The city of Osefast was a mausoleum of efficiency. It did not believe in noise. The structures were constructed of dense, sound-absorbent polymers, the electric transport vehicles hummed barely above the threshold of hearing, and the citizenry spoke in modulated, low tones—a cultural adaptation enforced by the omniscient municipal body, the Vigilance. In Osefast, silence was sanctity, and Riven was a living blasphemy.
Riven worked on the 107th floor of the Archives, a vast repository of historical data deemed too sensitive for casual consumption. Her job was simple: micro-indexing. It required precision, isolation, and, above all, absolute quiet. She wore thick, padded gloves and acoustic dampeners over her ears whether she needed them or not. She moved like a shadow, her breathing shallow, her thoughts muted, terrified that a simple cough might escalate into the physical manifestation of her curse: the sonic scream.
She had first truly used it at age fifteen, a raw, uncontrolled shriek of grief following the disappearance of her mother—a sound that had not only shattered every pane of glass in their sector but had crumpled the air itself, leaving Riven with bleeding ears and a horrifying understanding of the destructive potential coiled in her own throat.
Now, years later, she lived perpetually pressed down, a tightly wound spring waiting for the stress fracture.
One humid evening, during a shift change, Riven was navigating the narrow Service Passage Beta. This passage was a rare sanctuary because the dampening systems here were old and patchy. She was focused on her feet when a low, metallic clank echoed from an adjacent maintenance shaft—a sound far too loud for Osefast.
Two Vigilance Enforcers rounded the corner. These were not the usual patrol officers; they were outfitted in heavy, reflective suppression gear, their faces hidden behind dark visors. They were hunting something.
"Identification scan, citizen," the lead Enforcer demanded, his voice mechanically synthesized and sterile.
Riven fumbled with her ID chip. Her heart hammered, not from guilt, but from the sudden, sharp fear. Fear was the trigger.
As she held the chip out, the Enforcer's rifle shifted slightly, its barrel aimed at her chest. Something felt wrong. This wasn't a standard stop.
"Stand away from the wall," the second Enforcer ordered.
Riven's breath hitched. In that instant, the dam began to crack. She felt the pressure building in her chest, a physical, visceral vibration gathering below her diaphragm. This wasn't just adrenaline; it was power coalescing.
"I need you to lower your weapon," Riven managed, her voice thin and reedy.
The Enforcer laughed—a short, distorted burst of static. "Weapons secured. Stand down, anomaly."
Anomaly. They knew.
Before they could move, Riven allowed the fear and the pent-up repression of years to find a tiny escape route. It wasn't a scream—it was a focused, almost inaudible frequency.
The sound was generated deep within her sinuses and throat, directed narrowly. It hit the Enforcer's rifle like a hammer. The metal of the rifle barrel, vibrating at its natural resonant frequency, heated instantly, twisting into a coil of useless scrap before the Enforcer could even register the pain of the heat radiating through his gloves.
Both Enforcers recoiled. The momentary shock provided Riven with the window she needed. She bolted into the dimly lit passageway, the silence of Osefast temporarily shattered by the high-pitched whine of the Enforcers' proximity trackers activating.
The suppression systems of Osefast were designed to nullify explosive, loud sound, but Riven had just learned she could utilize subtlety. She had destroyed the metal without making a whisper.
Riven vanished into the forgotten underbelly of Osefast, traversing maintenance tunnels and disused sewage routes. The Vigilance, realizing they were dealing with a unique threat, began to tighten the grid. Emergency protocols were broadcast—not via sound, but via low-frequency tactile vibrations through the building floors. They were warning the city about acoustic instability.
Riven knew she couldn't outrun them indefinitely. Her power was a double-edged sword; any major outburst would bring the entire city infrastructure crashing down on her head, likely killing her in the process. She needed control, and she needed it now.
She found refuge in the forgotten Sub-Sector 4, an architectural graveyard built generations ago. Here, she stumbled upon a small, dusty workshop that had once belonged to an acoustic engineer named Dora—a marginalized scientist who had studied the very nature of sound amplification before the city's obsession with silence took hold.
The workshop was littered with archaic recording devices, tuning forks, and massive, cracked speaker cones. In the center lay a brittle, indexed journal.
Riven spent three days reading Dora's meticulous notes, starving herself of everything but water and the desperate hope of understanding. She theorized that sound was not merely volume, but controlled energy; a focused scream could be less about decibels and more about hertz.
