The night had been restless.
Eliah dreamt of numbers unraveling into shapes, spirals folding into themselves, and at the center of it all, a single pulse — not sound, but pressure, as if the world's skin was being pressed by invisible fingers. When he woke, his chest ached as though he had been holding his breath for hours.
He sat up, rubbed his face, and blinked at the faint dawn filtering through the curtains. The silence had not lifted. If anything, it felt heavier than yesterday, as though the air itself carried weight.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand. A message from Ava.
Something happened at the hospital. Come now.
The urgency in her words jolted him into motion.
The hospital sat on the edge of the district, a gray block of concrete with narrow windows. Normally, it would have been surrounded by ambulances, patients smoking at the entrance, the constant coming and going of visitors. Today, the courtyard was empty.
He pushed through the front doors. Inside, the reception desk was deserted. A nurse hurried past him, eyes fixed ahead, not noticing his attempt to catch her attention.
The atmosphere felt wrong. Hospitals were supposed to hum with noise, with voices, with alarms and beeping machines. Now, it felt like stepping into a mausoleum.
Ava waved from the end of the hall. He followed quickly, his footsteps echoing faintly against the sterile tiles. She led him into a room where three people sat on beds, all staring at the wall with vacant expressions.
"They're calling it the Vanishing Voice," she signed once the door was closed. Her hands moved quickly, sharp with agitation. "First, the sound disappeared. Now people are losing their ability to speak entirely. Not just volume—language."
Eliah glanced at the patients. One of them, a man in his fifties, opened his mouth as though to form words. His lips moved slowly, trembling, but nothing coherent came out. The shapes of language had crumbled.
"He tried to introduce himself to me," Ava signed. "But what came out wasn't even words. Just… empty shapes. Like his memory of language is dissolving."
Eliah felt the knot in his stomach tighten. Is it spreading to everyone?
She nodded grimly. "Not yet. But faster than yesterday."
They left the room and sat in the corridor, watching doctors scribble frantic notes, their eyes darting like trapped birds. Eliah kept replaying the man's broken attempt at speech. There had been something haunting about the movement of his lips, like a song played on a broken instrument.
Ava tapped his shoulder. You're thinking of something.
He hesitated before signing back. My dream. Numbers, spirals… a pulse. It felt connected.
She tilted her head. Connected how?
Eliah's fingers slowed. It didn't feel random. Like it had… structure. A design.
Her brow furrowed. You think this silence is deliberate?
Before he could reply, a shadow moved at the far end of the hall. A tall figure in a long black coat approached, his steps measured, his gaze fixed directly on Eliah.
Ava stiffened beside him.
The man stopped a few feet away. He had sharp cheekbones, gray streaking his dark hair, and eyes that seemed to observe too much at once. His lips curved into a thin smile.
"You're Eliah," he mouthed — words shaped silently, but unmistakable.
Eliah froze. Very few people outside Ava and his mother had ever recognized him without introduction.
The man reached into his coat and pulled out a small notebook. He scribbled quickly and handed the page over.
Dr. Marcus Kael. Researcher. I've been looking for you.
Eliah scanned the words, unsettled. Why? he signed.
Dr. Kael wrote again, his pen strokes decisive.
Because this is not a disease. It's a signal. And you can read it.
The words hit like a spark to dry tinder. Eliah's heart thudded, though his face stayed still. He stared at the note, then at the man's calm, almost smug expression.
Ava leaned forward, her hands slicing the air. How does he know that?
Kael answered not with writing but by raising a small device from his pocket. A recorder, though it looked heavily modified. He pressed a button and turned it toward them.
The screen lit up with jagged lines — sound waves, though no sound accompanied them. The lines pulsed, irregular at first, then folding into repeating spirals.
Kael tapped the screen, then his temple, then pointed at Eliah.
"You see it, don't you?" he mouthed.
Eliah's throat tightened. He had seen similar patterns in his dream — spirals folding into themselves.
Kael scribbled again.
This is communication. The silence is speaking. Most can't hear it. But someone like you… someone who has always lived in silence… you can.
Eliah wanted to deny it, to dismiss the man as another desperate theorist chasing madness. But the dream, the patterns, the gnawing feeling in his chest — they all whispered otherwise.
Ava signed sharply. Why him?
Kael's reply came swift on the page.
Because he's the only one who might understand before it's too late.
They left the hospital together, though unease clung to Eliah like a second skin. Outside, the streets were growing stranger.
Two men argued fiercely with their hands, yet their gestures were wild, incoherent, as if even their thoughts no longer carried clarity. A woman sat on the curb, drawing endless circles on the pavement with a piece of chalk, her eyes glazed.
The silence was evolving.
Kael walked between them with a calm detachment, like a man moving through a puzzle he had already half-solved. Ava stayed close to Eliah, her posture tense, ready to pull him away if this stranger proved dangerous.
At a quiet corner, Kael stopped and turned to face them. He wrote slowly this time, his eyes never leaving Eliah's.
There will be others who resist. Who believe silence is salvation. They will try to stop you from listening. You need to decide now — will you follow the pattern, or let the world fall into emptiness?
Eliah's hands curled into fists. He hated ultimatums, hated being forced into choices he didn't yet understand. But deep inside, he knew Kael was right about one thing: this was not random. Something was speaking through the silence.
The question was — what did it want?
That night, Eliah sat alone in his apartment again. The city outside his window was darker than usual, the streetlights flickering without rhythm. He placed a blank notebook on the table, drew the first spiral he remembered from his dream, and stared at it until his eyes burned.
His phone buzzed. A new message.
Unknown number.
Do not trust Kael. The silence has chosen you. Listen only to it.
Eliah's breath caught. His pulse thudded in his throat.
Someone else knew.
Someone was watching.
And the silence — the silence was not empty at all.