The rain hadn't touched the tower in days, yet the stone floors were damp with cold. Solan stood at the threshold of the Veil chamber, watching the girl curled beneath the altar. She was asleep—if sleep was the right word. Her chest did not rise, and no warmth radiated from her skin. Yet her fingers twitched, subtly, as if reaching toward something far beyond the waking world.
She had no name. Not in the system. Not in the Codex. Not even in the Labyrinth's endless pages.
And that terrified him more than anything else.
He had first seen her during the last descent—Tier VI, where language dissolved and even the concept of identity strained beneath conceptual collapse. In the shrine of the Oracle Without Eyes, she had emerged from a pool of mirrored thought, not born but written—etched into existence as a question the Labyrinth dared not answer.
She bore no Soulchain. No pulse. No record.
Only a mark—an untranslatable symbol, spiraling inwards like a blind eye, etched into the skin above her heart.
And when she had opened her eyes, Solan had known. She was wrong in the same way the Nameless Core was wrong. A tear in the order of things. A whisper made flesh.
She stirred now.
A slow blink. Pale lashes parting to reveal eyes like polished moonstone—reflective, hollow, unanchored by color. She focused on nothing. Yet when Solan spoke, her gaze snapped to him like an animal's scenting blood.
"You're awake," he said. Quiet. Careful.
No response. But something shifted behind her eyes, like tide against bone.
The system gave no notice.
She sat up, mechanically. Movements jerky, childlike, marionette-pulled. Her skin was unmarred, too smooth—as if the world had not had time to carve imperfections into her. Her hair clung wetly to her back, though the air was dry.
Solan approached cautiously. "Do you remember anything? A name? A place?"
She tilted her head. Then slowly, as if parsing a long-forgotten script, she spoke.
"...I remember… the scream before the scream."
Her voice was raw air turned sharp, not quite a whisper, not quite human.
Solan felt his stomach tighten. The system finally flickered—barely.
Data conflict detected… parsing null entity…Error: Entity classified as [Primordial Echo]Tag: [Not Of Chain]
"Primordial Echo?" he repeated.
No answer. Only the girl reaching to touch the black mark on her chest.
He summoned the grimoire. Its page flipped of its own accord, revealing a parchment he'd never written. A sketch appeared—her silhouette, inked in reverse. Beneath it:
"She who was not called but still arrived.""She who dreams the echo of the First Voice.""WARNING: Interaction may cause Temporal Drift."
The girl stood. She was taller than she'd seemed sleeping. Too tall. Her bones didn't quite move right under the skin. For a moment, her shadow flickered into something multi-limbed, and then back again.
She walked past Solan without a glance, toward the sealed mirror at the chamber's rear.
He reached out. "Wait—"
Her hand met the glass, and the mirror cracked outward from her touch. But instead of shattering, the reflection changed.
Not a mirror now—but a window.
A realm of white dust and fragmented architecture stretched beyond. Black suns spun above a sea of still air. No land. No sky. A place that existed between concepts.
Solan knew it instantly.
The Veil's deepest wound.
A realm he had never dared to chart.
He whispered, "The Hollow Moon..."
The mirror pulsed once. So did the mark on her chest.
The girl turned her head slightly, not facing him fully. "It was not made for you."
"You came from there?" Solan asked.
"I was left behind."
He watched, unable to breathe.
"By who?"
The girl touched her throat, hesitating. Then: "By the name that was erased."
Behind her, the realm flickered. Statues broken in infinite repetition. Thrones without kings. Symbols carved into the void. All frozen in a scream that had not ended.
The Hollow Moon.
It had once been a prison. A failed lock for the first of the Unspeakable Horrors. The place where the God-King of Silence was sealed. Where time fractured into remembrance. Where the Labyrinth bled from.
And now, a child had crawled from it.
"No," Solan whispered. "You're not just a girl, are you?"
She blinked.
"I am what was remembered wrongly."
Solan took a step back.
The system pulsed again, reluctant.
Entity V-Class Exception: [Echo of the Unspelled Name]Warning: Direct observation beyond this point may trigger Grimoire CorruptionRecommendation: Seal via Divine Sigil or Abandon Contact
But it was too late.
The girl turned to face him fully. And for one second—one agonizing second—he saw through her.
Not flesh. Not shadow. But concept.
And inside that concept: pain, coiled like a dying star. A memory of a voice too large for the world to hold.
Then, she blinked again—and she was only a girl. Dust on her toes. Pale lips chapped from silence.
"I… want to sleep," she said.
Solan nodded. "Then sleep. I'll keep watch."
She curled back beneath the altar, eyes never closing, yet her breath slowed—matching no rhythm of life or death.
And still, the Veil murmured through her. Like a door breathing open.
He sat beside her.
Outside, the sun had gone dim again. The horizon pulsed with spectral light. Echoes of names long-buried brushed the edge of the world.
Solan's hand hovered over the grimoire. The mark on the last page changed again—this time becoming a new glyph.
One he had not seen before.
Its name formed in the void behind his thoughts.
Saevathael.
The girl twitched in her sleep.
And the Veiled Labyrinth shifted.
The tower was never meant to shelter things like her.
It groaned beneath the girl's presence, each breath from her chestless body bending space ever so slightly around her. Dust no longer settled in the corners—it floated, as if waiting for her permission. Shadows refused to cling to her feet. The Veil itself, that sacred threshold between worlds, had grown thinner where she slept.
Solan remained still.
She lay now beneath the altar, unmoving, yet never still. Her breath was silent, but the world inhaled around her. Her body, weightless, pressed no mark into the stone. And where her skin met the air, faint veins of colorless static shimmered—like the afterimage of lightning trapped in glass.