If the voice is the generator, Dora had written, the body must be the insulator and the director. Resonance is the key to precision. Understand vibration, and you understand the soul of your output.
Riven began her grueling, perilous training. She couldn't risk a full scream, so she started small, focusing on manipulating the low, grinding static that filled the underground tunnels.
She placed an old, chipped piece of mirror on a metal workbench. She closed her eyes, visualizing the molecular structure of the glass, the way the atoms were held together. She channeled the gathering pressure in her chest, not releasing it fully, but feeding it slowly into a low, rumbling frequency.
The sound was barely audible, yet Riven felt the terrible strain. It was like holding back a physical tidal wave. The glass shard trembled. She increased the mental tension, pushing the frequency higher, narrower.
Suddenly, the shard didn't shatter explosively. It vaporized, turning into a fine, sparkling dust that settled harmlessly on the bench. Riven slumped back, exhausted, sweat dripping from her hairline. She hadn't made a noise louder than a sigh, but the energy expenditure was immense.
The biggest challenge was the electronic network of the Vigilance. Their surveillance systems relied on intricate, high-frequency signal bursts.
She needed to generate a counter-frequency—a silence that wasn't the absence of sound, but the cancellation of specific sound.
Using an old copper pipe, Riven began to practice disrupting the natural flow of metal vibration. She focused on the pure tone needed to counteract the electrical pulse running through it.
She aimed her channeled moan at the pipe. The metal began to sing—not loudly, but a pure, high, bell-like tone. Then, with a flicker, the pipe went dark. The electrical current hadn't been cut; it had been acoustically disrupted. The energy was scrambled by the counter-wave Riven generated.
Riven realized the true nature of her gift: she was not a destroyer, but a master resonator. She could tune the world.
During her self-exile, Riven intercepted a critical communication via a salvaged, highly sensitive microphone: the Vigilance was enacting the "Nexus Protocol."
The Nexus Regulator was Osefast's central sound suppression core, located in the towering, heavily armored Citadel. The Protocol was designed to permanently lower the atmospheric sound floor of the entire city to near-vacuum levels—a state of enforced, absolute silence that would not only permanently deafen the population but render any future attempts at rebellion or unauthorized communication impossible.
The Protocol activation was scheduled for midnight.
Riven had to move. Climbing out of the Sub-Sector, she emerged into the city core, cloaked in the shadows of the massive, looming buildings. The air already felt thicker, heavier, the ambient noise level dropping rapidly as the Regulator began its pre-charge cycle.
She had to bypass layers of complex, acoustic defenses surrounding the Citadel. These defenses weren't passive; they emitted a wide band of chaotic, low-level frequencies designed to nullify any potential sound weapon.
Riven used her power like a key. Instead of trying to scream through the chaotic field, she focused on synthesizing a specific, pure tone—a note so focused it acted like a needle in the haystack of noise. She generated a brief, high-pitched whistle that vibrated perfectly with the lock mechanism of the outer service door, melting the internal tumblers without a sound.
She slipped inside.
The Citadel was vast and cold, dominated by the rhythmic, shuddering pulse of the Nexus Regulator charging in the central chamber high above.
Riven ascended through the cooling shafts, her breathing ragged, the internal pressure mounting. She reached the main control platform just as the clock on the central console flashed 11:55 PM.
Waiting for her was Chief Warden Valerius.
Valerius was a man obsessed with quiet. He wore a powered exoskeleton designed to absorb and redistribute ambient noise, making his every movement silent and uncanny.
"The anomaly," Valerius said, his voice deep and synthetic. "We knew you would try to interfere. Your kind—the chaos generators—you cannot abide order."
"Order built on fear is just a prison," Riven countered, adjusting her stance.
She felt the internal reservoir of power—years of fear, anger, and suppressed life—ready to explode.
"You are nothing but noise, Riven," Valerius sneered. He raised a massive, specialized sonic dampener—a device designed to absorb and instantly neutralize high-decibel sound waves. "I will neutralize you, and Osefast will finally receive the gift of perfect silence."
He fired the dampener. It didn't make a sound, but Riven felt the air around her become thick and resistant, like wading through dense gel. Her power, the very vibration in her chest, felt choked.
Riven's immediate instinct was to scream a destructive blast, but she remembered Dora's words: Brute force is useless against specialized absorption. You must bypass volume and attack frequency.
