They left before dawn.
Or what passed for dawn this deep along the inner ledges. The sky didn't brighten so much as soften — a diluted gray bleeding into a darker gray, giving shape to rooftops and rusted walkways that had no business still standing. The boy followed Kesh silently, hood pulled low. She hadn't spoken since the night before. Not with words, anyway.
She walked fast. Deliberate. One hand on the blade at her hip. The other occasionally touched the small pouch of sigil-stones tied to her belt. Some were marked. Some were cracked. None were stable.
He didn't ask where they were going. Not because he couldn't, though speaking was harder than ever now. The real reason was something else — something that had begun to settle in his bones like a second skin.
A name had followed him from the silence.
He hadn't heard it. Not truly. But it echoed in the places where names were supposed to go.
Not his own.
Someone else's.
Someone forgotten.
They reached a narrow crevice behind a half-collapsed bridge. Kesh moved the debris expertly — a practiced rhythm, like a code only her hands remembered. Behind the rubble was a narrow stairwell spiraling downward, slick with condensation and rust. The walls were carved with glyphs — not written for reading, but for forgetting. Symbols meant to confuse the eye, to push memory away.
"Deep enough, and the world stops listening," Kesh said.
He blinked. Her voice startled him.
She glanced over, noticing. "You still hear, then. That's good."
He nodded once.
They descended in silence.
Ten minutes passed. Or more. It was hard to tell. Eventually, the steps opened into a circular chamber, wide and empty, save for a stone platform at the center with concentric rings etched into its surface.
"This place was built by a failed Proxy," Kesh said. "He tried to hold the Truth of Silence here. Alone."
She knelt and placed one palm on the platform. "Didn't work."
The boy stepped closer, tracing the grooves with his fingers. The markings buzzed faintly under his skin — not with sound, but with the idea of sound, like a memory remembered by someone else.
Kesh stood, brushing dust from her coat. "If we do this here, you'll be anchored. But you'll still need to decide. Will you resist the truth? Delay it? Or let it claim you?"
He looked at her, hesitating.
"You've already drawn it close," she said. "Now it waits."
Later, after they'd set camp in the corner of the chamber, Kesh finally spoke of her own truth.
"It wasn't pain," she said, staring into the pale fire. "Not first. It was Distance." She gave a humorless smile. "Fitting, right? It made me... other. Left me floating outside the world for weeks. I could see everything. Couldn't touch any of it."
He frowned.
"You've felt it too," she said. "When people brush past like you're not there? When time skips just long enough to make you doubt if you're real?"
He nodded slowly.
"I hated it," she whispered. "But I kept going. Because that's what truth is — not power, not freedom. Consequence."
The boy shivered, but not from cold. Something in her voice had cracked — just briefly — like a seam splitting open beneath too much weight.
"Some people think we hunt these truths to grow stronger," Kesh continued. "To become gods. Fix the world."
She turned to face him.
"But the world doesn't want to be fixed. It remembers too much. Or not enough. And the truths we gather don't heal anything. They just... burn cleaner."
He didn't look away. Couldn't.
She gestured at the spiral on his arm, now faintly glowing even in rest. "Your second truth is almost here. And when it arrives, you won't speak again. Not like this. Not with yourself."
He tilted his head, puzzled.
"You'll lose something," she said. "Even if you gain more."
Then, softly, like she hadn't meant to say it aloud:
"I forgot my brother's name."
That night, he dreamed again.
A room made of mirrors — not polished, but clouded. Each one held a different version of him, all silent, all slightly wrong. One wept but made no sound. One screamed, but his mouth didn't move. One just stared, with a spiral drawn over each eye.
At the center of the mirrored room stood a figure robed in silence. No face. No voice.
It held out a hand.
He didn't take it.
Instead, he whispered — or thought he did — the name he hadn't known he remembered.
"Kesh."
The figure lowered its hand.
And shattered.
He woke to silence.
Not emptiness.
Not absence.
Presence.
The Second Truth was watching him now.
Not awakened. Not complete.
But waiting.
Like a door that would only open if he stopped trying to walk through it.