The chamber was not a chamber, not in any architectural sense. It had no walls, only suggestion. Its corners pulsed in and out of visibility, shaped by silence rather than stone. The floor was made of nothing the boy could name. It gave underfoot like old memory, softened by denial.
He stood at the center, or what passed for a center in a room that bent around him, not with light but with absence. Every step echoed without sound. The echoes returned anyway, stitched together by something just behind hearing. Words that never left his mouth, repeating in voices not his own.
Ashur had tried. That much the boy knew. In the blur before this place, there had been shouting. Hands, familiar ones, reaching. Then the Choir had risen like oil through water. Their masked faces were calm, robes sweeping clean the corridor tiles as if preparing a body. He remembered the stillness of Ashur's last expression, not fear, not anger, just inevitability.
Then came black brine and sleep, and now this.
He tried to speak. Not aloud, but inwardly, the kind of speech one clutches to when silence becomes oppressive. But something snagged in the motion of thought. His name, the one he'd buried, pulsed in the hollows of his ribs. He bit the inside of his cheek, hard. It helped.
Across the chamber, shadows shifted. Forms emerged, then retracted. Failed Proxies, if they could still be called that. Bent figures, stitched together with memory scars. Some still wore Choir masks. Others wore nothing at all. Their faces were wrong, either overdefined or lacking any edge at all, like faces drawn from memory too many years after they were lost.
One of them crawled closer. The boy didn't retreat.
"You're what they think they can fix," it said, but the voice didn't come from its mouth. It came from somewhere behind his ears. It scratched like old wax being peeled from a record.
The boy looked down. His shadow was missing.
"I'm not here to fix anything."
"No. You're here to bleed it out. That's what confession is, isn't it? A slow cut."
Another figure rose. It had no eyes, just mouths along the crown of its head, whispering syllables the boy could almost recognize. The names of people who had trusted him. Forgotten followers. The acolyte he'd left behind.
Guilt opened something. Not fully. But enough for the pain to echo.
He moved to the edge of the chamber, where suggestion became boundary. The walls shifted, resisting the idea of exit. The space flexed with breathless denial. That was when he saw it, the mirror.
It was thin, cracked, and faced the wrong direction, reflecting not him but a slanted corridor that didn't exist. Through it, he saw a version of himself. Older. Paler. Eyes dull, lips moving in rhythm. No sound emerged, but he knew what was being said.
His name.
The true one.
He stepped closer, heart stuttering in rhythms that didn't match the space. Each beat landed slightly out of sync, like a skipped record.
The boy raised his hand to the mirror. Not to touch it. To block the reflection.
The reflection moved anyway. Not mirroring him, but reaching, slowly, deliberately, toward its own throat.
Then the whisper came. Direct, immediate, and without source.
"Say it. Just say it."
The boy pressed his hand to his mouth. His fingernails dug in. He tasted old salt, silence-brine.
"No."
The chamber responded. Walls shuddered, breathless groans vibrating through things that should have been air. One of the failed Proxies collapsed into itself, reduced to a heap of cloth and dissolving memory. The mouths on the second figure stopped moving. The names ceased.
He fell to his knees. Not from pain, not entirely, but because his thoughts were no longer lining up. Fragments overlapped. His mother's voice overlaid Ashur's. Kesh's challenge whispered in the voice of a child from Chapter 1. Time was folding.
And in that fold, the name came closer. Clawed at the edge of his throat.
He screamed.
But the scream made no sound. Not even in his mind.
He stayed that way, kneeling, hands shaking against the floor of softened memory. He was afraid to speak. Afraid to think. Even his thoughts had begun to echo in someone else's cadence.
Then, quietly, he wept. Not for himself, but for the truth he knew he'd eventually say. Because once it was spoken, it would never belong to him again.