He made it out of the Choir District by retracing the cold steps one at a time, each footfall anchoring him just enough to keep the walls from folding in. No one followed. No one had to. The silence did that on its own.
When he emerged into the lower quarter of the Cliffside Realms, the air felt sharp again — full of real sound. Clattering carts. Murmured trades. Someone sweeping glass into a pile and cursing under their breath.
But his mouth didn't work.
He tried again, whispering something — anything.
Only breath came out. No voice. Just the shape of a word without the word itself.
He pressed a hand to his throat.
Something was there.
Thin.
Tight.
He hurried down a narrow side alley, into the shadow of a broken shrine. It had once held a wind glyph, judging by the rusted weathervane and fractured bone chimes. Now it held only moss and names scratched out of its stone.
He checked again.
There were threads in his skin.
Not stitches.
Threads — fine and colorless, like spider silk woven just beneath the surface. When he flexed his jaw, they pulled faintly, as if his throat had been bound by something that listened when he spoke.
The Choir did this.
He hadn't accepted their shard. He hadn't taken their vow. But exposure had been enough.
The second Truth hadn't entered him — but it had brushed its fingers along his ribs and left a mark anyway.
By nightfall, the numbness in his throat had started to fade.
A whisper. That's all he could manage. Just one word at a time.
Not reliable. Not predictable.
But it was something.
He emerged from the alleys and returned to the last place he remembered seeing Kesh. An old gutterway above a rusted glasssmith's loft — a place where echoes carried strangely and the stars always looked a little bent.
She wasn't there.
Instead, a man sat slouched against the wall, carving a sigil into the stone with a piece of bone.
He didn't look up.
"You're early," he muttered.
The boy stepped closer. "You… know me?"
The man's eyes lifted. Pale blue. Clouded by soot.
"No," he said. "But I know what you smell like. Silence and spiral ink. You've been touched."
"Who are you?"
The man smiled, slow and worn. "Someone who remembers what forgetting costs."
He slid the bone shard into a pouch and stood. His jacket was stitched from old choir robes, cut into strips and rewoven. His belt held tiny jars — some filled with dust, some with thread, one with what looked like a tooth wrapped in black cloth.
"Name's Ashur," he said. "Used to build memories for people too broken to hold onto their own."
The boy didn't speak.
He couldn't — not clearly.
Ashur didn't seem surprised.
"They took your voice, didn't they? The Choir."
The boy nodded.
Ashur sighed. "Then you're going to need something stronger than a name to stay upright."
They sat beneath the slanting metal roof of the loft while night folded itself across the city. Below, the wind stirred broken banners and oil smoke. The hole in the sky didn't blink.
Ashur leaned back.
"You're lucky they let you walk out," he said. "The deeper Choir cells don't care whether you choose silence. They'll carve it into your bones either way."
The boy tried to speak — only got part of a syllable out before coughing.
Ashur raised a hand. "Don't force it. You'll bleed through the seams."
He pulled one of the jars from his belt — the one with the tooth — and turned it slowly between his fingers.
"You want to know what they're doing down there? Why they sing with no sound? Why they drain words out like poison?"
The boy didn't move.
Ashur answered anyway.
"They think the first Truth wasn't Pain. Wasn't Silence. Wasn't even real."
He leaned closer.
"They think the first Truth was a name. The name of the Hole itself. A word so true that the world had to forget it or unravel."
The boy blinked.
Ashur smiled again, but this time there was no warmth in it.
"So now they're trying to find it again. Piece by piece. One stolen voice at a time."