He wasn't summoned. He was extracted.
Three Overseers entered his chamber at dusk, said nothing, and escorted him through glyph-sealed corridors lit only by dreamlight. Their footsteps made no sound. Cael's did.
He didn't ask where they were going. He already knew.
The halls were colder than usual. Or maybe that was just him. His new Severance had begun to rot inside him—quietly, politely. Like a guest overstaying its welcome in his nerves.
[SEVERANCE #3: STABILITY INDEX — 41%]
[Thread Drift Acceleration: Confirmed]
[Voluntary Disintegration Detected]
That last one made his stomach twist. He didn't remember choosing anything.
They brought him to the tribunal chamber.
Not a courtroom. Not a trial. Just three high-backed chairs carved from dead scripture, occupied by two Overseers and one... other.
The first was Corra Venn, all precision and absence. Her face unreadable. Her eyes already looking past him.
The second was masked in mirrorglass. The kind that rewrote you when you stared too long.
The third didn't move. Didn't breathe. Wasn't introduced.
Its presence wasn't a person—it was a permission. Something that had been authorized but not explained.
Cael stood at attention.
Venn didn't look up from her data-sheets.
"You've returned from breach engagement," she said. "But the sanctum tether was incomplete."
He said nothing. The walls pulsed once with silence.
"Your Spiral Fragment has begun to rewrite local glyph logic," she continued. "Fourteen auxiliary systems have registered recursive bleed. Three Initiates experienced resonance hallucinations after passing near your dorm."
Still, Cael didn't speak. Not out of defiance—he wasn't sure if he could trust his mouth to keep to this time.
Venn's gaze finally rose.
"Your condition has become an anomaly," she said. "But not yet a failure."
The mirror-masked Overseer twitched—then spoke.
"You are being assigned to a trial deployment," it said. No inflection. No phrasing. Just inevitability.
Cael blinked.
Trial. Not mission.
[Observation Override]
[Trial Directive: 1]
[Stability must be demonstrated. Or the asset will be culled.]
He exhaled once through his nose.
"What's the assignment?"
A flicker of hesitation passed through Venn's expression. Microseconds. Then it was gone.
"A containment breach," she said. "Unmapped sector. No returning agents. Memory-locked grid." She passed him a slip of bone. Glyph-burned.
He read it. Just one line.
SILENCED HOLLOW
Containment Classification: Redacted
His vision twitched.
The name did something to him. Something old.
"Alone?" he asked.
"No," Venn said. "You'll be accompanied by another anomaly."
He didn't have to guess.
She was waiting at the gate.
White robes. Half-bandaged wrists. That same absence of voice—more pronounced now, like the air around her refused to hold language.
She turned as he approached.
Still no name.
Still that look.
Not curiosity. Not recognition. Something in-between. Like a scar trying to remember how it was made.
Cael met her eyes and didn't speak.
She nodded once.
[FRAGMENT HARMONY DETECTED]
[Interference Risk: 3.4%]
[Compensation: Unknown Variable "NARA" Engaged]
He flinched.
"Nara?" he asked, too quiet.
She didn't react. Didn't hear it. Or maybe… she hadn't heard it yet.
A glyph-latched Overseer handed them a mission spindle.
"Field Reassessment. Observe, contain, return. Or don't return at all."
Cael nodded, hollow.
The gate opened.
The air beyond wasn't air. It drank sound.
As they stepped through, the walls shimmered—not visibly, but in concept.
The mission began.
The first stair had no sound.
Not their footsteps. Not their breath. Not the whisper of cloth against armor. Nothing.
Cael glanced at the girl walking beside him—still nameless, still impossible to ignore. Her steps were perfectly measured. Not out of discipline. Out of… inevitability.
Does she already know where this goes?
The stairwell spiraled downward through stone that shimmered with dead glyphs. Old scripture, overwritten by some forbidden rite. Each step should've echoed. Instead, it swallowed the moment of impact—devoured it whole.
[SOUND RECOGNITION ERROR]
[AUDITORY LAG: -0.3s]
[Stability Check Failed]
His ears rang with absence. And absence had weight.
They passed the first ward line.
Cael felt it ripple through his ribs—a thinning. Like the membrane between idea and space had grown brittle. The temperature dropped. His fingertips numbed. Not from cold. From context drift.
He reached to check his comm-glyph.
Nothing.
He tapped again. Not even static.
[THREAD SYNC LOST]
[DISTORTION ZONE ENTERED]
[PROXIMITY TO FRACTURE: 74 meters]
He opened his mouth to speak.
Then stopped.
He was speaking. He just couldn't hear it.
Nara—no, the girl—paused.
She turned to him, slowly, as if on hinges.
He mouthed, "Can you hear me?"
She held up a finger. Pointed behind him.
He turned.
The stairs were gone.
Not physically. Conceptually.
There was nothing there—just a descending tunnel that bent light wrong. He tried to count how many steps they'd taken.
His brain refused.
Like the number didn't exist anymore.
The girl stepped ahead. He followed.
They entered the Hollow proper.
And Cael understood why it was named that.
