The silence that answered Praxus's Whisper was more profound than any he had ever known. It was not the quiet of an empty room, but the oppressive stillness of a tomb. He stayed frozen in the barren field outside Stonefall for a long time, the cold of the earth seeping into his knees, his astrolabe forgotten beside him. The sky, his life's work, his sacred text, had become a stranger.
He tried again. A frantic, desperate Whisper, pushing his thoughts towards the heavens with all hiswill. 'Qy'iel, speak. A sign. A whisper. Anything.'
The silence held. It was absolute, unyielding.
A panic, cold and sharp, pierced through his scholarly composure. This was a sickness, a blight in the heart of creation, and he was the only one who had seen the symptom. He could not stay here, in this town of placid faith and stone-faced certainty. Their ignorance felt like a weight, pressing down on him, suffocating him.
He scrambled to his feet, his movements clumsy with haste. He packed his instrument with none of his usual care, the brass rings clattering together in a way that would normally make him cringe. He loaded the long-suffering Hester in the pre-dawn gloom, his mind a whirlwind of impossible theories and terrifying questions. By the time the first baker in Stonefall was stoking his oven, Praxus was already a silhouette on the eastern road, chasing the sunrise, though he felt as if he were fleeing a great darkness.
His new plan was simple: get as far away from the Spire Mountains as possible. If the anomaly was a localized atmospheric trick, a phenomenon of the high altitudes, then observing from the low-lying plains of the east, near the great Mirror Coast, would prove it. It had to. The alternative was unthinkable.
The journey took him nearly a month. He traveled through the heart of Aethelgard, a land still basking in the golden afternoon of its long peace. He passed through towns where harvest preparations were underway, the air thick with the scent of cut wheat and the sound of cheerful folk songs. He saw children playing in the fields, their laughter echoing in the warm air. He saw families sharing their evening meal, their faces illuminated by hearth-light, their Whispers of thanks offered with untroubled smiles.
Each scene of idyllic life was a fresh torment. They were all living in a beautiful, perfect house, unaware that he, Praxus, had just seen a crack forming in its very foundation. He felt like a ghost, a specter of a future they could not yet comprehend.
Several times, he tried to warn them. In a bustling market town called Greenhollow, he sought out the local Sun-Priest, a man whose faith was as round and soft as his belly.
"A star has vanished, you say?" the priest had chuckled, patting Praxus on the shoulder. "My dear scholar, Qy'iel has more stars than a man has hairs on his head. Perhaps He simply plucked one for His own mantle. Do not trouble yourself with such things. Have some of my wife's berry pie. Your spirit is weary from the road."
Praxus had left the town before dawn, the sweet taste of the pie like ash in his mouth.
Every night of his journey, he would stop and set up his astrolabe. It became a torturous ritual. The first week, it was only Umbra Minor that was missing. By the second week, the star beside it, Lyra's Tear, had faded to a barely perceptible glimmer before vanishing completely. By the third week, two more stars in the Serpent's Coil had gone dark.
His journals, once filled with neat script and precise calculations, became a testament to his fraying sanity. The pages were now covered in frantic scrawls, astronomical charts with entire sections violently crossed out, and a single question, repeated over and over in the margins: Where are you?
The hole in the sky was growing. The silence in the celestial symphony was spreading like a contagion.
He finally reached the Mirror Coast as the month of High Sun was bleeding into the first days of Harvest Moon. He found a secluded spot on the high, chalky cliffs overlooking the great eastern ocean. The air here was heavy with salt and the cries of gulls. Below him, the sea was a vast, impossibly calm sheet of glass, living up to its name by perfectly reflecting the sky above.
He waited for night, his heart a leaden weight in his chest. This was his final test. Here, hundreds of leagues from the mountains, with the sea air clean and clear, there could be no tricks of atmosphere. Here, he would be proven either a fool or a prophet. He prayed to be a fool.
As the last vestiges of sunset faded and the stars began to emerge, he raised his astrolabe. He did not need it.
He could see it with his naked eye.
The Serpent's Coil, a constellation that had guided travelers for a thousand years, was gone. Not faded, not obscured. Utterly, completely gone. In its place was a ragged patch of perfect, featureless black. It was a wound in the fabric of the night, a blot of nothingness that seemed to drink the light of the surrounding stars.
He lowered his head, a ragged breath escaping him. He looked down at the ocean. There, on the placid surface of the water, was the same wound, a reflection of the void, a black hole in the second sky. There was no denying it. The sky was unraveling.
The next day, he walked into the bustling port town of Seacliff, his mind numb. The town was alive with the chaotic energy of sailors, merchants, and fishermen. And for the first time, he heard the echoes of his own fear in the voices of others.
"The charts are wrong!" a grizzled ship captain with a beard like a tangle of rope was shouting at a harbormaster. "We set our course by the Serpent's Tail, same as always. It should have led us straight to the northern channel. Instead, we nearly ran aground on the Widow's Reef! It's as if the star just… wasn't there."
"Your navigator was drunk," the harbormaster replied wearily.
"My navigator has been sailing these waters longer than you've been alive!" the captain roared. "Something is wrong with the sky."
Praxus listened, a cold sense of vindication washing over him. He was not mad. The world was simply beginning to notice.
That night, he returned to his cliffside perch. The wound in the sky seemed larger, its edges less defined, as if it were fraying. For hours, he simply watched it, the scholar in him giving way to a more primal sense of dread.
It was then that he felt a new change. It was a shift in the very texture of the world. The gentle, ever-present warmth he had always associated with Qy'iel's presence, a feeling like the sun on your skin even on a cloudy day, was fading. The air grew colder, thinner. The moonlight shining on the cliffs seemed to lose its soft, silvery quality, becoming stark and sterile. The world was being muted. The vibrant song of creation was dimming to a faint, hollow echo.
Qy'iel was not just silent. He was absent.
With a final, desperate surge of will, Praxus stood on the edge of the world, faced the gaping emptiness in the heavens, and did not Whisper. He shouted his prayer into the wind, his voice raw with anguish.
"QY'IEL! WHERE ARE YOU?"
His voice was swallowed by the wind and the waves. For a moment, there was only the familiar, empty silence in return.
But then… something else.
It was not a sound. It was a feeling. A pressure. It emanated from the black wound in the sky, a wave of malevolent stillness that washed over him. It was a silence that was not passive or empty, but active, ancient, and aware. It was the silence of a predator waiting patiently in the dark.
The silence was listening.
Praxus stumbled back from the cliff's edge, his heart hammering against his ribs with a terror that dwarfed all his previous fears. He stared up at the broken, unfamiliar sky, and the full, horrifying truth finally crashed down upon him.
His God was not missing. He was gone.
And in His place, something else was beginning to look back.