We couldn't speak.
Not because our voice was gone, though it had grown quieter, more uncertain, flickering like our body between presence and absence. We couldn't speak because every word we'd prepared, every argument we'd constructed, every defense we'd built against this exact moment dissolved the instant Lysithe stepped fully into the library and closed the door behind her.
She was real.
Solid in a way we hadn't been for weeks, moving through space without that slight delay or distortion that marked us as not-quite-present. Her footsteps made sounds. Actual sounds. Soft but distinct against the library's wooden floor. Her breathing disturbed the air. Her presence changed the light around her, not dramatically but noticeably, as if she bent reality slightly just by existing in it.
And her face. God, her face. We'd been imagining it for so long, reconstructing it from fragmentary memories and desperate hope and all those stolen echoes we'd consumed searching for pieces of her. But the real thing was different. More specific. More particular. A small scar above her left eyebrow we'd forgotten. The asymmetry in her smile, one corner lifting higher than the other. The way her eyes weren't just brown or gold or green but all three simultaneously, changing with her mood or the angle of light or perhaps with how closely you looked.
Details we'd erased when we'd tried to remember her. Details the projection in our head had lacked because it had been constructed from absence rather than presence.
Kerra had retreated to the far corner of the library, giving us space but not leaving entirely, as if she thought we might need a witness or might need to be restrained or might simply dissolve into nothing if left completely alone with truth. Her expression was careful, controlled, the look of someone watching a structure they'd built themselves begin to collapse.
Lysithe stopped a few feet away from us, close enough to touch but maintaining distance, her arms at her sides, her posture open but cautious. She looked at us the way someone might look at a wounded animal, with compassion and wariness in equal measure, unsure if approaching would help or make things worse.
"You're not transparent," we finally managed to say, our voice small and fractured. Not dual-toned anymore. Just Ardyn. Just one person speaking. "You're solid. You're whole. You're everything I'm not."
"I'm alive," she said simply. "Still. Barely. But alive in ways you stopped being three months ago."
"The journal said I consumed you. Said I ate your echo. Said I killed you with love disguised as salvation."
"The journal said a lot of things. Some of them were true. Some of them were lies you told yourself to make what you'd done bearable. And some of them were truths that became lies the moment you stopped believing them." She moved closer, just one step, testing whether we'd retreat or hold ground. We held, frozen, unable to move toward or away. "Do you want to know what actually happened? Not the version you wrote. Not the story you've been telling yourself. The truth."
"I don't know. I don't know if I can survive the truth."
"You can't survive the lie either. Look at you, Ardyn. You're barely here. You're fading so fast that in a few days there won't be enough of you left to have this conversation. Whatever you think consuming your own echo might do, whatever Sahrin's offered you, whatever peace the garden promises, none of it will matter if you don't first understand what you actually did and what it actually cost."
She gestured at the journal on the floor, at the pages with their dissolving words, at the record of Ardyn's descent into delusion. "That's not a confession. That's a script. You wrote it after everything happened, after you'd already constructed the version of events you could live with. You wrote it to convince yourself, to create a paper trail that would support the story you needed to believe. And then you forgot you'd written it. Forgot you'd created this elaborate fiction. Let yourself get lost in the performance until you couldn't remember where the truth ended and the lies began."
"Then tell me," our voice broke, barely more than a whisper. "Tell me what actually happened. Tell me what I did."
Lysithe took a breath, and we could see the cost of what she was about to say written in the tension of her shoulders, in the way her hands clenched and unclenched, in the slight tremor that ran through her before she forced herself to speak.
"The day the silence came, you did bring me to the gardens. That part's true. You'd already discovered your ability to hear echoes, had already consumed your first voice the night before. An old man who'd died in the street, his echo calling for his wife. You told me about it. Told me how it had felt, how it had sustained you, how it had filled the emptiness the silence was creating. You were terrified but also exhilarated. You'd found a way to survive. A way to resist the Hushed's consumption."
She paused, gathering herself, and we saw tears forming in her eyes though her voice remained steady. "I was afraid for you. Not of you. For you. Because I could see what consuming echoes was doing even then, even after just one. The way your hands had started to lose color. The way you struggled to meet my eyes. The way you kept touching your throat as if checking whether your own voice was still there. I knew. Even before you said it, I knew what you were going to ask."
"What did I ask?"
"You asked if I'd let you preserve my echo when I died. If I'd consent to being consumed so that some part of me could continue inside you. You said it was love. Said you couldn't imagine existing in a world where I'd been completely erased. Said that if I really loved you, I'd want to be remembered, would want to leave something behind that you could keep."
The words hit like physical blows, each one landing in the space behind our ribs where guilt had been living for three months. Because we remembered now. Remembered asking. Remembered the desperation in our voice. Remembered making it sound like the most reasonable request in the world, like she was being cruel and selfish if she refused.
"What did you say?" we asked, though we already knew. Already remembered.
"I said no. I said I'd rather fade completely than exist as someone's possession. That being remembered wasn't worth being consumed. That real love meant letting go, meant accepting endings, meant not turning grief into cannibalism." Her voice hardened slightly. "And you accepted that. Or I thought you did. You held me. Kissed me. Told me you understood. Told me you'd let me fade when the time came. Told me you'd find another way to survive."
