Ten years of quiet is enough to break any man.
I had wandered the stone fields for so long that I began to name them. Each statue had once been someone I knew — or thought I did. Eri stood near the ridge where the moss caught the sun; Ryn farther downhill, frozen mid-step, still facing the direction we had tried to run. They looked peaceful in the morning light, but peace had never been a virtue. It was only the silence pretending to be mercy.
I had stopped speaking years ago. Even whispering carried risk. The wind didn't exist here unless the Silence willed it, and the air waited for his permission to move. Every sound was theft. Every breath felt borrowed.
But today, I was done being quiet.
I walked until my legs ached and the horizon trembled. The emptiness of the world pressed down like a lid. I looked up at the gray sky and felt something hot twist inside me — grief sharpened into rage.
"If you can hear me," I said, my voice hoarse from disuse, "then listen."
The echo of that first word rolled through the valley like a stone dropped into still water. The statues shivered, cracks spidering through their surfaces. The world held its breath. Then, from behind the clouds, the Silence answered.
It stepped forward as if it had always been there — a man-shaped gap in the world, faceless, colorless, perfect. No sound followed its arrival. Not even the crunch of its feet on the dead grass. It simply was.
"You should not have spoken," it said. The words didn't pass through air; they bloomed inside my head, cold and exact. "This world was healing."
"Healing?" I laughed, and the sound startled even me. "You killed them. You killed everything."
The Silence tilted its head, curious. "Noise kills faster."
And then it raised its hand.
I felt it before I saw it — the creeping numbness that began at my throat, spreading down my chest. My voice cut off mid-breath. I tried to step back, but my legs were already heavy, the skin hardening into gray. The petrification came faster this time, deliberate, merciless.
So this is how it ends again, I thought.
The stillness crawled higher, reaching my jaw. I tried to scream, but the sound froze in my throat like an unspoken secret. The edges of my vision darkened until the world became a narrow tunnel of gray.
Then something cracked.
It wasn't the stone. It was deeper — something inside me, a pulse that didn't belong to this world. I felt warmth surge through my chest, strange and violent. The petrification quivered. It began to crumble, not outward, but inward — decaying itself.
The Silence stepped back, its faceless form rippling. "World B-21," it murmured, tone sharpened by confusion. "Impossible."
Cracks widened along my arms, and dust fell away in curls of smoke. The gray surface peeled off me like shedding skin, revealing the rawness beneath — not flesh, not power, but something older. The earth beneath me withered, grass turning to ash where I stood.
The Silence spoke again, but this time its words were not words at all. Symbols ignited in the air — spirals, slashes, ideas given shape. My mind stung with meanings too large to hold. The world trembled as if language itself were being rewritten.
I understood nothing. Yet I knew: it was trying to undo me.
I reached out without thinking, and the decay answered. The air fractured. The ground hissed and split. Even the glyphs the Silence had summoned began to blacken and crumble.
For the first time, the Silence hesitated.
It dropped its false shape like a discarded mask, and the air filled with the weight of its true form — not a being, but a concept. It became the absence of sound itself, a shimmering eclipse that swallowed light and motion. My thoughts dulled near it, as if my mind were being erased.
It laughed — a laughter without noise, a ripple through the bones of existence.
But then the edges of that absence began to rot. The stillness tore. The vacuum itself corroded, dissolving into echoes. The more it resisted, the faster it decayed. Fractures spidered across the sky, revealing light beyond light.
I saw fear take shape where a face should have been.
And then, for the first time in centuries, this world screamed.
The sound came all at once — thunder, ocean, wind, life — everything that had been muted erupted back into existence. The statues cracked, voices of the dead overlapping in chaotic chorus. The very air became a weapon.
I fell to my knees, clutching my ears, but there was no escaping it. My power surged beyond control. Everything I touched began to fade: trees collapsing into dust, mountains slumping into sand, rivers boiling into clouds of gray. The sky melted like old paint.
I shouted for it to stop. The shout only hastened the ruin.
The Silence dissolved completely — first its form, then the meaning of its name. Silence itself ceased to exist. What replaced it was noise, pure and endless. My skin blistered from the pressure of my own power. The world bent inward, the horizon curling like paper in a fire.
And then it was gone.
Everything. The world, the sky, the sound — all gone. I floated in the aftermath, surrounded by nothing but ash and light that wasn't light. My body no longer felt like mine. I was a hollow thing filled with echoes.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in the Expanse.
The gray void stretched forever, calm and infinite, its floor rippling like water. The stillness here was different — older, truer. I knew that voice would come before it did.
"You returned," it said, deep and measured, resonating through the endless horizon. "And earlier than expected."
I turned, though there was nothing to turn toward. "What did you do to me?"
"What you did to yourself," it replied. "The decay you wielded was sealed once — twice, in fact. Within you and beyond you. That seal cracked the moment you defied stillness."
I felt the memory of the world crumble behind my eyelids. "I didn't mean to—"
"There is no meaning in instinct," the Voice interrupted gently. "You are two forces now: existence, and its undoing. As you grow stronger, both seals will weaken. And when they break…"
The pause that followed was almost kind.
"…no one will be able to save you from what you are."
The words echoed across the Expanse, each one a heartbeat heavier than the last. I wanted to ask what it meant, what I was supposed to do, but the Voice was already fading. The gray ripples grew still again, and I was left standing in the quiet.
For a long time, I said nothing.
And then, softly, to no one at all, I whispered,
"I can still hear them."
The echo came back wrong — distorted, cracked — but it was still sound.
And somehow, that felt like hope.