The glyphs had learned to hide in plain sight.
Noa saw them everywhere now—etched into the condensation on her coffee cup, woven through the cracks in the sidewalk, lurking in the flicker of faulty streetlights. The city breathed them in and exhaled them altered, the way a body might metabolize poison into something stranger.
She pressed her forehead against the train window, watching her breath fog the glass. When she pulled back, fine black lines spiderwebbed through the condensation, forming symbols that hadn't been there before.
*"You're getting better at seeing,"* the Whisper murmured, its voice no longer separate from her own thoughts.
Across from her, a little girl swung her legs, humming a tuneless song. Noa went rigid. The rhythm matched the pulse of the glyphs in her dreams.
The girl met her gaze. *"Did I say it right this time?"* she asked, and her teeth were too white, her smile too wide.
The train screeched to a halt. Noa fled.
Malvek was waiting at her apartment, his face haggard. Blueprints spilled across her kitchen table—city plans, decades old, marked with sectors Noa had never seen.
*"There's a chamber,"* he said, stabbing a finger at the deepest level. *"Below the ruins. Below everything."* His hands shook. *"They walled it off in the seventies after a collapse. But the reports—Noa, the reports say they didn't seal it to keep something out. They sealed it to keep something in."*
Noa touched the paper. The lines of the blueprint squirmed under her fingertips, rearranging themselves into glyphs.
*"We have to go down,"* she said, and didn't know if the words were hers.
---
The air in the lower tunnels was thick, syrupy, as if sound itself had grown sluggish. Their flashlights carved frail circles in the dark, revealing walls that were no longer stone but something closer to skin—puckered, porous, veined with pulsing black lines.
The chamber yawned before them, a maw of polished obsidian.
Noa stepped inside. The moment her foot touched the floor, the glyphs ignited—not with light, but with *absence*, swallowing the glow of their flashlights and reflecting nothing back. The walls were alive with movement, symbols slithering across the surface like serpents.
At the center stood the mirror.
It was a slab of perfect black, taller than a man, its edges fused seamlessly with the floor. Noa approached, her breath coming too fast.
Her reflection stepped forward to meet her.
It wore her face, but the eyes were voids, the mouth stretched in a serenity Noa had never felt. Behind it stretched a city she recognized—Eira, but gutted, its sky peeled back to reveal an infinite dark.
*"Hello, mouth,"* her reflection said.
Noa's lips moved with it.
Malvek grabbed her shoulder. *"Noa—"*
The reflection kept speaking. The words were guttural, ancient, a language that predated tongues. But Noa understood. They were the same words Malvek's brother had whispered before vanishing into the ruins.
*"This city will echo,"* the reflection said, and Noa said it with it, her voice doubling, tripling, fractalizing.
The glyphs on the walls flared. Somewhere above them, the city shuddered—lights flickered, sirens wailed, a thousand voices cried out in a language they didn't know they knew.
Noa felt it happening—the unraveling, the rewriting. The Whisper wasn't just in her mind anymore. It was in the streets, in the wires, in the water. It was remembering itself through her.
Malvek's grip tightened. *"Fight it,"* he begged.
Noa turned to him, tears cutting through the grime on her face.
*"I think,"* she whispered, *"I'm not remembering."*
The glyphs on her skin pulsed.
*"I'm being remembered."*
The lights went out.