The cistern was a cold, cavernous hollow that swallowed the light of their single tallow candle. Water dripped from a cracked relief of a long-forgotten saint, the steady plink-plink providing the only rhythm in the absolute stillness.
Sylva sat cross-legged on the stone floor, her back straight, her breathing so shallow it barely stirred the dust. Around her sat the seven—the first strands of a network that would one day pull the city's secrets from the dark.
To Sylva's left sat Kael, a man whose very silhouette seemed to sag under the weight of a vanishing world. He still wore his clerical collar, though the white fabric was frayed at the edges and stained with the grey soot of the Low-End. For twenty years, that collar had been his pride—a symbol of a world that was supposed to be ordered, sanctified, and immutable.
Kael had been a rising star in the Cathedral, a man who spoke of the "Solid Light" with such conviction that even the cynical felt shielded. He had spent his life preaching that Aethelgard was a fortress of divine architecture, built upon laws that could never be bent. To him, the Light wasn't just a belief; it was the ultimate, unyielding floor beneath his feet.
Then came the morning of the Silent Mass. Kael had been kneeling before the Great Altar, his hands pressed against the cold, heavy marble in prayer. Mid-sentence, the world simply... stuttered. The heavy stone beneath his palms didn't break or crumble; it lost its density. For three heartbeats, the solid marble became as transparent as mountain water. Kael hadn't just seen through the altar; he had felt his hands sink an inch into the material, as if the stone had forgotten it was supposed to be solid.
He had stared through the altar at the dust motes on the floor beneath it, watching as a spider crawled through the "ghost" of the marble. Then, with a sickening thrum, the altar snapped back into existence, nearly crushing his fingers as the stone regained its reality.
The Church elders had called it a vision. The High Inquisitor had called it a test of faith. But Kael knew better. He hadn't seen a miracle; he had seen a flaw in the design.
His faith hadn't just broken in that moment; it had dissolved into a terrifying, cold clarity. He realized that the "shield" he had promised his congregation was made of the same flickering fabric as that altar. Every prayer he had ever uttered felt like shouting at a wall that might not be there when he leaned against it. He had spent weeks wandering the streets, staring at buildings and waiting for them to blink, his mind screaming at the "noise" of a city pretending to be solid.
Now, sitting in the cistern, he looked at Sylva not as a priest looks at a savior, but as a drowning man looks at a rock. He didn't want the Light anymore. He wanted the truth of the Void, because at least the Void didn't lie about being empty. He was a man who had realized the floor was a lie, and he was finally ready to learn how to fall.
Next to Kael was Mina, a girl whose age was hard to pin down. She had the small, wiry frame of a child but the eyes of an old scavenger who had seen too many winters. She wore an oversized, grease-stained tunic and boots held together by bits of twine, looking exactly like the thousands of orphans who lived in the city's cracks.
Mina didn't have Kael's theological crisis. She didn't care about the laws of the Light or the sanctity of the Cathedral. To her, the world was a series of physical obstacles—walls to climb, pockets to pick, and guards to outrun. Her survival depended on the world being predictable. If you jumped from a roof, the tiles had to be there to catch you. If you hid behind a crate, the crate had to be solid enough to hide your breath.
Then came the Ghost-Step in the Upper District. Mina had been tailing a wealthy merchant, a man whose coat was heavy with the weight of gold coins. She had timed it perfectly—the moment he turned into a narrow alleyway, shadowed by the overhanging balconies of the noble houses. She had reached out, her fingers nimble and sure, aiming for the leather pouch at his hip.
But as her hand closed around the silk of his coat, the sensation wasn't what she expected. There was no resistance. Her fingers didn't encounter fabric or leather; they passed through the merchant's hip as if he were made of cold, swirling mist.
Panicked, she had lunged forward, her entire arm sinking into the man's torso. She felt a brief, nauseating chill—the sensation of moving her hand through a space where matter existed but had no "bite." The merchant kept walking, entirely unaware that a girl's arm was currently occupying the same physical space as his ribs.