"But I didn't."
"No. You didn't." She took another step closer, and we could smell her now, could smell something that wasn't the copper and ash and curdled prayers we'd grown accustomed to but something else. Something alive. Soap and sweat and the particular scent of her skin that we'd forgotten until this moment. "That night, while I slept, you went back to the cathedral. You spent hours in your workshop, calculating and measuring and designing. And you built something. A device. An acoustic trap using principles you'd developed for capturing and amplifying sound. Something that could hold an echo indefinitely, could preserve it without consumption, could keep a voice alive without anyone having to eat it."
Understanding began to dawn, cold and terrible. "The cathedral. I didn't design it just to hold prayer. I designed it to trap you."
"Yes. Every surface, every curve, every carefully calculated angle. You rebuilt the entire acoustic system in one night, working like someone possessed, using math and music and architecture to create the world's most beautiful cage. And the next day, when my voice started to fade, when the Hushed came for me like it came for everyone, you brought me back to the cathedral. Told me you'd found a way to preserve me without consumption. Told me the building itself would hold my echo. Keep me alive. Let me exist without anyone having to eat me."
"And you believed me."
"I wanted to believe you. God, I wanted to believe you so desperately. Because I was terrified, Ardyn. I was losing my voice, losing my ability to speak, losing the thing that made me feel human. And you were offering me a solution that didn't require anyone to violate anyone else. That didn't require you to consume me against my will. So yes. I believed you. I let you lead me to the cathedral. I let my echo form in that perfectly calibrated space. I let you trap me."
She was crying now, tears running down her cheeks though her voice never wavered. "But you miscalculated. You were so focused on creating a cage that could hold my voice that you didn't consider what it would feel like to be held. To be aware but unable to move. To be conscious but unable to die. To exist in perfect stasis while the world continued without you. It was torture, Ardyn. Beautiful, architectural, mathematically perfect torture."
"How long?" we asked, our own voice breaking. "How long were you trapped?"
"Two weeks. Fourteen days of being conscious but unable to speak, unable to affect anything, unable to even properly scream because the scream just echoed back into itself, got trapped in the same acoustic loops you'd designed so precisely. I watched you visit every day. Watched you talk to me as if I could respond. Watched you convince yourself that I was at peace, that I was preserved, that you'd saved me."
"But then something changed. The Hushed began targeting the cathedral. You could hear it approaching, could feel the silence pressing against the walls. And you realized your trap wouldn't hold against something that consumed sound itself. That the Hushed would absorb the building's acoustics, would unravel everything you'd built, would take me anyway. So you made a choice."
We knew what came next. Could feel the memory returning in full, undeniable, brutal. "I consumed you. After two weeks of keeping you in that cage, I decided it was better to eat you myself than let the Hushed have you."
"Yes. You opened your mouth and you pulled my echo out of the cathedral's architecture and you swallowed me. And this time, because I'd been held in stasis for two weeks, because I'd been aware and conscious and trapped, I stayed aware even inside you. I didn't dissolve. I didn't become just another voice in the chorus. I remained intact. Watching. Listening. Experiencing everything you did from the inside."
The horror of it crashed over us like a wave. She'd been there. Conscious. Trapped inside our body. Watching us convince ourselves we'd done the right thing. Watching us eat other echoes. Watching us descend into madness and delusion and the creation of a projection we'd used to absolve ourselves of what we'd done.
"The Lysithe I've been talking to," we said slowly. "The one who appeared in the baker's shop. The one who merged with me. All of that was me performing both sides of a conversation while you were trapped inside, unable to speak, forced to watch me create a puppet version of you to make myself feel better."
"Yes."
"And you couldn't tell me. Couldn't make yourself heard. Couldn't do anything except watch me spiral deeper into delusion."
"Not until recently. Not until you started releasing the echoes from the cathedral's walls. When you destroyed the architecture, when you broke the acoustic traps, something broke in the system holding me silent too. I gained the ability to manifest separately. To take physical form. To finally, finally speak with my own voice instead of the one you'd been imagining for me."
She reached out slowly, giving us time to pull away, and placed her hand against our transparent chest. We could feel her warmth, could feel her solidity, could feel the life in her that we no longer possessed. "I've been here the entire time, Ardyn. Inside you. Part of you but not you. Aware of everything. And I need you to understand something. I need you to really hear this."
"What?"
"I don't forgive you." The words were soft but absolute. "What you did was violation. Was imprisonment. Was torture disguised as love. And the fact that you convinced yourself otherwise, the fact that you created an elaborate fantasy where I forgave you and loved you and merged with you willingly, that makes it worse. Not better. Because it means you knew. On some level, you knew what you'd done was unforgivable, so you built a version of me who would forgive you. You made me complicit in my own consumption."
Our body, already mostly transparent, flickered harder, threatening to dissolve completely under the weight of her truth. "Then why are you here? If you don't forgive me, if you hate me, why manifest now? Why speak to me at all?"
