Kallum sat on a stool of petrified wood. The seat was hard and cold. He watched Elyria with the wary intensity of a wolf cornered in a strange den.
The library was a tomb of silence. The dust hung suspended in the blue wash of the lumen-stone like microscopic stars. It was so quiet that Kallum could hear the wet slick of blood moving through the bandage on his arm.
Elyria moved around the obsidian table. She did not walk so much as drift. Her boots made no sound on the stone floor. She traced the edge of a crumbling map with a long, pale finger.
"You are bleeding," she said. She did not look up.
"I will live," Kallum said. His voice was a rasp. He kept his hand near the dagger. "You said the shard remembers the sky. What does that mean?"
Elyria stopped. She looked at the heavy leather satchel resting on the black table. The leather vibrated. The object inside was agitated. It was a trapped animal pacing in a cage.
"The Vestiges are not just rocks, Kallum," she said. "They are hardened moments of trauma. They are physical pieces of the event that broke the world."
She reached out. She hovered her hand over the satchel. The leather rippled as if something pushed against it from the inside.
"May I?" she asked.
Kallum hesitated. Every instinct screamed at him to run. He was in a hole in the ground with a woman who looked like she had forgotten how to blink. But the streets above were full of Watchers. The tunnels outside were full of monsters. He had nowhere else to go.
He nodded.
Elyria undid the clasps. She reached into the lead-lined pouch. She withdrew the shard.
The room darkened instantly. The blue light of the lumen-stone seemed to be sucked into the jagged black rock. Shadows lengthened and sharpened. The air temperature dropped ten degrees.
Elyria did not flinch. She held the shard in her bare palm. Her skin was so pale against the void-black stone that she looked translucent.
"It is heavy," she whispered. "It carries the weight of a mountain."
She looked up at him. Her eyes were chips of glacial ice.
"You carry a Dirge in your flesh," she said. "You hear the song. But you do not know the lyrics. You are shouting into a storm and calling it power."
"I know enough," Kallum snapped. The scar on his arm throbbed. It resented being analyzed. "I know it wants to hollow me out."
"It wants to be heard," Elyria corrected. She held the shard out to him. "Touch it. Do not fight it. Listen to the silence behind the noise."
Kallum looked at the shard. He looked at the woman. He realized then that she was not just a scholar. She was terrified. The fear was buried deep beneath layers of discipline and centuries of cold poise. But it was there. She needed him to do this. She needed to confirm a horror she already suspected.
He reached out.
His fingers brushed the obsidian.
The library vanished.
There was no transition. One moment he was breathing the stale dust of the archive. The next he was standing on the roof of the world.
The cold was absolute. It was not a weather phenomenon. It was the absence of heat on a molecular level. It burned the moisture from his eyes. It froze the breath in his lungs before he could exhale.
He stood on a plateau of black, jagged rock. The stone here did not reflect light. It devoured it. Above him, the sky was a bruised violet vault. There were no stars. There was only a heavy, suffocating overcast that pressed down like a ceiling of lead.
In the center of the plateau rose a formation of rock. It was massive. It twisted upward in a spiral of razor-sharp spikes. It looked like a splash of water flash-frozen in the instant of an explosion.
The Throne of Quietus.
It was not a chair for a man. It was a seat for a titan. It was a focal point.
Kallum tried to scream. He tried to make any sound at all to break the pressure building in his skull.
No sound came.
The silence here was a physical force. It was a vacuum that sucked the thoughts from his head. The wind tore at his cloak but it did not howl. The rocks crumbled under his boots but they did not clatter.
He felt a presence.
It was not on the Throne. It was the mountain.
Something was watching him. It had no eyes. It had no face. It perceived him as a vibration of heat and fear in a universe of cold static. It was ancient. It was hungry. It hated the noise of his beating heart.
Quietus. The Silent King.
