The silence did not fade. It thickened.
It gathered behind his eyes like pressure, filled his throat with absence, grew claws and curled into the cage of his ribs. It was not stillness. It was weight, the kind that bent ceilings and pressed thought into strange shapes.
The boy sat in the center of the not-chamber, legs folded beneath him, spine too straight for comfort. His breathing was shallow. Not from fear. Not anymore. It was instinct, some leftover animal logic whispering make no sound, and it won't find you.
But there was nothing to find him. Nothing left, not really.
The failed Proxies had vanished, if they had ever been there. Their memory was porous. His mind touched the image of them, and the image rippled. That was happening more now. Images and thoughts and events collapsing into soft, unreliable paste. He knew there had been a mirror. He remembered reaching toward it. Or maybe he hadn't. Maybe the mirror had reached toward him.
He blinked slowly. The chamber held no time, but something in his bones said hours had passed. Or minutes. Or none at all.
Then, in the folds between those thoughts, came a new thing.
A question.
It didn't arrive as voice or language. Not even sound. It slid in like static, a thin shiver across the skin of his mind. The feeling of being asked, without knowing what had been said.
The boy pressed a hand to his chest.
Again, the sensation came.
Not voice, not word, but intent. Curled like smoke around the back of his teeth. He understood it the way one understands a nightmare without needing to translate it.
Why did you leave them?
He flinched.
The chamber flickered. For a breath, it turned to something else, a corridor of blackened pillars, dripping brine, covered in feathered script. A broken shrine. Then it was the chamber again, empty, silent, taut.
His hands trembled. He tried to place them in his lap, but they wouldn't sit still.
He knew the question wasn't about the cult. Not exactly. Not just the follower he'd left behind. It was older. Deeper. Something before the Choir. Before truth-seeking. A memory with the edges chewed off.
Why did you leave them?
The boy opened his mouth.
Nothing came.
He stood, slowly, stiffly. The space did not resist. The walls, if they existed, did not move. But he could feel the gravity of the question bending the air around him.
"I didn't," he said, finally.
No echo. Not even in his mind.
Then the images came. Not as visions, not quite. More like feelings that wore masks shaped like people. A darkened doorway. A hand he didn't take. Rain, or maybe oil. A whisper he chose not to hear.
There had been a choice. Somewhere in the cracks of memory. A moment he'd refused to pull someone from the ledge. Because saving them meant knowing something. And knowing meant bleeding.
His stomach turned.
The silence pressed deeper.
This was what Ashur had meant, in that sideways way of his. That the truth would come when it no longer needed to be spoken. When it forced its way up the throat.
The boy walked. Not forward, there was no forward, but into space that felt less weighted. He moved like someone escaping a bad dream with careful, silent steps.
The chamber pulsed.
And then came the sound.
It was faint, thin as paper. A whisper, not heard but known. Like breath through dry reeds. Like the curl of a word behind a closed door.
He stopped.
The sound was coming from within him.
His body stiffened, but not in fear. In refusal. The kind of refusal that could only come from the fragile denial of something already known. A truth grown toxic in the soil of silence.
He clutched his forearm. Nails dug into skin. Pain helped. It gave anchor.
The whisper grew louder.
Still wordless. Still shapeless. But rising, filling the cavity of his chest like fog. He breathed, slow and shallow, as if trying to avoid exhaling something that might escape and make it real.
He bit the inside of his cheek again. Hard. Copper taste. It steadied him.
But the fog kept rising.
And then, without consent, his mouth began to move.
One syllable. Then another.
But nothing left his lips.
It was like mouthing the shape of betrayal, like watching his own mouth say something he had no right to hear.
He pressed both hands to his face.
The image of the mirror returned.
He saw himself, no longer pale, but hollow. Not dead, but past the state of being alive. He saw the boy he was, the one before the Choir, standing by a riverbank, someone else's hand in his. He saw that hand let go.
Why did you leave them?
Tears ran hot and silent down his cheeks.
He tried to answer.
But every word he formed came out in a different voice. One that wasn't his. One that had never been his.
He screamed again, wordless.
The chamber darkened.
Or perhaps his vision did.
He fell. But not to the floor. To something lower, something inside.
Something opened.
And in that opening, he heard it again.
His name.
Spoken not with malice. Not with demand.
But with understanding.
He broke.
He did not cry out. He did not resist. He only let the silence pour through him, washing away the last fragments of deflection.
And in the silence, a question bloomed:
If you say it, who will you be?
He did not answer.
Not yet.
But the silence was ready.
Waiting.
Listening.