The silence in the workshop after the memory-projection was heavier than the dark of the archives. It was a charged, brittle thing, vibrating with Rylan's shock and the lingering echo of a century-old atrocity.
His pale eyes, still wide with the aftershock, remained locked on me. Not with Kaito's ancient, weary understanding, nor with Hale's clinical cruelty. This was a new, terrifying intensity: the gaze of a master engineer who has just found the fatal flaw in a hated machine. I was no longer a person to him, or even a monster. I was a schematic. A living blueprint of the weapon that broke his world.
"Inside you," he repeated, his voice a rasp. He took a step closer, his movements unnervingly silent on the chitin floor. The great, veined ears atop his head swivelled forward, focusing on me like parabolic dishes. I could almost feel them pulling at the air around me, sampling my frequency. "The root frequency of the Erasure… it's woven into your neural echo. How are you not catatonic? How are you not screaming?"
"I have been," I said, the truth escaping before I could cloak it in bravery. "Just not out loud."
He stopped, his head tilting. The analytical fury in his eyes flickered, replaced for a nanosecond by something else—a recognition. He knew about internal screaming. He lived in a world of noise so violent that silence was the only sanctuary. My quiet, broken answer resonated with him on a frequency words could never reach.
Kaito stirred, a rustle of pained silver. "The Mnemosensitive mind is a paradox, Vesper. It can shatter from a whisper and contain a supernova. She has held the supernova. The scream is there, but she has built a dam around it." He paused, his vulpine face drawn. "As have I. We are both at our limit."
Rylan's gaze snapped to the Kitsune, taking in the dulled fur, the way his tails lay like felled trees rather than living things. The assessment was quick, clinical. "Your resonance field is unstable. Fluctuating by 0.3 decibels on the sorrow-band. You're bleeding power. The pact is draining you both." He stated it as a fact, not a question.
"We need to reach the Thyrsian Warden," Kaito said. "His grove can provide a restorative field. A place to anchor and recover."
"Silas," Rylan said the name like a taste. "His grove is dying. The Ghost-Noise bleeds into the telluric channels. His restorative field is compromised." He turned back to his workbench, picking up a delicate, crystalline caliper. He began adjusting it, his back to us. "You cannot reach him in this state. The Hounds will hear your instability a mile away. You need to… recalibrate."
"There is no time for your machines, Rylan," Kaito's voice held an edge of impatience.
"Not my machines." Rylan turned, holding up the caliper. It glowed with a soft, internal blue light. "Her resonance. The human. The pact is a two-way bridge. You are trying to shield a chaotic, shining signal with a storm that is exhausting itself. It is inefficient. You need to dampen her source frequency, not just blanket it."
He took a step toward me again. I instinctively leaned back against the wall. "What does that mean?"
"It means," he said, crouching down to my eye level with that unsettling, silent grace, "that the memory inside you is a bell that has been struck. It is ringing. That ring is what the Hounds will eventually hear through the Kitsune's fading storm. To hide, we must make the bell stop vibrating."
"You can't erase the memory," I whispered, horrified.
"I do not deal in erasure," he said, and there was a flash of profound contempt in his pale eyes. "Erasure is the Concordat's tool. I deal in harmonics. In counter-frequencies." He tapped his own temple, where the scars gathered. "The Ghost-Noise is a pain that lives in my people's bones. We cannot remove it. So we create a second, perfect opposite frequency—a sonic mirror—that cancels it out. We call it a Stillpoint."
He looked from me to Kaito. "The memory is a traumatic sonic event imprinted on her psyche. Its echo is active. I can analyze its resonant signature and craft a personal Stillpoint for her. A tailored silence to wrap around that specific memory. It will lower her psychic profile… significantly."
Kaito was silent, considering. I could feel the calculation humming down our bond. Trust. Risk. Necessity.
"What would it require?" Kaito asked, voicing my own dread.
"It requires me to map her," Rylan said, his tone utterly professional, devoid of any malice or warmth. "To listen, very closely, to the memory's echo within her. To take its measure. It will be… invasive. And for her, it will likely be painful. To hold the memory still for inspection is to hold a live coal in your hand."