The Nexus Regulator was positioned just behind Valerius, its massive components slowly vibrating, preparing for the final, devastating output.
Riven ignored Valerius for a moment, letting the dampener's suction press against her. She focused entirely on the Regulator. She needed to identify its operational frequency—the core note that held the entire system together.
Valerius stepped closer, the dampener humming, preparing to completely drain the acoustic energy from Riven's body.
"Goodbye, noise," he whispered.
Riven closed her eyes. She released a sound, but it wasn't aimed at Valerius. It was aimed at the Regulator's infrastructure.
It was the lowest sound she had ever produced, a rumbling thrum that started in her feet and resonated up through the metal floor. It wasn't loud enough to register on Valerius's external microphones, but it was perfectly tuned to the subterranean support pylons of the Citadel.
The concrete supporting the regulator began to stress. Valerius paused, sensing the unusual ground tremor.
"What are you doing?" he demanded.
Riven opened her eyes. The sound wasn't finished. She pushed her resonant frequency slightly higher, targeting the delicate cooling coils of the Regulator.
The sound was agonizingly suppressed by the dampener, but because it was focused entirely on vibration and not volume, the suppression was only partially effective.
The cooling coils, vibrating violently at Riven's command, twisted and burst. The Nexus Regulator, now critically overheated, began to sputter.
Valerius swung the dampener toward the device, realizing the threat to his life's work. "No! You cannot destroy the order!"
Riven saw her chance. Valerius was distracted, his focus pulled the wrong way.
She focused everything she had left—years of stifled emotion, decades of imposed quiet—and released the true, unfettered power of her acoustic core.
She aimed the scream directly at Valerius's pressurized suit and the complex micro-mechanics of the dampener.
It wasn't a destructive wave, but a surgical strike: a high-pitched, oscillating frequency capable of vibrating the minute circuits in the suit's armor.
The sound that erupted from Riven's throat was not a shout; it was a perfect, crystalline chord of destruction. It was the sound of existence being unmade.
Valerius's suit didn't explode; it tore itself apart from the inside. The synthetic voice box shattered, the protective visor fractured, and the complex dampener weapon overloaded, collapsing inward with a muffled shriek of frying metal.
The Chief Warden fell silent, utterly defeated by the one thing he had dedicated his life to eradicating: intentional sound.
Riven, reeling from the output, braced herself against the console.
The Nexus Regulator, critically unstable, began to fail spectacularly. Not with a massive boom, but with a series of rapidly escalating, ear-splitting feedback loops—a cacophony of failing metal and shrieking electronics.
The countdown timer hit 00:00. Instead of the intended absolute silence, the city was blasted with a wave of uncontrolled, beautiful, deafening noise. Sirens blared, emergency warning systems shrieked, and the sound-dampening polymers across Aethel crackled and groaned, their structural integrity momentarily compromised by the sonic chaos.
The city did not fall, but the tyranny of silence was broken.
Riven stood on the platform, her ears ringing, watching the chaos unfold below. The Vigilance forces were fractured, unable to cope with the sudden deluge of sound and data overload. The citizens, jarred from their hushed obedience, were spilling into the streets, unsure whether to flee or celebrate.
Riven knew she couldn't stay. She was no longer just an "anomaly"; she was a force of nature. The city would recover, and the Vigilance would rebuild its suppression systems, but they would never again achieve the absolute, unchallenged order of silence. Riven had gifted Osefast its voice back, however painful the delivery.
She retreated from the Citadel before dawn, leaving a shattered landscape of broken glass and singing metal in her wake.
As she moved toward the outskirts, past the damaged suppressors that now leaked a low, constant hum, Riven felt something she hadn't felt since she was a child: relief.
She had finally learned to control the weapon in her throat, not by suppressing it, but by understanding its true nature—that sound was energy, and energy could be wielded with precision.
She paused on the broken concrete leading out of the city limits, a figure framed by the smoggy, noisy light of the rising sun.
Riven took a deep breath. She didn't scream, she didn't shout. She simply spoke, testing the air.
"Hullo," she whispered.
The word was quiet, yet it carried weight. It vibrated not just in the air, but in her bones. It was the sound of a woman who was no longer afraid to hear herself.
Riven stepped into the noisy, messy world beyond Osefast, knowing that wherever she went, she would never again be silenced. She carried the cacophony heart, and now, she knew how to make it sing.