The void had always been a place Cipher knew, for all its shifting cruelty: a realm of echoing stories and paths through nightmare forests, castles of ash, towns emptied of light. But here—here was something else entirely.
The Composite Graveyard was not built. It accreted. Layer by layer, it pressed together ruins of myths, fairy tales, and half-remembered whispers until they fused into a land without direction. Cobbled streets from forgotten kingdoms split and bled into marshes of melted glass. A palace spire leaned sideways, pierced through a collapsed wooden ship. Broken statues—some of kings, some of animals with too many teeth—littered the cracked earth like discarded toys. And in the air… the silence was not empty. It crawled.
Cipher walked slowly, scythe in hand, eyes narrowed. His boots crunched over what looked like a floor of blackened petals, but when one stuck to his sole, he realized it was not petal nor leaf—it was paper. Torn paper, water-warped, with fragments of words across its surface.
"…once upon…"
"…they screamed…"
"…no ending…"
The pages clung to him, as if demanding to be read. He scraped them off and pressed forward.
On his shoulder, Auto's glass eyes whirred, shifting with faint clicks. "This place… I do not calculate it. It is not bound to one narrative structure. It feeds. Expands. Teacher—"
Cipher cut him off softly. "I know. Don't speak too loud."
The words fell like stones in water. The silence swallowed them quickly, but not before Cipher heard—faintly—something shuffle. A dragging sound. Wet against stone.
He froze. His breath fogged in the still air. The sound stopped too.
For a long moment, nothing moved. Then—like the blink of an eye—something stood where the ruins had been empty.
A man-shaped figure.
It was not walking. It was simply there, as if it had always been there and Cipher had only just noticed. Its body was static, like a corrupted image. Limbs jittered in and out of place, blurring, as though it could not decide how tall it was. Its head turned too slowly. Where its eyes should have been, there was nothing. Hollow sockets, dark, but Cipher felt them lock on him.
Auto clicked, voice a near whisper. "Do not look for long. They will notice you watching them."
Cipher's jaw clenched. He lowered his gaze, grip tightening on his scythe. The figure did not move closer. Not yet. But its silence pressed harder than a scream.
When Cipher glanced back, the thing was gone.
He kept walking, past broken carriages half-sunk in tar, past statues with faces worn smooth. The Graveyard seemed endless, but more than endless—it seemed aware. Every time he turned a corner, the landscape shifted slightly. A toppled bell tower now lay where he swore there had been an orchard of withered trees. A dried fountain trickled faintly with blood.
And always, in the edges of his vision, the static figures.
They flickered in and out of place. On rooftops. Behind walls. Standing on the horizon. Watching without eyes. Never moving while he looked, but always closer when he turned away.
At last, Cipher stopped. "They're not hunting me," he murmured. "They're herding."
Auto whirred. "To what purpose?"
Cipher did not answer. He didn't know. He only felt the pull, like gravity, like an inevitability. Something at the Graveyard's center wanted him.
It was when he reached the cracked plaza that the Graveyard stopped waiting.
The ground was tiled with fragments of windows, each pane showing a reflection—but not of him. The reflections showed a hundred different Ciphers, some with his scythe broken, some with his eyes hollow, some lying dead at the feet of unrecognizable monsters. He stepped carefully, trying not to look.
Then the glass began to move.
Hands pressed against the underside of the reflections. Dozens. Hundreds. Pale, gray, childlike hands slapping the glass, smearing it. Their mouths moved without sound, open in silent cries.
The glass bulged upward as though it were water's surface. The hands began to break through.
Cipher's voice was a whisper of steel. "Auto. Count them."
"Too many," Auto replied.
The first child-shape crawled free. But it was no child. Its face was featureless, skin stretched taut like wet parchment, limbs jerking unnaturally. It staggered toward Cipher, arms reaching—not to attack, but to cling.
Cipher's scythe lashed out in a blur. Silver light split the air, severing the creature into ash. But as it fell, three more were already pulling free. Then five. Then dozens.
"Teacher," Auto said, voice urgent. "We must retreat. The density is—"
"No." Cipher's eyes burned with starlight. He shifted his stance, planting his scythe in the ground. The runes along its blade lit, spilling arcs of light across the plaza. "If we run now, we'll never find our way back. This place will swallow us whole."
The faceless things advanced. Limbs trembling, heads tilting unnaturally. Not fast. Not furious. Just endless.
Cipher swung. The scythe blazed, arcs of silver carving through them like wheat. Each one fell in smoke and ash, but more always came. Their hands clawed at his clothes, his arms, dragging him down with the sheer weight of them. Their silence was worse than screams—the only sound the scraping of limbs against glass, the rustle of hundreds of bodies moving at once.
"Cipher—!" Auto buzzed, gears straining.
"I know!" Cipher bellowed. He thrust the scythe into the ground, light bursting outward in a circle. The creatures staggered back for a moment, edges of their bodies blurring where starlight touched.
But the Graveyard did not stop.
From the far end of the plaza, something heavier stirred. A shadow taller than the ruins, moving with the same static flicker as the eyeless watchers. Its limbs bent wrong. Its head brushed the broken spires.
Cipher froze, breath sharp in his chest.
It did not step closer. Not yet. It only stood, half-hidden by distance, watching. Waiting.
He whispered to Auto, without looking away. "…That one's different."
Auto's gears clicked in grim rhythm. "Yes. That one is not for this battle."
Cipher tightened his grip on the scythe, pulling light back into his body. His arms ached, his lungs burned, but he forced himself upright. The faceless children surged again. The Graveyard pressed tighter, suffocating in its silence.
The tall figure never moved. But Cipher knew it was marking him. Hunting him. Not tonight. Not yet.
But soon.
Cipher raised his weapon high, starlight flaring like a defiance against the crushing dark. "Then come!" His voice carried ragged but unyielding. "If this world wants me, it will bleed to keep me!"
And the Composite Graveyard answered, not with words, but with the endless advance of its horrors.