The Seed's retreat was not a defeat; it was a reassessment. The intimate, surgical approach had failed. The heresy of memory, personified by the girl, was too entrenched, too fiercely loved by the city's spirit. The Gentle Dark, confronted with a will that chose beautiful noise over perfect peace, abandoned subtlety.
It began at dusk, not with a whisper, but with a dimming.
The vibrant, remembered colors Lyssa and the city's spirit had fought for began to leach away, not slowly, but like dye fleeing cloth in cold water. The defiant green of Maren's garden greyed in moments. The warm glow of a thousand candlelit windows smothered into a uniform, dull ochre. Sound didn't fade—it was sliced. The murmur of the city, the distant clang of Torvin's purposeful repair, a child's cry, all were cleanly excised, leaving a vacuum of silence so absolute it felt like pressure on the eardrums.
Then, the silence moved.
From every shadowed alley, every dark doorway, the still air itself coalesced. They were not Shrouds, formless and consuming. These were more defined, more vicious. Silence-Eaters. Their forms were jagged outlines of darkness, like shadows ripped from a nightmare and given hunger. They had too many limbs, moving with a jerky, insectile grace, and their heads were smooth ovals featureless save for a single, sideways gash that emitted no sound, only a deeper, lightless void. They did not hum or sigh. They were the absence of those things, given predatory form.
They flowed into the square and down the main arteries, not with speed, but with an inexorable, chilling purpose. Where they passed, the world didn't just go quiet; it went dead. The cobblestones didn't just lose their specific memory; they became inert, generic stone. A hanging sign didn't just stop creaking; its wood became petrified, a fossil of itself.
This was not conversion. This was erasure. The Gentle Dark had decided Saltmire was a lost cause, a tumor of noise. It would be cut out.
Panic, a raw, soundless screaming in the mind, threatened to swallow the city. The shared memories, the whispered stories, they faltered against this blunt, annihilating force.
On the battlements, Kaelen shouted orders that were swallowed by the void. Arrows loosed by his guards flew true, passing through the Silence-Eaters as if through smoke, doing nothing. Steel was a concept of a noisy world; it had no purchase here.
Torvin stood in the doorway of his smithy, watching a creature glide past. The vibrant, singing metal of his latest repair—a hinge for the orphanage—suddenly dulled, its resonant song snipped away, becoming just a lump of cold iron. He roared in wordless fury, a noise that was instantly devoured.
In the square, Lyssa stood frozen, the scale of the assault crushing her will. Her power was one of conversation, of harmony, of gentle persuasion. This was a screaming negation. How did you reason with a vacuum?
A Silence-Eater turned its sideways gash towards her. She felt it—a pulling not at her body, but at her essence. At her connection to the song of stone, the whisper of water, the spark of fire. It sought to unmake her magic at its root.
Despair opened beneath her. This was it. The world would go quiet, and she would be the first note silenced.
Then, a new sound.
Not a memory. Not a story. A rhythm.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
It was the log mallet from the flood rehearsal, wielded by Sergeant Durn and two other guards. They weren't attacking a creature. They were pounding it against the petrified cobblestones of the square, not to break them, but to make a noise. A stupid, simple, physical noise of impact.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
The sound was tiny, swallowed by the void, but it was persistent. It was an act of pure, defiant will.
It sparked something.
From a rooftop, a young boy, terrified, threw a clay pot. It shattered on a Silence-Eater's back with a CRACK that was shockingly loud in the unnatural quiet. The creature didn't flinch, but the sound happened.
A woman, seeing the grey creep over her window box of bright flowers, screamed. Not a scream of terror, but of loss. A raw, ugly, human sound of protest.
The dam broke.
Saltmire did not fight with magic or soldiers. It fought with the only weapons it had left in the face of erasure: unrefined, human noise.
People banged on shutters with pots. They stomped their feet on floorboards. They shrieked, they cursed, they shouted the names of loved ones. They made a glorious, discordant, desperate racket. It was not a song. It was the sound of a beast cornered, refusing to die quietly.
The Silence-Eaters slowed. Their purpose was to impose quiet, to smooth into nothing. This… this cacophony was the opposite of what they were designed to process. They could consume a melody, but could they consume this shapeless roar?
Lyssa, jolted from her paralysis, saw it. They weren't invincible. They were specialized. They were the gentle dark's idea of a soldier, designed for a war of philosophies. They were unprepared for a bar brawl.
She didn't try to weave harmony. She didn't try to speak to the elements. She tapped into the raw, terrified, furious noise of her city. She focused it, not into a spell, but into a command of defiance.
She raised her hands, not elegantly, but like a conductor trying to tame a hurricane. She pulled the screaming, the banging, the stomping, the weeping—all the glorious, ugly noise of a people fighting for their right to be—and she channeled it into a single, focused psychic SHOUT.
It had no elemental attribute. It was pure emotional amplitude. A wave of collective, screamed "NO!"
It hit the line of advancing Silence-Eaters.
They didn't dissolve. They stuttered. Their smooth, erasing glide fractured into disjointed, confused movements. The void in their slash-mouths seemed to warp, straining to ingest a "sound" that was too big, too chaotic, too fundamentally alive to be consumed. They recoiled, not in pain, but in systemic overload.
The assault halted. The creeping grey of erasure paused at the edge of the square, held back by a wall of human din.
Saltmire had won a breath, a reprieve. But as the people gasped, their throats raw from screaming, and the Silence-Eaters twitched, already beginning to re-calibrate, Lyssa knew the truth.
They had surprised the enemy with their brutality. They wouldn't surprise them again. The Gentle Dark would return with a new tool, a new adaptation. And they couldn't scream forever.
They needed a different kind of noise. They needed the Warden's dawn. They needed Arden. And he was nowhere to be found.