The world lost its name. It was no longer Midland, the Scab, or the Fen. It was Transition. A peeling-away of layers. Color leached from the earth, leaving only shades of graphite and bone. The sky did not darken; it became a ceiling—a dome of smoked glass, through which a faint, sourceless twilight filtered.
They were in the foothills of the First Cell.
The air was thin, scentless. Sound died inches from its source. The Glimmer in its pouch was a cold fossil. Lyra moved like a sleepwalker, her stolen memory of the baker's cowardice a clumsy, ill-fitting skin. She kept touching her face, her arms, as if verifying she was still there. She was a ghost dressed in another ghost's shame.
Cassian's tongue was silent. The Brand was a cold, dead knot. The hunger was gone, replaced by a vast, anticipatory hollow. He was not being pulled. He was arriving.
They found the entrance not by sight, but by absence. A part of the hillside wasn't there. A void in the shape of an arch, edges so sharp they seemed to cut the light. Beyond it was not darkness, but a different quality of twilight.
The Gallery of Broken Oaths.
They passed through the arch. The air changed. It became still, cool, and smelled of old parchment and dried flowers.
The corridor was wide, its walls not stone, but something like polished, dark amber. Encased within the amber were scenes. Frozen moments of profound betrayal, not of passion or hunger, but of sworn word.
Here, two knights shook hands, their faces brotherly, while a third watched from the shadows, a signed treaty burning in a brazier at his feet.
There, a queen placed a crown on her daughter's head, her smile beatific, her other hand slipping a slow-acting poison into the child's ceremonial cup.
Each scene was a masterwork of duplicity. The faces were not monstrous. They were serene, convinced of their own necessity. The horror was in the calm, in the ceremony of the lie.
Lyra stopped before one. A priest anointing a warrior, holy oil on his brow, while whispering the location of the man's family to the invading warlord. Her borrowed face twisted. "He smells of soap and incense," she whispered, her voice rough from disuse. "Not blood. How can something so clean be so rotten?"
Cassian had no answer. This was Gareth's foundation. Not the messy, human sins he'd been hunting. This was betrayal as ideology. Sin refined to a philosophy.
The corridor opened into a vast chamber. It was not a room, but a forest of stone plinths. On each plinth rested a single object, illuminated by a beam of that sourceless grey light.
A shattered longsword.
A melted signet ring.
A lock of hair tied with a blood-blackened ribbon.
A child's wooden knight,split down the middle.
The relics of broken vows.
In the center of the forest of plinths stood a figure. It was tall, draped in robes the color of a deep bruise. Its face was hidden within a deep cowl, but its hands were visible—long, pale, delicate fingers that moved in the air as if conducting a silent orchestra. It was tracing the contours of the broken oaths, savoring their shapes.
This was the Curator of this wing. Not Gareth. A lesser artist. A keeper of the theme.
It sensed them. The cowled head tilted. The delicate hands stilled.
"Ah." The voice was a dry rustle, like leaves skittering over a tomb. "The sieve. And the… remix. Gareth said you might appreciate the foundational works. Do you?"
Cassian said nothing. He watched the Curator's hands.
"Oathbreaking is the highest form of our art," it rustled, gliding between the plinths. Its fingers brushed the shattered longsword. A faint, echoing clang of its breaking whispered through the chamber. "It requires intellect. Premeditation. It is a promise made with the explicit intent to later transmute it into a weapon. It is alchemy." It gestured to the child's toy. "Even the smallest vow, when shattered, rings with a particularly pure tone."
Lyra took a step back, bumping into a plinth holding a broken quill. A psychic echo of a broken peace treaty—dry, legalistic, and devastating—washed over her. She whimpered, a sound that was part her, part the baker's fear.
The Curator's cowl turned toward her. "You are dissonant. You carry a… greasy note. A promise broken for bread. It is pedestrian. But placed here, among these grand treacheries…" It drifted closer. "It becomes an interesting critique. A piece of grotesquerie. May I have it?"
The Curator's hand stretched toward Lyra's forehead, fingers poised to pluck the memory from her like a rotten fruit.
Cassian moved. Last Silence cleared its sheath with a sound like a stone dropping into a deep well.
The Curator's hand paused. It did not look threatened. It looked intrigued. "You would defend this crude thing? This… marginalia? Her pain has no grandeur. It has no point."
That is the point, Cassian thought, but the words were ash.
He attacked. A simple, brutal overhead chop aimed at the cowled head.
The Curator did not dodge. It raised a single, pale finger.
The blade stopped an inch from the cowl, arrested in the air as if embedded in glass. A faint, intricate web of silver light—the visualized geometry of a broken oath—had sprung up between them.
"You see?" the Curator whispered. "An oath is a structure. A binding law. When broken, the shards of that law can be rewoven into a shield. Into a cage."
It made a gentle twisting motion with its finger.