Kallum fell to his knees on the black rock. The silence was crushing him. It was pressing his eyes into his skull. It was squeezing his heart until it stopped beating.
Then the vision shifted.
He was not alone on the plateau.
He saw a figure standing at the base of the Throne. It was a silhouette wreathed in pale, golden light. The figure was perfect. It was symmetrical. It was devoid of flaw or humanity.
A Lumen-touched.
The figure raised its arms. It opened its mouth to sing. It was going to pollute the silence. It was going to hijack the amplifier of the mountain and broadcast a new song of absolute, sterile order across the world.
The mountain shrieked.
It was a psychic scream that shattered reality.
Kallum gasped.
He slammed back into his body. He fell off the stool and hit the stone floor of the archive. He scrambled backward until his spine hit a bookshelf. He was hyperventilating. Blood poured from his nose. It splattered onto his tunic.
Elyria was still standing. She swayed slightly. She gripped the edge of the table with white knuckles. She gently placed the shard back onto the obsidian surface.
She looked at Kallum. Her mask was gone. Her eyes were wide with a raw, naked dread.
"You saw it," she whispered. It was not a question.
Kallum wiped the blood from his upper lip. His hand shook so hard he smeared it across his cheek.
"The mountain," he choked out. "It... it eats sound."
"The Throne of Quietus," Elyria said. Her voice was hollow. "It is the highest point in the Silent Peaks. It is where the Threnody is loudest because there is nothing to distract from it."
"I saw someone," Kallum said. He forced himself to stand. His legs felt like water. "Someone was there. A golden man."
Elyria closed her eyes. She exhaled a breath she seemed to have been holding for years.
"The Order," she said. "They are not just studying the Abyss, Kallum. They are trying to colonize it. They want to put one of their saints on the Throne. If they do that... if they merge their artificial order with the raw amplification of that place..."
"They will control the song," Kallum finished. The horror of it settled in his gut like a stone. "They will rewrite the world."
"They will erase us," Elyria said. "Free will. Chaos. Memory. It will all be smoothed over. It will be a world of perfect, silent marble."
She looked at him. The calculation returned to her eyes. She looked at the brand on his arm.
"Your power," she said. "It is cold. It is angular. It resists. That is why you survived the vision. A normal mind would have shattered."
"I don't want this," Kallum said. "I just wanted to leave."
"There is no leaving," Elyria said. She picked up the satchel. She held it out to him. "Not anymore. The Order knows you have the shard. They know you are a loose end. And now you know their endgame."
Kallum looked at the bag. He looked at the woman who spoke of the apocalypse with the tone of a librarian discussing a misfiled book.
He realized then that he was trapped. He was trapped between the monster on the mountain and the monsters in the city.
"We cannot stay here," he said. He took the bag. "The cultists are hunting the scent. The Watchers are hunting the man."
"Agreed," Elyria said. She pulled her cloak tight. She checked a slim dagger at her belt. "We need to leave the city. The main gates are sealed. The sewers are compromised."
"There is another way," Kallum said. He thought of the maps he had studied in the Scholasticum. He thought of the whispers he had heard in the taverns of the Gloom. "Stonewake. The Kyn district."
Elyria raised an eyebrow.
"The Kyn hate humans," she said. "And they hate the Order. They will kill us on sight."
"They hate the Order," Kallum corrected. "I am a heretic carrying a weapon that scares priests. That makes me a curiosity. Curiosities can be traded."
He walked to the door of the archive. He listened to the silence of the tunnel beyond.
"Do you know the way to the industrial district from below?" he asked.
"I know the way," Elyria said. She moved to his side. She moved like smoke. "But knowing the path and surviving it are two different things."
Kallum touched the hilt of his dagger. He felt the throb of the scar on his arm. It was a cold, steady rhythm now. It was the beat of a war drum.
"Then we better start walking," he said.
They stepped out into the dark. Behind them, the library waited in the dust. It held its secrets. It waited for the world to end.