Mina had stumbled back, her hand shaking as she stared at her own fingers. They were still there, still solid, but the world around her had momentarily lost its "grip." She had tried to lean against the alley wall to steady herself, only for her shoulder to sink three inches into the brickwork before the stone suddenly hardened again, bruising her bone.
For Mina, the world was no longer a playground; it was a trap. Every step she took felt like walking on thin ice over an infinite drop. She had stopped stealing, not out of a change of heart, but because she was terrified that the next time she reached for a coin, she might fall into the person she was robbing and never come back out.
Sitting in the cistern, she watched Sylva with a desperate, animal-like focus. She didn't want to know the "why" of the Void. She wanted to know how to move through a world that was becoming a hall of mirrors without falling through the floor. She needed the Void Path to learn how to exist when the walls were no longer willing to hold her.
Next to Mina sat Elara, an apothecary who had spent her life defining the world through its physical properties. She knew the exact weight of dried nightshade, the oily residue of crushed hemlock, and the sharp, biting scent of high-grade ether. To Elara, reality was a collection of tangible essences that could be brewed, bottled, and measured.
But over the last two years, her shop in the Mid-District had become a place of silent horror.
It started with the colors. She would open a jar of vibrant, sun-yellow marigold petals only to find them turning a dull, flat grey as soon as she touched them. It wasn't rot; the petals didn't wither or smell of decay. They simply lost their "information." When she tried to grind them, they didn't turn into powder; they dissolved into a fine, colorless ash that felt like nothing at all between her fingers.
Then, the scents began to vanish. She would lean over a boiling cauldron of valerian root, a smell famous for its pungent, earthy weight, and find her nostrils filled with absolute neutrality. The steam was there, the heat was there, but the essence was gone. It was as if the "logic" that made valerian smell like valerian had been deleted from the air.
The final straw came when she tried to heal a young boy's fever. She had administered a potent tincture of willow bark, a remedy she had prepared a thousand times. As the boy drank it, Elara watched in frozen terror as the liquid passed through his throat, but instead of being swallowed, it simply vanished into his chest cavity. No coughing, no choking. The tincture didn't enter his stomach; it simply ceased to exist the moment it entered his physical space. The boy didn't get better; he didn't get worse. He simply became "less."
Elara realized then that she wasn't just losing her craft; the world was losing its substance. The ingredients of life were being edited out, leaving behind a hollow shell of shapes with no meaning. She had closed her shop and walked into the Low-End, seeking anyone who didn't look at the fading colors with denial.
She looked at Sylva now with the clinical focus of a scientist who had found the only stable element in a collapsing laboratory. She didn't want a miracle; she wanted to understand how to exist when the very molecules of her body began to lose their scent and color.
Beside Elara sat Bram, a man who looked like he had been carved out of the very docks he worked on. His shoulders were broad enough to block an alleyway, and his hands were calloused into thick, leathery paddles from years of hauling iron chains and wooden crates. Bram was a man of the "Physical Truth." If you hit something hard enough, it broke. If you pulled something heavy enough, it moved.
His crisis was the most visceral of all. Bram had been working the night shift at the Great Crane, lifting a massive shipment of Inquisition steel. The chain was taut, the gears were screaming under the tension, and Bram was leaning his full weight into the iron lever. Suddenly, the resistance vanished.
It wasn't that the chain snapped. It was that the weight disappeared. The massive crate, weighing several tons, began to float upward as if gravity had simply forgotten it existed. Bram, still pulling with all his might, fell backward. But he didn't hit the wooden pier.
As he fell, the wood beneath him became as soft as a feather bed. His heavy boots sank into the solid oak planks as if they were made of fresh snow. He watched, paralyzed, as his own forearm submerged into the pier. He could feel the grain of the wood inside his skin, a sensation of static and pins-and-needles that made him want to scream, but his lungs felt like they were filled with wool.
Then, the "glitch" snapped shut. The crate slammed back down with a thunderous crash that shattered the pier, and Bram's arm was violently ejected from the wood, leaving his skin bruised and weeping with splinters that hadn't been there a second ago.
Bram had spent his life being the strongest man in the room. Now, he was terrified of his own strength. He was afraid that if he gripped a door handle too hard, he might accidentally "edit" it out of existence, or worse, merge with it. He sat in the cistern with his massive hands tucked tightly into his lap, afraid to touch anything, looking at Sylva as the only person who could teach him how to be heavy in a world that was becoming light.
