The boy stepped forward, and the wax figures turned.
Not fast. Not sharply. Their heads swiveled in slow, synchronized arcs. No faces. No mouths. Just smooth, candle-colored masks where humanity should've been.
He paused at the center of the room, unsure whether to sit or run.
Ashur hadn't followed him in.
The boy didn't need to look back to know that. He could feel it — a thinning behind him, as if the threshold itself no longer connected to anything. Like the entry point had faded the moment he passed through, locking him into the forgotten.
He turned to face the podium.
The bone-ink spiral stared back, scratched into the wall so deep the stone itself looked wounded. The center had once held a shape — an eye, maybe — but it had been gouged out completely. Not erased. Defaced. As if the Choir themselves had tried to unsee whatever watched from inside.
The boy stepped closer. His spiral mark ached faintly. Not the sharp tingle of the first time, but a pull. As if something in that wall spiral was unfinished — and waiting for him to complete it.
The silence in the room thickened.
It wasn't just quiet. It was intentional. Structured.
He realized the wax figures weren't simply watching. They were listening.
Not to him.
Not yet.
But to something.
Something deep beneath the stone, or beyond the memory of this place.
He sat.
Not because he understood why. But because some part of him — the part still listening for a name he couldn't say — recognized this as the next thread.
The seat was colder than expected. Not just physically, but temporally. His skin bristled as if time had skipped a breath. He blinked, and the candlelight dimmed. Not all at once — but in slow layers, like memory fading page by page.
A new sound joined the silence.
Breathing.
But not his own.
The wax figures were inhaling now. Inhaling, but never exhaling. Their shoulders rose, stiff and halting, but no air ever came back out.
They were becoming hollow. Preparing.
He didn't move. He wasn't sure he could.
The podium before him shimmered — and something stepped out of it.
It wasn't a person.
Not entirely.
It had shape, but not edges. Cloaked in veils of static and memory-glare, its form bent the air around it. No face. No feet. Just a shifting silhouette like heat above broken glass. And from its center, a sound rose.
Not a voice. A note.
Flat. Monotone. Barely audible. Yet it struck his bones like a bell.
The boy clutched the edge of the chair. His thoughts stuttered. The sound wasn't entering through his ears — it was crawling in through his memories.
He saw flashes: the Archive vault with the grinning boy. The spiraled sigil on the plaque. Kesh turning in a hallway, eyes full of something too knowing to be kind.
And over it all, the sound — soft and inevitable — pressed deeper into him, looking for the cracks.
It found one.
A memory surfaced.
Not summoned. Not called.
Just… surfaced.
A hallway. Wood floor. Chalk dust on fingertips. A name scrawled on the corner of a page.
His name.
But as the sound touched it, the name blurred.
The letters unraveled. Not vanished — just unthreaded, like cloth torn slowly from the middle.
His breath caught.
He tried to speak. Tried to say it. Even silently. Even in his mind.
But when he did, the sound grew louder.
The wax figures exhaled all at once.
Not air.
Laughter.
Dry, empty, cracking laughter — not joyful, not cruel. Just reflexive. Like the sound people make when they forget something they thought they'd never forget.
The boy stood.
The veiled figure stepped forward.
The spiral mark on his chest burned.
The boy gritted his teeth — not in anger, but in resistance.
He could feel it now.
The sound was a summoning. A test. The Choir wasn't just trying to take his voice. They wanted to rewrite what it had ever meant. To replace it with reverence. Submission.
But he wasn't hollow. Not yet.
He stepped down from the podium and faced the figure directly.
"I won't forget myself," he whispered.
The figure tilted its not-head. The sound paused — just for a second. Enough for the boy to press his hand to his spiral.
And remember.
Not everything. Not even most things.
But enough.
The wax figures turned again, this time away.
The silence returned — thinner now. Beaten back.
The figure began to recede. Folded in on itself, like pages turning backward. It disappeared into the podium, leaving behind only one thing.
A single, ink-black feather.
The boy stepped forward and picked it up.
It was cold.
Not in temperature.
In truth.
When he emerged from the chamber, Ashur was waiting.
He didn't ask what happened. Didn't offer comfort.
Just watched the boy's eyes carefully, like someone checking for cracks in glass.
"You kept your voice," he said after a moment. "Most don't."
The boy didn't answer.
But he smiled — barely — and held up the feather.
Ashur's brow furrowed.
Then he nodded.
"You're closer than I thought," he said. "But remember: not every silence is a blessing. Some are cages."
The boy turned toward the cliff's edge, where the wind had gone still.
He didn't know if he was winning.
But he knew he wasn't lost yet.