It began with the pause before a name is spoken. The moment when language coils against the back of the tongue, and silence becomes a blade—neither cruel nor kind, only waiting.
She had not died.
She had been unwritten.
And now, in the trembling core of the Echo-Silts, wrapped in silk like shadow and blade, she was coming into form again—not as the assassin they remembered, not even as the shadow-worshipper she had once believed herself to be, but as a wound in narrative itself. A cocoon forged of cut sentences, bound silence, and scars no language could properly contain.
Darius stood before the cocoon without armor, without dominance, without the voice that had once commanded gods to kneel.
He stood as the man who had once called her beloved, even when she could not speak the word back.