The silver web contracted, wrapping around Last Silence. The metal groaned. Cassian felt the un-screams trapped within the blade stutter, as if their perpetual silence were being interrogated, forced into a logic they did not possess.
He wrenched the sword back. It came free with a sound of tearing light.
"You fight with a relic of loyalty," the Curator observed, gliding to another plinth, this one holding a torn standard. "A sword that remembers the hands it failed. How fitting. Let us see how it behaves when surrounded by its betters."
The Curator swept its hand in a wide arc.
The relics on the plinths sang.
Not a beautiful sound. A discordant, shrieking chorus of betrayed trusts. The shattered sword shrieked of a brother's back turned. The melted ring wailed of a marriage bed defiled. The torn standard screamed of an army abandoned.
The sound was a physical wave. It hit Cassian and Lyra like a wall of broken glass.
Lyra fell to her knees, hands clamped over her ears, but the sound was inside her skull, vibrating the borrowed memory, threatening to shatter it into meaningless noise.
Cassian staggered. The chorus wasn't attacking his body. It was attacking connection. The fragile threads that tied him to his sword, to his purpose, to the faint, dying ember of the Glimmer at his belt. It sought to isolate him, to make him a lone, meaningless note in the cacophony.
He swung Last Silence wildly, trying to cut the sound. It was useless.
The Curator watched, its cowled head tilting as it appreciated the composition. "Isolation is the truth of the oathbreaker," it murmured over the din. "To break a vow is to choose the self over the other. It is the first, and final, solitude. This music is that solitude, given voice."
Cassian's vision swam. He was being unmade not by violence, but by anthem. His own branded, paradoxical truth was being drowned out by the pristine, logical horror of a million broken promises.
He looked at Lyra, writhing on the floor. She was mouthing something. Not a scream. A word.
It was a name from the baker's memory. The name of the neighbor he'd locked in the cellar. A meaningless name. A specific, petty detail.
In the grand symphony of shattered oaths, it was a wrong note. An ugly, human detail.
Cassian understood.
He stopped fighting the chorus. He stopped trying to hold onto himself.
He opened his mouth, and instead of a roar, he hummed.
He hummed the memory of the baker's petty fear. The greasy, shameful tune of the oven's warmth and the cellar's silence. He pushed it out, not as a shield, but as a counter-melody.
The grand, shrieking chorus of broken oaths faltered. The high, clean note of the shattered sword clashed with the low, greasy hum of stolen bread. The wail of the betrayed marriage twisted around the mundane terror of a hungry man.
The music curdled.
The Curator flinched, a tiny, precise jerk of its robed form. "Stop that. It is… vulgar."
Cassian hummed louder, walking toward it, pouring the entire tawdry, human story into the gallery's pristine space. He was defacing the masterpiece with graffiti.
Lyra, seeing his actions, pushed herself up. She joined him. Not with a hum. With a whisper. She whispered the other details—the scratch of the rats, the weight of the flour sack, the specific ache in the baker's knees from a long day's work. The gritty, un-poetic texture of the sin.
Together, they created a zone of profound, ridiculous banality in the heart of the gallery.
The Curator recoiled as if from a foul smell. Its beautiful, tragic relics seemed to tarnish under the psychic onslaught of something so pointlessly real. The silver web of defensive logic flickered, its equations fouled by irrational, human variables.
"Enough!" the Curator hissed, its dry rustle now sharp with displeasure. It clapped its delicate hands together.
Snap.
The chorus cut off. The silent forest of plinths returned.
But the echo of the vulgar hum lingered, a psychic stain on the amber walls.
"You have no respect for the form," the Curator said, its voice tight. "You are philistines. Gareth finds you amusing. I find you… corrosive."
It drew itself up. "This gallery is for appreciation, not for your grubby performances. The next wing will be less… discursive. It deals in simpler truths. In cause, and abandonment."
It gestured toward the far wall of the chamber, where a new archway shimmered into existence. Beyond it, Cassian could see a cold, blue light, and hear a distant, vast sound like a slow, single heartbeat.
"The Hall of Silent Complicities awaits," the Curator rustled, already turning away, dismissing them. "Try not to drag your… muck… into it."
Cassian and Lyra stood amidst the plinths, the taste of petty sin and broken bread still thick in the air. They had not won. They had offended.
But they had passed through.
Lyra looked at him, her eyes no longer just confused. There was a spark there. The spark of a shared act of vandalism. She had used her stolen, shameful memory as a weapon. It had made her real, if only for a moment.
Cassian nodded toward the new archway. The single, slow heartbeat thumped, a rhythm of profound, patient loneliness.
He adjusted his grip on Last Silence. The sword felt lighter. As if the un-screams within it had been momentarily silenced by the sheer, stupid humanity of their victory.
They walked toward the blue light, leaving the Gallery of Broken Oaths behind, its perfection forever marred by the smell of fresh bread and cowardice.