The glyphs in Noa's notebook didn't belong to her.
She stared at the page, her breath shallow. The symbols coiled across the paper like serpents, written in her own handwriting—but she had no memory of putting them there. They pulsed in her vision, a sickly violet that tasted of copper and static.
*"You're listening."*
Noa snapped the notebook shut. The whisper had come from the walls again, but this time—
This time, it had *answered* her.
She stuffed the notebook into her bag and fled the lab.
The abandoned metro station stank of mildew and old iron. Noa's footsteps echoed as she descended, following the trail of glyphs left for her—scratched into peeling paint, scrawled on damp concrete. They led her to a platform where the tracks had long since rusted into ruin.
A woman waited in the shadows.
She was gaunt, her dark hair streaked with premature silver, her fingers tattooed with faded glyphs. When she stepped into the dim light, Noa saw her eyes—one brown, the other clouded white, as if blinded from within.
"You're Noa Serrin," the woman said. Not a question.
Noa's hand tightened around the strap of her bag. "Who are you?"
"Selka Tann." A humorless smile. "Former disciple of the Stillborn Choir. Current fugitive." She tilted her head, studying Noa like a specimen. "And you—you're the reason the Whisper is waking up."
Selka spoke in riddles and razor-blade truths.
The Stillborn Choir, she explained, wasn't just a cult. They were archivists of the unspeakable, worshippers of a language that predated humanity. The glyphs weren't words—they were *vessels*, designed to hold something that had no shape of its own.
"The Whisper isn't a god," Selka said, lighting a cigarette with trembling hands. "It's a *hunger*. It feeds on interpretation. The more you learn it, the more it learns *you*."
Noa's skin prickled. "That's impossible."
"Is it?" Selka exhaled smoke, watching it curl into the shape of a glyph before dissipating. "Then why do you dream of the black cathedral? Why do you hear your name in the walls?" She leaned closer. "You think you're decoding it. But it's decoding *you*."
Malvek found the footage that night.
Noa had begged off work, pleading a migraine, but the real reason sat like a stone in her gut: Selka's warning. *"They want a living speaker. A voice to birth it fully."*
She didn't hear Malvek enter her apartment until he dropped a grainy surveillance photo onto her desk.
"Tell me this isn't you."
Noa picked it up. The image showed a man—Malvek's brother, she realized—standing at the mouth of the ruins, his mouth open in a silent scream. Behind him, barely visible in the shadows, stood a figure with Noa's face.
Her blood turned to ice.
"That's impossible," she whispered. "I wasn't—"
"The date stamp says twenty years ago." Malvek's voice was hollow. "You weren't even born."
The whispers followed her home.
They slithered from the cracks in her walls, from the static of her radio, from the spaces between heartbeats. Noa pressed her hands to her ears, but the voice wasn't outside her anymore.
It was in her bones.
*"Serrin,"* it sighed, tender as a lover. *"You were always the first voice."*
Noa stumbled to her desk, yanking open her notebook. The pages were filled with glyphs she didn't remember writing—and at the center, a single phrase, repeated over and over:
*Let me in.*
Selka was gone.
Noa returned to the metro station at dawn, desperate for answers, but the platform was empty. Only a message remained, etched into the dust where Selka had sat:
*"You were always the first voice."*
As Noa stared at it, the words began to bleed—not ink, but something darker, something that moved.
The Whisper was learning.
And it was almost strong enough to speak for itself.