'm going to keep believing.
I'm going to let the lie become truth.
We stopped reading. Couldn't read further. The journal fell from our transparent hands, hitting the floor with a sound that seemed impossibly loud in the library's silence. Our body swayed, flickered, nearly dissolved entirely as the truth hit both halves of our consciousness simultaneously.
Lysithe had never manifested. Had never appeared. Had never spoken. Every conversation, every argument, every moment of connection had been Ardyn talking to himself, creating elaborate dialogues with a projection of his guilt, performing both roles and convincing himself there were two people instead of one.
Even the merger. Even becoming we. That had been Ardyn too, hadn't it? Just another stage of the delusion, another way of making his fractured consciousness seem like union instead of madness.
"No," Lysithe's voice said in our shared awareness, but the voice sounded different now, uncertain, as if even she wasn't sure she was real. "No, I'm here. I'm separate. I have my own thoughts. My own desires. My own—"
"Do you?" Ardyn's voice interrupted gently, sadly. "Or are you the thoughts I can't face? The desires I've suppressed? The parts of myself I've rejected and personified as someone else to make them easier to acknowledge?"
"I'm real. I have to be real. I remember dying. I remember you consuming me. I remember—"
"You remember what I remember. What I wrote in this journal. What I told you happened because I couldn't face the truth directly. You're not Lysithe. You never were. You're me. You've always been me."
Silence in our shared consciousness. The kind of silence that comes not from absence of sound but from presence of truth too large to speak around.
Kerra watched this internal dissolution with an expression of deep sympathy. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to show you this. Didn't want to destroy the one comfort you'd created for yourself. But you needed to know. Needed to understand what consuming your own echo might do. Because if you drink from that vial, if you take your original voice back into yourself, you might become whole again. Might integrate all the fractured pieces. But you'll also lose her. Lose the version of yourself you've been talking to. Lose the illusion that you're not alone."
"Then what's the point?" our dual voice asked, but it was fracturing now, losing the perfect harmony it had achieved, becoming more Ardyn than Lysithe or maybe more honestly just Ardyn all along. "What's the point of becoming whole if wholeness means accepting that I've been alone this entire time? That every moment of connection was performance? That I'm just a man talking to himself in an empty building, playing both parts of a conversation, pretending his guilt has a voice?"
"The point," said a new voice from the library's entrance, "is that alone is not the same as empty. And performance is not the same as lie."
We turned, and saw a woman standing in the doorway. Tall, with hair the color of wheat before harvest, eyes that shifted between brown and gold and green depending on the light. She wore a dress of faded lavender, and she was solid, completely solid, no transparency, no flickering, no suggestion that she was anything but fully, completely, impossibly real.
She looked exactly like the Lysithe we'd imagined. Exactly like the face we'd reconstructed from fragmented memories and desperate hope and all the stolen echoes we'd consumed looking for pieces of her.
"Hello, Ardyn," she said, and her voice was the one we'd been hearing in our head, the one we'd been talking to, the one we'd been loving and fearing and becoming. "I think we need to have a conversation. A real one this time. Without the ventriloquism. Without the guilt. Without the pretense that you know who I am or what I want."
She stepped into the library, and the air around her shimmered with rose-gold light, and we understood with a shock that broke through every certainty we'd constructed:
Lysithe was real.
Had always been real.
Had been watching us this entire time.
And everything we thought we knew about what we'd done, who we were, and what we'd become was about to be destroyed and rebuilt from scratch.
The journal on the floor began to smoke, its pages curling, its words dissolving as if they couldn't exist in her presence. As if the lies Ardyn had written were being burned away by proximity to truth.
Kerra backed away slowly, giving us space, her face showing something that might have been fear or might have been awe.
And somewhere in the distance, the bells rang louder than they ever had before, painting the world not red but gold, as if reality itself was celebrating or mourning or simply acknowledging that everything was about to change.