At the far end of the circle sat the youngest members of the Order: Pip, Jax, and Hana. They were aged between eight and eleven, a small, huddled unit of survival who had navigated the alleys of Aethelgard together long before Sylva found them. They didn't have the heavy grief of the priest or the professional loss of the apothecary. Their perspective was simpler: the world was their home, and their home was beginning to "flicker."
To a street child, the city is a living thing. They know which floorboards creak, which walls hold heat, and which shadows are deep enough to hide a small body. They survive by knowing the rules of the terrain.
Then, the rules began to change. Pip, the smallest, had been the first to see it. He had been hiding in a chimney flue to avoid a guard patrol when he noticed the soot was no longer black. It hadn't turned grey or white; it had simply lost its "property." When he wiped his face, his skin didn't get dirty. He reached out to touch the bricks, and his hand felt a terrifying lack of texture. The chimney was still there, but it felt like he was touching a memory of a chimney—smooth, cold, and entirely hollow.
Jax and Hana had their own terrors. They had been sleeping in a crawlspace beneath a bakery for the warmth, only to wake up and find that the bakery's stone foundation had become semi-permeable. Rain wasn't dripping through cracks; it was passing straight through the solid rock as if the stone were a sieve. They watched, paralyzed, as the water fell through the ceiling and pooled on the floor, but when they tried to touch the water, it offered no wetness. It was a visual error—an image of rain with no substance.
For the children, the world wasn't just breaking; it was becoming "pretend." The walls they relied on to hide them were becoming unreliable. The food they scavenged sometimes turned to dust in their mouths because the "logic" of its nutrition had been edited out. They were starving in a city of plenty because the reality of the bread was failing before they could swallow it.
They sat together now, holding hands so tightly their knuckles were white. They didn't understand "frequencies" or "architectural flaws." They just knew that Sylva was the only thing in Aethelgard that felt "heavy" and "true." To them, the Void Path wasn't a philosophy; it was a way to make sure that when they leaned against a wall, they wouldn't fall forever into the grey fog beneath.
Sylva looked at the seven—the priest, the thief, the apothecary, the dockworker, and the children. Each of them was a victim of a reality that was trying to reject them.
"You have all seen the glitches," Sylva said, her voice cutting through the damp chill of the cistern. "You have felt the world become thin. The Inquisition tells you this is a curse. They tell you to pray for the world to be solid again."
She stood up, moving to the center of the circle.
"But the world will never be solid again," she said. "The Core Design has been altered. If you try to stay 'real' in a world that is becoming 'unreal,' you will be crushed by the friction. You will be caught in the gears as they slip."
She looked at Bram, the dockworker.
"Bram, you are afraid to move because you are too heavy. Kael, you are afraid to speak because your words feel hollow. I am going to show you why that fear is your greatest enemy."
Sylva picked up a small, jagged piece of masonry from the floor. She held it out in her open palm.
"The world expects this stone to fall if I let go. It expects it to be hard. It expects it to exist."
She closed her eyes. The air around her didn't change, but the feeling of her presence did. To the Seven, it felt as if the room had suddenly become very large and very quiet. Sylva entered the Ghost State.
She opened her hand.
The stone didn't fall. It didn't float, either. It sat in the air, exactly where she had left it. But it looked wrong. The edges of the stone began to blur, vibrating at a speed that made it look like a grey smudge.
"I am not holding it up with magic," Sylva whispered. "I have simply stopped giving the world enough information to decide that the stone should fall. I have edited the 'gravity' out of its local space."
She reached out and passed her hand through the floating stone. There was no sound. No resistance. Her flesh and the stone occupied the same space for a heartbeat, and then she pulled her hand back.
"This is the Void Path," she said, her eyes snapping open, violet light simmering in her pupils. "We do not fight the errors. We inhabit them. We become the silent spots where the world's rules no longer apply. If the world is a sinking ship, we are the ones who either have learned how to breathe water or fix the boats holes fast and I'll teach you how to do both."