They didn't speak for a long time.
Not out of fear.
Not out of lingering silence.
But because silence had become a shape that lived between their words now — something that pressed close whenever a thought neared the edge of being spoken aloud. The boy sat slouched against the stone wall, breathing shallowly. His throat felt raw, yet strangely open. As if every sound he might make would echo backward through time.
Kesh crouched nearby, tying a wrap around her wrist where the spiral's backlash had split the skin. "It went too far," she muttered. "We're not ready. You're not ready."
He didn't answer. But he looked at her.
Not with defiance. Not confusion.
With clarity.
Something inside him had shifted. He hadn't claimed the second Truth — not yet — but its reflection had brushed him. And reflections always leave something behind.
"You felt it," Kesh said, her voice hoarse. "Didn't you?"
He nodded.
"What did it say?"
He didn't speak. He lifted his hand instead and pressed it to his chest — the spot where breath begins. Then tapped his fingers once, slowly, across his ribs.
A rhythm.
Not a word.
But it carried meaning.
Kesh closed her eyes. "It's starting to change you."
He tapped again — same rhythm. A heartbeat slowed to thought.
"Can you still speak?" she asked, suddenly wary.
He tried.
The first sound came out wrong — thick and warped, like a memory being rewound through cracked film. The second try worked better. A single word, raspy:
"Yes."
And then, softer: "Not always."
They slept uneasily that night, curled against the cold stone and the fading spiral scars burned into the ritual floor. No dreams came. Only flashes. Half-faces behind fractured mirrors. Rooms made of breathless air. A tower of spirals coiling downward into a sea of ink.
By morning, the chamber was colder.
Something had passed through in the dark — something listening.
Kesh was already packing when he stirred. She didn't look at him.
"The Blind Choir is moving," she said. "The lower cults can smell Truth leakage. They'll come looking for the source. And they're not subtle."
He stood and stretched his sore legs. The silence didn't press against him the same way it had before, but its echo still clung to the edges of sound — like soot after a fire.
Kesh shouldered her pack.
"We need to move."
He nodded.
They left the ritual chamber just as it began to collapse.
No warning. No rumble.
Just a sagging of the air, a sense that the room had forgotten it was real. The spiral in the floor folded inward, layer by layer, until the stone surface cracked and split. The glyphs peeled off the walls and drifted upward like ash.
He looked back once, just before the entrance sealed itself behind them with a soundless quake.
Nothing remained.
No proof they'd been there.
Just breath — his own — hanging in the cold.
Hours later, as they climbed a winding stair along the city's rusted underbelly, Kesh broke the quiet.
"I'll take you to the Archivists," she said. "You need context before the next pull starts. Someone has to tell you what came before."
He didn't answer immediately. But after a pause, he touched the anchorbone she'd given him and spoke again — the second word he'd said all day.
"Why?"
Kesh didn't stop walking.
"Because if we don't keep the past alive," she said, "the Hole will choose what to forget."
He frowned. Then looked up.
The sky was visible now — a slice of dark iron above the cliff layers, scattered with false stars and warped constellations that bent too sharply. Somewhere above them, the Hole watched.
And for the first time, he wondered:
Had it always been watching — or had it only just remembered him again?