The whisper came at dawn.
Not in his ears, not in his head. It came in the gap between — that narrow silence right after a thought ends but before another begins. That space the mind usually skips over.
There, the Hole spoke.
"Is the thing wearing your skin still you?"
The boy sat upright, breath trapped in his chest. For a moment he wasn't sure where he was. The dream had bled over again — not with visions or voices, but absence. A soft, yawning void tugging at the corners of his memory. It took a full minute before he remembered Kesh was real. That the spiral was still on his arm. That he hadn't been swallowed whole.
Kesh sat across the room, compass open in her lap. She hadn't slept. Maybe she didn't anymore.
"You heard it, didn't you?" she asked, not looking up.
He didn't answer right away.
"Is the thing wearing your skin still you?"
The question hadn't echoed. It hadn't even felt like sound. Just a pressure, burrowed behind his name.
He nodded slowly. "I think so."
Kesh shut the compass and finally met his gaze. "Then the second Truth is watching."
That was how she said it. Watching, not coming. Not arriving. Truths weren't summoned. They were awakened by recognition, like a reflection noticed in still water. And now it had seen him.
They spent the morning preparing.
Kesh explained it like a storm — not sudden, but inevitable. The first truth always opened the door. The second one asked if you still wanted to walk through it. Most didn't. Some fled. Others went mad trying to shut the door again.
"You can't reverse the first mutation," she said, binding copper wire around the threshold of their bunker. "But you can delay the second if you anchor yourself deep enough."
"Deep how?"
She touched the spiral on his wrist.
"Here. And here." Her hand moved to his forehead. "Memory. Belief. Your sense of shape. Lose those, and the second Truth stops being something you get — and becomes something you are."
They gathered incense made of grave ash and rust leaves — not magical, but familiar, grounding. Symbols of loss, memory, and decay. The things forgotten people clung to when the Hole got too close.
Then she drew the sigil.
Not on the floor.
On him.
The spiral wasn't drawn this time. It was carved. A shallow cut down his forearm, inked with old water from the lower cisterns. Water that hadn't seen sunlight in over a hundred years.
"It's not a real sigil," she said. "Just a placeholder. Something for your nerves to remember when the rest of you forgets how to stand."
It stung, but only vaguely. He watched the blood well up, then recede — like it, too, wasn't sure whether to be present.
"You'll need to stay conscious," Kesh added. "The second Truth doesn't announce itself like the first. It lures. Tests. Plays with your sense of noise."
"Noise?"
"You'll know."
That night, he wandered further than he should have.
Not physically. In his thoughts.
He tried to remember the name of his first teacher. Couldn't. Tried to recall the sound of his mother's voice. Couldn't. Tried to remember the feel of the cliff winds at noon, the scent of burnt oil and bread in the Halves, the way the sky turned rust-colored just before rain.
Gone.
Not in the way memory fades.
Gone, like it had been edited.
Like someone had replaced it with a placeholder — static instead of song.
His hand twitched.
There was no pain.
The spiral on his wrist pulsed once. Then again. Faster now.
He staggered to his feet and turned — only to see that the room had changed.
It was still his, still Kesh's, still beneath the Lower Halves... but not exactly. The walls leaned a little further. The table was too tall. And the shadows didn't line up with their sources.
He wasn't dreaming.
This was a scrape — a localized distortion in space caused by proximity to a Truth's emergence.
And then the sound came.
Not loud. Not violent.
A soft, high tone, like wind threading through a broken pipe. He covered his ears, but it didn't help. It wasn't outside. It was inside.
It was eating the silence.
Kesh burst in seconds later, her expression unreadable. She looked around once, nodded, and muttered, "It's early. But it's happening."
She handed him something — a strip of folded cloth laced with sigil-wire. "Bite," she said.
He did.
And then the walls began to hum.
They didn't vibrate — the hum came from between surfaces, as if the air had grown taut and was trying not to snap.
He dropped to his knees.
The sound pressed harder, not in volume but in presence — as if silence itself were being killed. Not replaced. Removed.
A shape moved in the corner of his vision. He turned, but there was nothing there.
The hum deepened.
Now it sounded like words. Not syllables. Just the feeling of speech. The implication that something wanted to be spoken.
And then — the spiral flared white-hot.
The world cracked.
And he heard the second Truth whisper:
"You have spoken enough."