The air of Drovenmarch was still thick with ash and silence when Eldric rose. His body ached, but the dream lingered not in flesh but in the hollow of his mind. That whisper.
It was not the sort of voice born of words. It had no weight, no flesh. It was a breath of something older a thought that was never his own.
Do you seek the truth, child of silence?
The question clung to him as he stepped into the fractured streets. Stones cracked and leaning houses loomed like sentinels of forgotten sorrow. The Fringe Districts were a graveyard of dreams, and Drovenmarch was the headstone.
He moved without clear direction. His mind replayed the voice again and again, the cadence of it haunting him. Was it a memory? A phantom? Or the first breath of something far greater?
Through the ruins, voices rose. Not human ones, but murmurs the kind that slip into your chest without sound, shaping thought without language. Eldric stopped, his eyes narrowing.
Then he saw him.
A figure draped in dark robes, standing in the shadow of a collapsed archway. He was still, but the air around him shifted, as though reality itself recoiled. A sigil glimmered faintly upon the robe carved not in ink but in something older, something living.
"You're awake," the figure said. His voice was gravel and silk. "I wondered if the ritual had worked."
Eldric studied him quietly. "Who are you?"
"A hermet," he replied simply. "And you, you have begun your own path."
The word settled heavy in Eldric's mind. Hermet. He had heard fragments of the word before, whispered by beggars and scavengers in Drovenmarch. Something about them was always shrouded, as if saying it aloud called forth shadows.
"What is a hermet?" Eldric asked. His voice was small, hesitant.
The man smiled faintly, though there was no warmth in it. "A hermet is one who shapes reality through will. Through ritual. The carving of a sigil is no trifling matter. It is creation, destruction, and revelation all at once. It is the forging of your truth."
Eldric frowned, his mind twisting. "And the cost?"
The hermet's smile deepened. "Always. The question is never if there is a cost only what it will be. You will find that the world has a way of asking for pieces of you. Sometimes it is memory. Sometimes something more."
Eldric's hands curled into fists. "I have no desire to pay too much."
"Ah," said the hermet, stepping closer. "But desire itself is the cost. You have already begun paying." His eyes glimmered faintly beneath his hood. "You will not walk this path untouched."
Eldric looked away. He wanted to speak, to deny the words, but something unshakable tugged at him. The voice from before echoed again in his mind that breath of unseen truth.
Do you seek the truth, child of silence?
The hermet continued. "The Fringe is not kind to seekers. They will call you heretic, lunatic, sinner. They will test your resolve. But if you persist if you carve your sigil fully you will see what lies beneath the veil of all things. That is the truth Hermets pursue."
"And if I fail?" Eldric asked softly.
The hermet regarded him for a long moment. "Then you are lost. But no one escapes the cost of the truth."
Eldric's gaze fell to the cobblestones. He felt the weight of silence pressing in. The Fringe District had its own breath slow, patient, full of centuries of forgetting. It seemed to lean toward him now, pressing against his shoulders.
"Why are you telling me this?" he asked at last.
"Because," the hermet said, "I have seen the making of a sigil before. And your path it is not yet complete. The voice that calls you is not idle. You have begun carving already. Whether you know it or not, you are no longer untouched."
Eldric's thoughts fractured. The voice, the sigil, the whisper of the ritual it all tangled inside him. And beneath it, an unshakable sense that something ancient was awakening.
The hermet stepped back, fading into the shadowed archway. "Seek me when you are ready, child of silence. The path awaits."
Eldric stood in silence long after he had gone. The ruins around him felt heavier now, as though the air remembered something Eldric could not name. Somewhere deep within him, a question burned:
Do I seek the truth?
And beneath it, a whisper that was not his own:
Yes.