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When I awoke, the world returned to me first as sound.
A thin scrape — as if something heavy and deliberate was being drawn across plaster — traced its way along the air above me. It was not hurried. It was not hesitant. It was patient in the way of tides or the turning of a planet. My eyes resisted opening, as though they feared the geometry that might await them, and for a moment I lingered in the darkness behind my lids, where the memory of a sound — a syllable not entirely human — circled like a predator in shallow water.
It had been the last thing I uttered before the blackness took me.
A sound half-spoken, the jagged half of a name not meant for tongues shaped like mine.
When I forced my eyes apart, the ceiling above me did not immediately commit to its own shape. The boards seemed to slope toward me and then away again, as though testing how best to fall. The air was thick and dry, yet it carried a metallic taste, the tang of old coins handled too long, mixed with the stale herbal rot of a forgotten apothecary.
I turned my head, and she was there.
The woman in the corner sat so still she might have been carved into the shadows themselves. She was not young, nor truly old, but her stillness made age irrelevant. When she looked at me, there was neither surprise nor relief — only the patient appraisal of someone examining an artifact dredged from a depth they would never dare themselves to descend into.
"You're awake," she said, and her voice was like paper rubbed thin between the fingers. "You were found in a place where no one should be."
My throat constricted when I tried to speak. My tongue felt scraped raw, my mouth unfamiliar with the act of forming sound. Still, I forced a word, though it was more rasp than speech:
"The… name…"
Something flickered across her gaze — not alarm, but recognition, a faint tightening as though she'd heard a distant rumble of thunder and was measuring the seconds to the lightning. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands steepled.
"You mean the old one?" she asked, almost reluctantly. "The Pale Answer?"
The phrase landed inside my ears like stones dropped into an ancient well. The Pale Answer. Even without the syllables I had half-shaped on that blood-choked night, it carried weight. It was not merely a name — it was a suggestion, an implication of a question that should never be asked and of a response that would stain the mind that heard it.
My lips trembled around the shape of the words, but I could not bring myself to speak them back to her. She seemed relieved by that.
She gave me water in a tin cup. I drank greedily, the coolness spilling down my throat like something alive and eager to escape the dryness. But the moment I set the cup down, the air in the room thickened. My mind began to fracture — not in confusion, but in recollection.
The year was wrong. The bed beneath me dissolved into another bed, smaller, harder, with the rough wool blanket of my boyhood pressed against my cheek. The woman's face blurred and shifted into the colder mask of my father, framed by the brittle lines of our family home.
---
The smell came first.
That dry wood-and-dust scent of a house long shut to sunlight, steeped in the hushed hostility of people who do not speak unless they must. My father's voice — precise, measured, and always slightly disdainful — followed it like a blade's edge.
"Stand straight, Jonathan. People remember the man who fills a room, not the one who shrinks from it."
He stood by the doorway of my childhood bedroom, his silhouette framed by the light of the hallway, an interruption more than a visitor. His gaze drifted over the little collection of artifacts I'd arranged on the desk — coins, stones, a brass key I'd found in a gutter and convinced myself belonged to something ancient. None of them mattered to him; they were simply clutter between me and whatever use he imagined for me.
"You'll never be remembered," he said once, on a night when I thought he'd already retired to his study. I had been polishing the key, imagining the lock it might open, when his voice came from the doorway, flat and final. "Not if you keep your head in dirt and fairy tales. Men make their names in the world, Jonathan. Not in the dust."
My mother was worse, in her way. She simply wasn't there. Her absence was not just physical — though she had a talent for vanishing to the gardens, to the city, to her own locked rooms — but spiritual. I cannot recall a single instance of her eyes lingering on me without flicking away moments later, as if acknowledging me too long might create some binding obligation.
So I learned to fill the space they left behind.
Every contest at school, every chance to be seen — I took it.
Spelling bees, debate tournaments, local history fairs. I collected awards, small plaques, certificates. All lined up on my shelf like soldiers awaiting a war they would never be called to fight. I believed, with the certainty only a child can muster, that if I gathered enough proof of my worth, the world would remember me. That they would.
But there was one memory that cut deeper than the rest, because it carried with it the first whisper of the hunger that would later drive me to the coin, to the church, to the name.
