There was no sound.
There was, instead, the absence of all sound.
A wave of absolute nullity erupted from the Cube and slammed into Elian with the force of a collapsing star. The comforting hum of the palace the whispered prayers, the quiet sobbing of a young courtier, the distant adagio of the spires all of it was ripped away in an instant.
For Elian, it was an agony beyond comprehension.
It was not pain. Pain was a sensation of the body, and he had no body. It was un-being the systematic unraveling of everything he was. The Symphony that had sustained him since the dawn of creation, the eternal Song that was his blood and breath and soul it was gone. Replaced by a deafening, sterile silence that pressed in on him from all directions, that filled his mind with the white noise of absolute nothing.
He felt his ethereal form convulse. The threads of his resonance—the delicate frequencies that composed his being began to fray and snap. The gentle silver light that was his essence flickered.
Died.
Reignited in a desperate, sputtering flare.
He was being compressed. Folded. Forced into a shape that was never meant to contain him.
And then, with a violence that tore a silent scream from his throat, he was wrenched into corporeal form.
He collapsed onto the cold, unyielding marble floor with a gasp his first breath of physical air, and it was a breath of violation. Cold. Weight. Solidity. Sensations he had observed in mortals for millennia but never experienced. His new lungs burned. His new heart hammered against ribs that felt like a cage.
His new eyes opened.
For the first time in the history of creation, mortal eyes could see a Grim.
A stunned silence fell upon the chamber.
The courtiers, the healers, the guards none of them understood what they were seeing. They had witnessed a ripple in the air, a flash of silver light, and then a figure had simply... appeared. A young man, pale and slender, collapsed on the floor beside the dying king's bier. He was radiating a soft, silver light that sputtered and flared erratically, like a guttering candle.
But the Architects the ten Menancers who had planned for this moment, who had theorized and calculated and sacrificed they understood.
And the reality was far more profound and terrifying than any of them had imagined.
One of the younger mages, Lyra an apprentice to Lady Sylvaris, barely twenty years old took a stumbling step back. Her eyes were wide with a terror that was half horror, half reverence.
"By the lost chords..." Her voice was barely a whisper. "What is it? An elemental? A spirit? Who is this being that we have dragged into the light?"
Another mage, an older, more cynical Geomancer named Borin, clutched his amulet with white-knuckled fingers. His face had gone pale. "Look at its form. It's so... slight. It looks almost like a boy."
And it did.
The being on the floor was pale and slender, with features that seemed somehow unfinished as if the universe had only had a moment to sculpt him and had left the fine details for later. His hair was the color of starlight, and his eyes when he raised his head to look at his captors were pools of condensed silver, ancient and knowing, now wide with a primal, disoriented fear that echoed the trauma of creation itself.
He struggled to push himself up on arms that had never borne weight before. His hands slipped on the marble, and he fell again, a soft, melodic sound escaping his lips a ghost of a chord dying in the dead air.
From the shadows, Archmage Kaelen stepped forward.
His own eyes were burning not with awe, not with fear, but with a cold, avaricious fire. The success of the experiment ignited a fierce triumph within him, a vindication of every risk he had taken, every moral line he had crossed.
"It is neither angel nor demon," he declared, his voice cutting through the tense silence like a blade. "It is a mechanism. A keeper of a lock we are here to pick. Do not be fooled by its appearance."
He gestured sharply to the other Architects.
"Bind it. Now, before it acclimates."
Elian, reeling, tried to rise. He could feel the Song it was still there, distant, muffled by the Cube's hateful null field, but present. He reached for it, tried to shape it into a form that could carry his thoughts to these beings who had done this to him.
"Why?" The thought screamed in his mind, a language of pure intent that his physical mouth could not form. "I am a guide, not a foe! I bring peace! Why are you doing this?"
But they could not hear him.
They heard only the faint, melodic sigh that escaped his lips a sound that could be interpreted as defiance, as fear, as anything they projected upon it.
And they were already moving.
The first spell hit him like a wave of molten iron. Chains of solidified, painful light wrapped around his arms and torso, searing into his new flesh with an agony he had no framework to understand. He cried out a raw, wordless sound of protest and the cry was met with hardened gazes and incanted commands.
Under normal circumstances, a mere thought from him would have unraveled such crude constructs back into harmless energy. But now, with the Cube's null field smothering him like a burial shroud, his power was a faint, distant echo a whisper in a hurricane.
More chains. More spells. Binding after binding layered onto him until he could barely move, barely breathe. The weight of it physical, magical, existential pressed him down onto the marble floor, and for the first time in his eternal existence, Elian felt something that no Grim had ever felt before.
He felt helpless.
"Take it to the oubliette," Kaelen commanded. "The old temple beneath the palace. The wards there are ancient and strong. Move!"
The courtiers had fled those who had not fainted. The dying king lay forgotten on his bier, his soul now untethered and wandering, a ghost in the making. Isolde did not look at him as she followed the Architects out of the chamber.
Only Lyra hesitated. She looked back at the being they had captured at the silver eyes that met hers for a fleeting moment and she felt something crack inside her chest.
What have we done?
Then Kaelen's hand closed on her shoulder, and she was pulled away.
— ✦ —