"Because hate isn't the opposite of love. Because I need you to know the truth before you make whatever choice comes next. Because you deserve to understand what you actually did instead of continuing to live in the story you wrote for yourself." She pulled her hand back, and the absence of her warmth felt like another death. "And because there's still a chance. A small one. A terrible one. But a chance."
"For what?"
"For me to be fully separate from you. For my consciousness to exist in a body that isn't yours. For us to be two people instead of one person pretending to be two." She glanced at Kerra, who nodded from her corner, confirming something they'd apparently discussed. "That's why Sahrin's offer matters. That's why your own echo in that vial matters. If you consume yourself, if you integrate all the fractured pieces of Ardyn Noir back into wholeness, you might create enough cohesion, enough solidity, that I can separate completely. Can step out of you and into independent existence."
"And if it doesn't work?"
"Then we're both trapped forever. Me inside you, aware but unable to affect anything. You dissolving slowly, taking me with you into oblivion. Both of us fading until there's nothing left but grey and silence and the Hushed finally claiming what it's been hunting."
The choice crystallized. Consume our own echo and risk integrating into something whole or risk complete dissolution for both of us. Accept Sahrin's offer and become preserved but static. Return to the garden and transform into threshold. Or simply fade, let go, accept ending.
Four paths. Four possibilities. Four ways to refuse or accept what we'd become.
But now there was another factor. Another consciousness depending on our choice. Lysithe. Real Lysithe. Not projection or puppet or performance but an actual person who'd been imprisoned inside us, who'd suffered everything we'd done, who deserved freedom more than we deserved continued existence.
"If I consume the echo," we said slowly, "if I try to become whole, and it works, and you separate, what happens to you? Where will you go? How will you survive?"
"I don't know. Maybe I'll fade immediately. Maybe I'll have a few hours or days before the Hushed comes for me. Maybe I'll find my own way to resist. But at least it will be my choice. My ending or my survival. Not yours."
"And what happens to me? To us? To whatever connection we had?"
Her smile was sad, broken, beautiful. "There is no us, Ardyn. There never really was. There was you consuming me. You imprisoning me. You performing both sides of a relationship to avoid facing what you'd done. If I manage to separate, if I manage to exist independently, then maybe, maybe we can have a conversation. A real one. Not through the filter of your guilt or my imprisonment. But I can't promise anything beyond that. Can't promise forgiveness. Can't promise love. Can't promise anything except honesty."
From somewhere outside the library, we heard the bells ringing. Loud. Insistent. Urgent. Painting the world not red or gold but a color that had no name, a shade between warning and celebration, between ending and beginning.
The Hushed was coming.
Drawn by this conversation, by the presence of two consciousnesses occupying one failing body, by the promise of consuming something that had resisted consumption for three months.
"You need to decide," Kerra said from her corner, her voice cutting through the moment. "Now. The Hushed knows you're here. Knows she's manifesting. It will come for both of you. If you're going to try separation, if you're going to consume your echo, it has to be now."
She pulled the vial from her coat, the one holding our original voice, and held it out. In her other hand, she held something else. A blade. Silver and sharp and inscribed with symbols we didn't recognize.
"If you drink the echo," she explained, "I'll need to cut. To open you. To give Lysithe a path out when the integration happens. It will hurt. It might kill you. But it's the only way I know to create separation between fused consciousnesses."
The vial glowed in her hand. Our voice. Our original echo. The sound we'd made before we'd started eating others, before we'd imprisoned Lysithe, before we'd died and refused to stay dead.
Inside it, we could hear ourselves speaking. Not words exactly. Just the tone. The particular frequency and timbre that had been uniquely ours. The sound of a person who'd believed in beauty, in architecture, in the possibility of creating spaces where human voices might reach something divine.
The sound of someone who hadn't yet learned that love could be a cage.
We looked at Lysithe, at her solid form, at her tears, at her expression of hope and terror and desperate determination. She'd been trapped inside us for three months. Had watched us spiral into madness. Had been unable to speak, unable to act, unable to do anything except experience our horror from the inside.
She deserved freedom.
Even if it killed us both.
We took the vial from Kerra's hand. It was warm, pulsing in rhythm with a heartbeat we were no longer certain we possessed. Inside, our voice was singing. Not the melody Lysithe had been humming. Not the four-note lullaby that had followed us through this nightmare. Something else. Something older. A sound that predated words, that came from a time when humans were still learning what voices could do besides warn and call and cry.
It sounded like hope. Like belief. Like the person we'd been before we'd learned to eat.
"Ardyn," Lysithe said softly. "Whatever happens next, whatever this does to either of us, I want you to know something."
"What?"
"Your last voice. The one in that vial. It's singing my name. It's calling for me. Even then, even at the very end, even in your final moment before you consumed your first echo and became what you are now, you were still thinking of me. Still loving me. Still unable to let go." She paused. "That doesn't make what you did right. But it means something. I don't know what yet. But it means something."
The bells rang louder. Closer. The library's walls began to darken, shadows spreading from the corners like ink through water. The Hushed was here. Was pressing against the building. Was seconds away from breaking through.
We lifted the vial to our lips.
And drank.