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It was summer. I must have been ten. My father had taken me along on one of his business trips — not from affection, but to keep me out of my mother's way. The hotel was near the river, where the bank had eroded to expose layers of stone older than the city itself. While he attended his meetings, I wandered down to the water, prying at rocks with a stick.
That was when I found it.
Not the coin — that would come years later — but a shard of something like pottery, its surface marked with lines too intricate for accident. The grooves were worn, smoothed as though by centuries of fingers tracing them, but they formed a pattern I could not forget. It was not writing, not art, but something between — a shape meant to suggest sound without truly speaking it.
When I showed my father, he glanced at it for less than a second before handing it back.
"Trash," he said, already walking away.
I kept it anyway. In the years that followed, I found myself tracing those lines whenever my mind wandered. I never showed it to anyone else, but in my most private moments, I imagined it was a fragment of something far older, something that had been meant to survive until I found it.
---
Back in the safehouse, the memory dissolved, and I found myself staring at the woman in the corner once more. She was watching me with an intensity that made me wonder if she'd seen every thought pass across my face.
"You've been speaking in your sleep," she said.
"What did I say?"
She hesitated. "Not all of it was… in this language."
---
I woke to the sound of bells.
Not the distant clang of the city's churches, nor the dull chime of the safehouse's ancient hallway clock, but bells inside my head — small, metallic, impossibly close, as if they had been struck within the hollow space behind my eyes.
They did not fade. They deepened.
With each toll, I felt the air in the room press against me, the walls drawing in, the space growing heavy.
The woman was gone. The corner where she had been was nothing but peeling plaster and a bent chair, as if she'd never been there at all. I sat up, unsure whether I'd truly woken or was adrift in some corridor between sleep and awareness.
It was then I noticed the shard.
The same shard from my childhood. Only — no. It couldn't be. That had been lost years ago, left behind in a drawer when I'd moved for university. Yet here it was, sitting neatly on the desk beside my bed, its lines darker, deeper, as though carved fresh.
I reached for it, and the instant my fingers touched its surface, the pattern shifted. The grooves rearranged themselves under my skin, a slow twisting that didn't break the surface but moved all the same. It was no longer a frozen pattern; it was a pulse.
The bells stopped.
In their place came a whisper, not in my ear but in the space between my thoughts — a syllable I half-recognized from some nightmare I'd never remembered fully upon waking. It was not my own tongue, not any tongue, yet I knew in the marrow of my bones it was calling.
The whisper didn't end. It repeated, changing each time, as if searching for the exact pitch, the exact shape of itself that would fit the hollow space it had found in me.
Then — nothing.
The shard lay inert in my palm.
The woman's voice, from the hallway: "Jonathan? You're… speaking again."
---
Sleep took me without warning.
One moment I was seated at the desk, tracing the shard's grooves under the dim bulb's halo. The next, I was somewhere else.
The ground was not ground but a surface too smooth to be natural, reflecting faint shapes without ever revealing what lay above them. The air had weight, like the interior of a tomb left sealed for centuries, yet I could breathe without effort.
In the distance — no horizon, just the slow curve of dark emptiness swallowing the edges of vision. And at the center of that void, something moved.
It approached without crossing the space between us. One moment it was far; the next, it stood before me, its body neither man nor beast, but a sculpted blur of angles my mind could not fix. Only when it slowed did I see what humans must see when they glimpse it — the perceived form.
A towering figure cloaked in what looked like rotted banners, each strip stitched with symbols I felt more than read. Its face, if it had one, was obscured by a mask of bone, fractured and reshaped into impossible symmetry, a mouthless oval split with hairline cracks.
From those cracks leaked a faint light, not white, not any color I'd known, but the memory of a color I must have seen before birth.
The figure tilted its head. The light flared once.
My knees buckled.
From behind the mask came the sound — no, the shape — of a word, the half-name I had heard before. It did not echo in the dream's air; it echoed inside me, each repetition wearing grooves into the substance of thought itself.
I tried to speak. To ask what it wanted.
But my voice came out wrong — elongated, split into syllables I'd never formed before, as if my mouth belonged to something else.
The figure leaned closer. I felt the weight of its unseen gaze bore into my skull until the world behind my eyes seemed to peel away.
Then, as I fell forward into that peeling blackness — I woke.
The shard lay in my hand again, warm as blood.
And in my mouth lingered the taste of that not-color, metallic and eternal.
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