Wyrm whispered from Solan's soul.
"She should not be."
"I know," Solan murmured.
"Not even the Nameless Core dreams of her."
Solan turned to the grimoire resting on his lap. The last entry now writhed, defying ink. The page twisted beneath his fingers, recoiling like flesh touched with flame. But still, the symbol remained:
Saevathael.
He traced it with his fingertip. Pain bloomed instantly, not in the nerves, but in the self. A burning sensation in the architecture of his own memory. The name was not meant for mortals to think, let alone speak.
It had no root in any Veilscript. It predated even the First Language.
System interface had not reappeared.
Even the Codex seemed afraid.
The girl stirred.
When her head turned, her eyes did not shine like light—but absence. They devoured color, stripped sound. And in the depths of those irises, Solan saw a fragment of something ancient, something singular.
The Hollow Moon.The first Realm unchained from the Waking World.
He had heard of it only in myths. A realm abandoned by the gods themselves, sealed in silence during the Nameless War. A place where time was not a river, but a wound. Where unspeakable things waited not in cages—but in memories.
She had come from there.
"I saw the One Without Threshold," she whispered.
Solan stiffened. "That's… not a real name."
She shook her head. "It is not a name. It is what remains when all names have burned."
Wyrm's soulform tightened in his chest. "She remembers something from before the Towers."
"Before the Veil," Solan said.
"No," Wyrm rasped. "Before language."
Solan rose and stepped toward her.
"What are you?" he asked, not as accusation, but prayer.
She sat up, hands resting gently in her lap.
"I am what was not chosen."
Silence stretched.
"Chosen by what?"
"The Voice at the end of Meaning."
Another pulse of unreality spread from her, and this time, Solan felt the stone beneath him ripple, as if trying to escape her gravity. The Codex rattled in his grip. Pages tore themselves loose and blackened in the air, curling into ash that never fell.
She stood.
Behind her, the mirror gateway to the Hollow Moon began to stir again.
"I remember them," she said. "The five who cast their towers into the sky. The Lords who stood against the Nameless Ones. I remember the war that never ended."
"You weren't alive then," Solan said.
"No," she replied. "But I was the wound they left behind."
Something moved inside the Hollow Moon. A shadow without shape. A scream without noise.
Solan's knees weakened.
She turned her pale gaze to him.
"I need you to take me there," she said. "Before they notice."
"Who?"
"The Others. The Ones who remember the world wrong."
Solan's blood chilled.
"You're asking me to descend into the Hollow Moon?"
"I cannot walk it alone," she said, stepping into the circle of moonlight. "But you carry the Mark of Vareth'alun. The First Forgotten Name. The one even the Oracle dared not speak."
He blinked.
"How do you know that?"
"I was born from it."
Lightning snapped through his mind.
It all clicked.
She wasn't birthed from the Labyrinth.
She was written by the Veil itself.
Not a being. A Conceptual Echo—birthed from the first True Name Solan had ever stolen. A backlash of meaning. A divine miscarriage of language itself.
And now she stood before him asking him to walk into the one place even the gods feared.
Wyrm trembled.
"Solan. You cannot let her in."
He stared at her.
"I already did."
The mirror expanded.
Not shattered—opened.
Behind it, the Hollow Moon pulsed with silent light.
A cathedral of mirrors spiraled endlessly within, each reflecting a memory of the world before shape. Music played from mouths that didn't exist. The sky bled ink. Names fluttered through the wind like birds made of paper.
She stepped through.
Solan hesitated.
And followed.
The Labyrinth shifted as he crossed the threshold, responding not as a Realm—but as a witness.
The girl without a name had returned to the place where she was first unwritten.
And now Solan walked beside her—not as a bearer of a Mask or a chain, but as the one marked by a truth even the Veil couldn't contain.
He heard the Voice.
The same that once named him.
And this time, it said nothing.
Because what followed next could not be named.
Wind did not blow here. Time did not tick. The world around the Tower of Black Glass was a mirror turned inward, a sealed horizon where even the Veil refused to gaze.
And yet—tonight, something stirred.
A single eye opened.
It was not flesh. It was not spirit. It was memory remembered wrong, awakened by a name that should not have been spoken.
The being that once bore the name Elyrion the Severant—Lord of the Fifth Tower, God-Eater, Betrayer of the Dawn—watched from within his prison.
He felt it.The ripple.The breach.
Not in the sea. Not in the Veil.
In the Hollow Moon.
And worse: someone had entered.
"After all this time," Elyrion whispered.
His voice cracked the silence like glass. Across the walls of his sanctum, sigils flared—ancient, forbidden. Language from the First War, etched in the blood of slumbering gods.
He rose.
Chains clattered from his back—divine seals that had held for eons. Not because they were broken, but because something on the outside had changed. The Hierarchy of Realms had shifted.
A True Name had awoken.One not spoken since the War of Uncreation.
And he remembered it now.
Vareth'alun.
The name of a god that was never born… and yet now walked the Veil through a vessel of flesh.
Elyrion looked toward the Veil, though it was only shadow in this place.
"Who are you, Solan Maelvaran?" he whispered.
He reached for the mirror fragment in the center of his black sanctum. It refused to reflect him.
Good.That meant he still had time.
He bent a knee—not in prayer, but in ritual alignment.
Not to the gods. Not to the Nameless Core.
But to something older still: the Abyss beneath all thought.
For if the girl had returned to the Hollow Moon… then the Silence-Born would soon awaken.
And if the Silence-Born woke…
Even death would forget its name.