Chapter 123 - Trial by Moonlight

The faceless figure loomed, a titan born not from the familiar laws of flesh but from the forgotten laws of sound itself. Its body was not a thing of sinew or bone but a cathedral of echoes, stitched together with resonance, shadow, and the faint aftertaste of countless voices swallowed whole. Each vibration of its existence was a hymn to silence and terror, a song of something that should never have been. It rose so impossibly high that it seemed to scrape the cavern's ceiling, its form bending and unbending with grotesque elasticity, as though it were not bound by mortal constraints but by the discordant rhythms of some older universe. Where a face should have been, there was only a blank expanse an abyssal mask that devoured light. Yet in its emptiness lingered something worse than features: intent. A will as suffocating as a storm, cold and terrible, pressed down from that faceless void and demanded recognition.