The chamber stretched wide and low, its walls flickering between stone, metal, and something else—fabric of logic unstitched. Pillars of calcified bone jutted from the floor in spiral patterns, etched with broken names. The ceiling pulsed like a dying thought.
There were corpses. Or… remnants.
Shadows of Initiates caught in mid-motion, but folded wrong. Bent at elbows that shouldn't exist. One had two mouths, both open in a scream that made no sound.
The girl moved slowly among them. Not startled. Not curious.
She placed her palm against one—just a whisper of contact.
It dissolved.
Not like dust. Like regret.
[REVERSE ECHO DETECTED]
[CAUSALITY THREAD: NULL]
[DO NOT BREATHE IN THE SILENCE]
Cael reached for his blade.
He didn't draw it.
Didn't finish drawing it.
The moment stuttered.
His hand was at his side again. The blade already back.
He hadn't remembered sheathing it.
He looked down.
His shadow was late.
Two steps behind him. Frozen mid-step.
He stared until the System blinked:
[TEMPORAL ANCHOR DEGRADED]
[YOU ARE NO LONGER IN STEP WITH YOURSELF]
[BACKLASH RISK: EXTREME]
His knees buckled.
The girl caught him—not roughly. Not kindly. Just… practically.
Their eyes met. Hers held no panic.
Just clarity.
She helped him stand, and as she did, a ripple passed through the Hollow. A resonance. Not sound. Not sight.
Memory.
A laugh. Childlike. Fragile.
Then—
Something moved.
A flash of twisted white. Spindled limbs. A mask carved in mockery of grief.
The System stuttered.
[RECURSIVE ENTITY: CLASS ∅]
[DESIGNATION: HUSH ECHO]
[DO NOT LISTEN TO WHAT IT ISN'T SAYING]
The girl pulled Cael behind a bone pillar. Her hand gripped his collar with practiced precision.
The creature—Hush Echo—drifted past.
Silent. Wailing. Bleeding not blood, but syntax.
On the far wall, glyphs began to scream without sound.
Cael's vision cracked.
Then—
Silence folded.
The Hush Echo vanished.
And the girl whispered—not aloud, but into him:
"Don't breathe here. Not even in memory."
The silence was no longer clean.
It hummed—low, bone-deep, like it had gotten under his skin. Not sound exactly, but resonance. A thrum in the architecture of thought.
Cael moved slowly.
He couldn't trust his reactions anymore. Each time he turned his head, there was a one-second delay before his vision caught up. Every shadow looked familiar—because it arrived in his memory before it hit his eyes.
This isn't time distortion. It's me.I'm not parsing the now.
He checked the System again.
[Peripheral Chronoception: Suppressed]
[Thread Drift: 48%]
[Cause-Effect Parsing: DEFERRED]
[Cognitive Looping Detected]
Still climbing.
But he could move. So he did.
The girl stayed ahead of him—no voice, no hesitation. Her feet didn't echo. They never had. But when she walked, the Hollow stopped humming for half a second. A breath.
The corridor unfolded into a spiral basin, half-collapsed, with a ribbed ceiling like the inside of a creature that had forgotten how to die. In the center, resting on a raised dais of cracked boneplate, was a containment vessel.
Oval. Sealed with spiraled binding-thread. Its seams twitched.
Cael shuddered. Something in his spine sparked—his Fragment reacting.
[RECOGNITION: FRAGMENT PROGENITOR]
[Severance Thread Detected: FAILED]
[Caution: Memory Radiation Present]
He stepped closer.
The glyphs on the shell shimmered, curling and reforming. Not language. Not quite.
Is this… a discarded identity?
He blinked.
And in that blink—
He wasn't in his body.
Not quite.
The Hollow lent him a moment.
A memory. Not his.
A figure—small, slight, feminine—stood before the same containment vessel. A pair of Overseers flanked her, their masks bloodless and blank. She tried to speak, but her voice wouldn't rise.
No name. No echo.
The Overseers looked at her. Then at each other.
"Receptive. Fragment-compatible. Clean slate."
"She severed correctly?"
"More than that. She emptied."
The girl reached forward. A bone shard was placed in her hand.
It glowed for a second.
Then dulled.
The name etched in it—the last trace of who she'd been—burned away.
Cael gasped.
The memory receded. His knees buckled, but he didn't fall. The girl was there—beside him.
Not touching him. Not speaking.
But her presence anchored him like a tether of silence.
Was that you? he thought, not aloud.
She didn't nod.
But her eyes didn't lie.
And in that moment, Cael felt the truth.
She had come back to this place. Not to remember.But to see what forgetting had cost her.
The glyphs on the vessel quieted.
Still cracked. Still dangerous.
But no longer pulsing toward him.
He staggered back. The System flickered again.
[Temporal Parsing Stabilized]
[Thread Drift: 42% | Auto-Correction Engaged]
[Proximity to Null Identity Signature: Effect—Grounding]
[Secondary Fragment Compatibility: Pending Sync]
The silence returned.
But it was calmer now.
Contained.
The girl gestured toward the exit.
Not urgently. Not afraid.
Just… certain.
Cael followed.
But not before casting one last glance back at the containment vessel.
He didn't know what Fragment it had once held.
But he knew what it had taken to hold it.
And somehow, she'd survived that.