My heart pounded against my ribs. The idea of letting this severe, bat-eared stranger map the most horrific experience of my life was worse than the initial dive. That had been a chaotic flood. This would be a dissection.
"Is there another way?" My voice was small.
Rylan's expression didn't change. "You can continue as you are. The Kitsune's storm will fail within 36 hours at this rate of decay. You will light up on their scanners like a beacon in the void. They will take you. And they will use tools that make my mapping seem like a lullaby." He stood up, turning back to his bench. "The choice is yours. I will prepare the resonator. Decide."
He began selecting tools—tuning forks of different sizes, crystal lenses, spools of fine silver wire. His workshop filled with the soft, precise sounds of his preparation, a world away from the organic tension in our corner.
Little wraith, Kaito's voice brushed my mind, private and tired. He is not wrong. The shield is failing. I can feel the cracks. His solution is… elegant. Brutal, but elegant. He is a craftsman. He will not harm the source material; he is too obsessed with purity of function.
He hates me, I thought back, despairing.
He hates what you represent. There is a difference. And hatred is a predictable fuel. It is pity or mercy that makes actions fickle.
I watched Rylan work. His hands were steady, his focus absolute. Here, in his domain of sound and silence, he was in control. The outside world, with its lies and its Hounds, was just noise to be managed. In a strange way, I envied him.
"Alright," I said aloud, the word tasting of ashes. "Map me."
Rylan didn't look up. "Remove any metal. It will interfere. Sit in the centre of the room."
With trembling fingers, I unpinned my hair, letting the silver braid fall. I had no jewellery. I stood and walked to the centre of the workshop, near the hovering spherical apparatus. The air hummed with a latent charge.
Kaito remained on the mat, but I felt his consciousness sharpen, watching through the bond, a silent guardian.
Rylan approached. He held a large, clear crystal lens in one hand and a small, humming tuning fork in the other. "You will need to hold the memory at the forefront of your mind. Not relive it. Present it. Like holding up a book. Can you do that?"
I didn't know. I'd never tried to control the ghosts; I'd only ever survived them. I nodded, unsure.
"Do not lie to the process," he said, his voice cold. "Failure will create a feedback loop that could shatter your auditory cortex. Mine as well."
A fresh wave of fear washed over me. I closed my eyes. I tried to find the memory. But it wasn't a book. It was a vortex. A black hole of sensation that sucked me in every time I got near. I flinched back from it mentally.
Elara. Kaito's voice, a steadying current in my panic. The memory is a tapestry. Do not look at the whole picture. Find a single thread. The colour of Hale's coat. The sound of the device charging. One thread. Hold that.
One thread. I grasped for it. The sound. Not the psychic rip, but the mechanical whine just before. The high-pitched, building keen of the crystalline weapon. I focused on that. Isolated it. A single, screaming note in the symphony of horror.
"I have a thread," I whispered.
"Hold it." Rylan's voice was closer now. I felt him circle me. Then, the crystal lens was placed before my forehead, not touching. A chill radiated from it. "Now, let the thread vibrate. Let the echo sound."
I focused on the keening note in my memory. I let it ring in the vault of my mind.
A change in the air. The tuning fork in Rylan's hand began to vibrate, sympathetically. He watched it, his eyes narrowed behind the now-present goggles he'd slid back on. He swapped forks. Listened. Swapped again.
"The frequency is complex," he muttered, more to himself than me. "Layered. A carrier wave of psychic suppression, modulated by a harmonic of… pure grief. Interesting. The weapon wasn't just stealing; it was imprinting the victim's despair onto the stolen echo. A signature of cruelty."
His words were a cold analysis of my deepest wound. I trembled, holding the thread.
"Deeper," he commanded. "I need the sub-harmonics. The emotional resonance beneath the mechanical tone."
