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Keeper's Adage:
"Beware the power found in the hollowed self. For when the cage of order shatters, it is the fracture within that becomes the key—and the threshold through which ancient hungers gaze upon the broken soul"
– Scroll of Sundered Threads of Virgil
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The void held no light.
Not merely its absence. Its abolition.
This wasn't darkness. Darkness was a thing – a shifting cloak, a pool of potential. This was null-space: the surgical excision of perception itself. A silence so absolute it scraped the raw meat of the mind. No warmth. No vibration. No echo of breath, no phantom thrum of pulse. Only the hollowed carcass of sensation.
Hatim existed. Or perhaps the null-space existed through him.
Direction dissolved. His body was a constellation of isolated agonies:
- The deep, bone-deep ache in limbs stretched against unseen, unyielding bonds.
-The fevered sting where the Whispercloak's glyph-bindings seared into muscle, pulsing like parasitic worms feeding on his potential.
- The emptiness where his Node had been.
Not silenced. Not muted.
Excised.
As if the fundamental concept of connection, of resonance, had been carved from his soul's marrow. The Null Cells weren't constructed of matter. They were silence given geometric form – angles folded so tightly they strangled light, choked sound, and devoured Akar into non-existence.
Only he remained.
Breath. Bone. Suffering.
A phantom sensation flickered. He curled inward, knees drawn towards his chest, a primal fetal reflex. Sweat slicked his palms. But even that felt alien – thin, insubstantial, as if the null-space refused to acknowledge the reality of his own sweat.
—Time coiled, a serpent consuming its own tail.—
Minutes? Hours? Lifetimes?
The silence wasn't passive. It pressed. A suffocating weight, a scream turned inside out, collapsing inwards.
And beneath it—
A pulse.
Faint. Treacherous. Wrong.
Not the golden resonance of Asha's Veins. Not the structured hum of Crown glyph-lattice.
The violet thread.
Buried deep within his ribs, beneath the excised Node.
Still there.
Still watching.
The Whispercloaks' Null Spiral hadn't erased it.
Not fully.
Not this.
His teeth chattered uncontrollably. Breath hitched in his desiccated throat.
It did not speak in words. Words were glyphs, were structure, were their law. This was not language.
This was a question. A presence. A breath held beneath the breath of the world.
Something deeper than Akar.
Deeper than Veins.
Deeper than the Null Cells could comprehend.
You do not belong to their brittle order.
Hatim flinched, muscles spasming against the void-bonds. The voice wasn't heard – it was unearthed, rising from marrow, from the spaces between his cells, from the fracture where his Node had been ripped away.
Instinct screamed to reject it. To claw it out like poison. But the colder truth resonated:
There was nothing else left.
He was hollowed.
Except for it.
Call it.
Not with glyph. Not with plea. With will alone. With the shape of your fracture.
His pulse hammered against the silence, a frantic drum against an unyielding void.
Was it memory? The forge's impossible chord? The resonance trial's shattering? The golden-violet braid defying Aethel's gaze?
He didn't think. He reached.
No glyph formed. No script drawn. His trembling fingers traced nothing in the dark, yet in his fractured mind—
A tear. A fold. An unmaking.
The null-cell resisted. Conceptual geometry shrieked – not sound, but a vibration that tasted like powdered glass and shattered teeth.
Hairline cracks spiderwebbed through the air. Not in physical walls. In the idea of containment. In the absolute fabric of the null.
Beneath his sternum, the violet thread flared – cold fire, sharp as broken ice, intoxicating as oblivion.
The Whispercloak bindings trembled. Golden glyph-threads frayed, their light sputtering. One snapped with a silent, psychic twang.
Hatim gasped. Air flooded his lungs – thick, stale, yet impossibly sweet. His Node didn't return.
But something rushed into the vacuum.
Something jagged. Hungry.
You do not draw power.
You unmake its cage.
The surge wasn't gentle. His bones locked in a rictus of agony. Vision splintered into kaleidoscopic shards of non-color. Nausea surged from depths too profound to name, a vertigo of the soul.
His fingers spasmed – clawing at the void, desperate to shape the unshapable fracture, to widen the tear—
The bindings reacted.
A sigil blazed overhead – Containment Prime, inverted, a devouring maw of absolute negation. Not light. The absence of possibility.
The fracture slammed shut.
The violet power recoiled, collapsing back into his ribs like a wounded serpent. Dormant. Cowed.
But not gone.
Never gone now.
Hatim collapsed within his unseen bonds, a puppet with cut strings. The null-pressure returned, crushing, absolute. Silence reclaimed its throne.
And then—
Footsteps.
Not sound. The impression of impact. The vibration of intent displacing the void.
Glyph-seals hissed – a psychic static, not audible noise.
The door didn't open. Space unfolded. Reality peeled aside like necrotic flesh revealing raw muscle beneath.
Two Whispercloaks glided in, their mirrored masks reflecting only deeper void.
Then a third figure.
Not Aethel.
A man. Broad-shouldered, radiating an aura of absolute stillness. Robes of woven silence hung heavy, absorbing even the impression of light. His mask – obsidian, matte, a hole in existence – bore no features. Only glyphs etched in closed, perfect loops. No beginning. No end. No exit.
A Warden of the Null Order.
His voice resonated, not in ears, but in the hollow spaces of Hatim's bones: polished iron striking stone.
"Bring him."
"The Synod convenes."
Hatim's body was lead, refusing command – but the Whispercloaks' glyph-chains moved for him. He rose, limbs jerking, a marionette of shuddering flesh suspended in agony.
As the null-door sealed behind them, folding space back into seamless void, one truth resonated louder than the silence:
This wasn't merely a prison.
This was a threshold.
And something had been waiting on the other side.
Something that knew the shape of his fracture.
Something that knew his name.