The climb back from the Chamber of Reversal felt longer than the descent.
They did not speak.
Each step echoed with a weight none of them wanted to name—like walking up through the ribs of a buried god. The Hollow Basin remained still behind them, but not quiet. Now the silence listened. It held their footsteps, measured their heartbeats, and waited.
Ayanwale's hands trembled, not from exhaustion, but from contact.
He had touched the Codex—not with fingers, but with something deeper. And though it was bound, sealed by rhythm and will, its whisper had not left him.
It had shown him the boy. Himself, unmarked. Untouched by rhythm. A blank slate.
A chance to begin again.
He glanced at Zuberi, who walked ahead, silent. Even their staff had dimmed, its usual hum muffled. The seal they had woven still shimmered faintly beneath their feet, trailing behind like the tail of a comet. But it wouldn't last forever. Nothing bound in rhythm did.
Not anymore.
Rotimi lagged at the rear, eyes shadowed. He hadn't spoken since the Codex had flickered his name. Since it had nearly unwritten him.
And Yẹ̀yẹ̀ Adùn—she moved with the grace of someone beyond flesh, yet bound to it. Her presence held them together, like a spine stitched through spirit. But Ayanwale noticed her hand touch her side once, briefly. A flicker of pain she tried to hide.
Even she was not untouched.
They emerged onto the crumbling ledge overlooking the Hollow Basin. The woven bridge was dimmer now, its strands frayed by their crossing. The sky above was no longer dusk. It was... fractured.
Pale lines of rhythm—normally invisible—shimmered faintly across the heavens, as though the Codex's awakening had bruised the air itself. A cosmic wound.
Ayanwale reached out, brushing his fingers through the pattern. The threads recoiled.
It had begun.
They made camp by the ridge, surrounded by nothing but dry stone and quiet dust. A fire burned low, fueled by dried moss and flickers of breath-bound rhythm Zuberi coaxed from their staff.
Ayanwale didn't eat. He sat apart, eyes fixed on the silent basin below. His thoughts looped like an unfinished rhythm.
The boy in the Codex.
He hadn't just been a vision. He'd been possible.
And that frightened him more than the Codex itself.
Would he have chosen a different path, if offered sooner? Before Baba Oro's death? Before the Royalty Drum first thundered through his veins?
What would I have become if I never learned to listen?
"You're too still," Yẹ̀yẹ̀ Adùn said quietly, settling beside him.
"I'm afraid to move," Ayanwale replied. "The Codex didn't just show me a choice. It showed me a desire I didn't know I still had."
"To be untouched?"
"To be… innocent."
She nodded. "That is always its first promise."
A pause.
"What was yours?" he asked.
Yẹ̀yẹ̀ Adùn looked toward the stars, then back at him. "To have never left you."
The words struck deeper than he expected.
"But if I had never left," she continued, "you would not have become this."
He shook his head. "That's what I hate. That pain was the only teacher."
"No," she said, voice firm. "Pain was not the teacher. It was the door. What you chose to do with it—that was the lesson."
Later that night, Ayanwale woke to find Rotimi gone.
His heart seized—but then he saw a flicker of green beyond the camp.
He followed quietly.
Rotimi stood near the cliff's edge, looking out over the Basin. The moss-thread robe shimmered faintly around him, but something was wrong. It was stretched tight against his skin, almost suffocating.
Ayanwale stepped closer. "Rotimi."
"I still see her," Rotimi whispered.
His voice was too calm. Too focused.
"My sister. Not as a lie. As… a memory that almost could be."
Ayanwale stepped slowly, not wanting to spook him. "It's the Codex. Its echo still lingers. Don't trust what it offers."
"But what if what it offers is better?" Rotimi turned. His eyes glowed with a strange glint. "What if our reality is the lie, and the Codex is the truth that was taken from us?"
"Rotimi," Ayanwale said, firmer now. "You're stronger than this."
"No," Rotimi said. "I'm tired."
Zuberi appeared behind them, staff in hand.
They didn't speak.
They didn't need to.
They struck the staff once against the ground. A sharp rhythm echoed outward—not of pain or command, but of grounding. A rhythm of naming.
Rotimi shuddered.
The moss-thread robe slackened. The tension in his body melted. He fell to his knees.
Ayanwale caught him. "You're still here."
"I didn't ask to be," Rotimi whispered.
Three days passed.
And on the fourth, the first tremors began.
Not of earth. But of song.
Across the continent, the rhythmic threads began to fray.
Choirs in the Upper Spires lost their harmonics.
The Whispering Stones in the Valley of Lines fell silent for the first time in 300 years.
In the libraries of the Splintered Archive, forgotten volumes began to erase themselves—not from shelves, but from memory. Readers sat in confusion, staring at open pages that suddenly meant nothing.
And at the edge of the Eastern Reach, a man in black robes played a flute of silence, summoning the first fracture.
The Splinter Order had begun to move.
In a hidden cove carved into the cliffside of the Basin, unknown to Ayanwale and his companions, a figure knelt before a hollow filled with ash.
Not kneeling in prayer.
In alignment.
His hands traced invisible lines, his lips moving in rhythmless chant.
Around him, stolen artifacts pulsed faintly.
And before him, a shard of the Codex—not the cube, but a fragment, cast off in the moment of its binding—floated in the air.
It whispered not to him.
But through him.
"Name is a prison," he murmured. "Memory is a cage."
He looked up. His eyes were empty.
"But unmaking… is freedom."
And behind him, dozens of initiates waited.
Voices without names.
Souls without rhythm.
The Splinter Order had no leader. Only purpose.
To rewrite.