I had to go deeper into the memory. I had to touch the edges of the despair he mentioned. I let the thread pull me closer to the vortex. The feeling of Kaito's loss, Aethelred's betrayal, began to bleed into the pure sound. My breath hitched. A tear traced a hot path down my cheek.
The new tuning fork in Rylan's hand didn't just vibrate; it emitted a faint, visible pulse of blue light. He grunted, adjusting a dial on its handle. "There. The sorrow-band. It's… immense." For the first time, his clinical tone wavered with something like awe, or horror. "How are you containing this?"
I couldn't answer. I was clinging to the thread, the vortex pulling at me, threatening to swallow me whole. The keening note in my mind was becoming a scream, layered with the sound of tearing silk (tails being severed) and a deep, animal groan of loss (Aethelred's final breath).
My body began to shake. The trauma was no longer a memory; it was a present-tense assault.
"Enough!" Kaito's voice rang out, physical and mental.
But Rylan held up a hand. "Nearly. The profile is almost complete. The Stillpoint requires the full signature. Hold, human. Just a moment longer."
The room was spinning. The amber light of the fungi streaked. I was going to fall into the memory and never come out.
Then, a new sound. Not from me, not from the memory. From Rylan.
He began to hum.
It was a low, deep, vibrational hum that seemed to originate in his chest and resonate in the hollows of the workshop. It was not a melody. It was a foundational tone, a sonic anchor. And as he hummed, he slowly raised the now fiercely vibrating tuning fork and touched its base to the centre of the crystal lens before my forehead.
The hum and the fork's resonance met.
Silence.
Not an absence of sound, but an active, profound cancellation. The screaming thread in my mind didn't vanish; it was met by an equal and opposite wave. The two interlocked, nullified each other, and left in their wake a pocket of perfect, still quiet.
The psychic pull of the vortex ceased. The memory was still there, but its terrible, ringing echo was gone. It was a book on a shelf. A closed one.
My knees buckled. I didn't hit the floor. Rylan caught me, his grip firm and impersonal. He guided me to a sitting position against the base of his spherical apparatus. The hum in his chest faded.
I sat there, panting, staring at nothing. The relief was so immense it was disorienting. For the first time since the dive, my own mind felt… mine. The background psychic noise of my own trauma had been dialled down to zero.
Rylan stepped back, observing me like a finished project. He picked up a slate and a stylus, making quick, precise notations. "The Stillpoint is established. It is a passive resonance shell around that specific memory-complex. It will dampen your overall psychic signature by approximately seventy percent. The Kitsune's cloak will now be far more efficient."
Kaito rose, moving stiffly to my side. He looked at Rylan, his starry eyes unreadable. "You used your own core resonance as the anchor tone. That was… risky."
Rylan didn't look up from his slate. "It was the only tone pure enough to match the grief-harmonic. My core resonance is the frequency of my own silence. The silence I built to survive." He finally looked at Kaito, then at me. There was no kindness in his face, but the outright hostility was gone. Replaced by a bleak, professional satisfaction. "The job is done. You are now a viable stealth asset."
I found my voice, though it was hoarse. "Thank you."
He flinched, almost imperceptibly, as if the gratitude was a discordant note. "Do not thank me. I did not do it for you. I did it for the data. For the frequency map. Now I have the root signature of the Ghost-Noise. I can refine my people's Stillpoints. That is the payment." He turned his back, shelving his tools with precise movements. "You can stay one night. The resting frequency of the Warrens will help stabilize you both. At dawn, you leave for the Thyrsian."
He dismissed us, retreating into the focused solitude of his work.
That night, wrapped in a thin blanket on the mat, the deep, subsonic thrum of the Warrens vibrating through the floor, I felt the first flicker of something besides terror or grief. It was the fragile, quiet peace of a bell that had finally stopped ringing.
And in the dark, through the bond, I felt Kaito's watchful presence, and a new, faint thread—a curious, resonant echo of Rylan's anchoring hum, lingering in the stillness we now shared. The harem was not a romance. It was a symphony of damaged parts, and the first note of harmony had been one of shared, profound silence.