The halls beneath the shrine began to change after the punishment. Subtle things at first. Shadows lingered longer in corners where there were no lights. Chants that once echoed predictably now returned garbled, voices bouncing back with the wrong cadence, or not returning at all. Even the faithful moved differently, their steps quieter, their faces less certain behind their stitched hoods.
The boy noticed it, but he said nothing.
He couldn't say anything. Not well. Not anymore.
The silence-brine had dulled his speech. Words came slower now, distorted on the way to his tongue. Half his thoughts felt like they belonged to someone else, and the rest circled endlessly, repeating without end. When he tried to pray, he would forget the middle of the chant and start again without realizing. Some days, he lost hours in those loops.
But it wasn't just him.
Something had shifted in the Choir.
It started with the candles.
They used to light the way in pools of warm salt-yellow. Now they burned with a strange bluish siltlight, flickering shadows that didn't match the shapes that cast them. Ashur said nothing about the change. The others didn't even seem to notice.
But the boy did.
And so did the new initiate.
He arrived during the fourth meal cycle after the brine punishment. Taller than most, though he slouched. Wore his hood too low. Moved too softly. Something off about his silence, not reverent like the others, but deliberate. Like someone holding their breath, waiting for the right moment to speak.
The boy didn't recognize him at first.
Not until the stranger whispered during the rote prayer, just loud enough for the boy to hear:
"Still speaking too loudly for their liking?"
He turned his head slowly.
The initiate beside him didn't look his way.
Didn't smile.
Didn't move.
But the voice, it was unmistakable.
Kesh.
The name scraped against the inside of the boy's spiral, a flicker of old recognition that didn't quite belong anymore. He hadn't seen him since the day of the mark, when the Hole had whispered another name instead of his own.
The stranger didn't speak again that day. Nor the next.
But his presence started to spread.
He began organizing quiet walks through the deeper levels of the shrine, where the spiral walls grew thin and the chanting faded to wind. He asked strange questions during meal silence, questions the others weren't sure they'd heard. Questions like:
"Have you ever heard the Hole apologize?"
Or—
"What if the silence is someone else's voice?"
He taught games that had no winners. Recited hymns backward and claimed it was closer to the original meaning. When the elders asked for a volunteer to clean the prayer cages, he offered before they finished asking.
The boy watched it all with growing unease.
Kesh was weaving a net, but not to catch something.
To pull it apart.
Late one night, the boy found him in the Siltlight Passage, the corridor just before the brine vaults. A place where walls sweated salt and the air hummed low enough to feel in your teeth. Kesh sat cross-legged on the floor, a candle flickering between them.
He didn't look up.
"Did you know," he said, "they used to sing in here?"
The boy said nothing.
"They stopped because the walls started remembering the words. Started echoing them back hours later. That scared them."
Still silence.
Kesh smiled faintly, still not looking up. "They fear echoes. Isn't that funny? A choir afraid of its own sound."
The boy sat opposite him, careful, uncertain.
"Why are you here?" he asked, voice low and hoarse.
Kesh looked up then. His eyes were darker than before. Not cold, sharp. Like something had cut away the softness he once had.
"To remind you," he said simply, "that forgetting isn't the same as being forgiven."
The boy stared at him. "I didn't forget."
"You're starting to."
Kesh leaned forward, and for a moment his face looked too old, too knowing.
"Do you even remember her name?" he asked.
The candle sputtered.
The boy didn't answer.
Kesh nodded like that was the answer he expected.
"I'll be around," he said, standing. "Try not to echo anything you wouldn't want coming back louder."
He left without another word.
And the candle snuffed itself out.