The night cracked.
Not with thunder or celestial light, but with something subtler—an unseen shift, like a page turning in a book no one remembered writing. Beneath stars too distant to care, the world exhaled. Somewhere deep within the folds of reality, an ancient balance shifted.
And the void… listened.
In the forgotten halls beneath Cael'Belen, the boy who was no longer a boy stood atop cracked marble and weeping bones. The floor beneath him pulsed faintly, as though remembering footsteps it had not felt in centuries. Ivy crept through the broken masonry, wrapping around statues of winged beings with faces worn smooth by time. All had been holy once. Now, they watched with hollow eyes.
He did not weep. He did not breathe. He did not sleep. Yet he existed—each moment held together by the will of something vast and ancient, something that even gods had stopped naming. His body bore no wounds, yet every inch of him felt carved, hollowed, filled with something… else.
Within him, two presences stirred.
One was silence—heavy, watchful, cold like judgment rendered in stillness. This was the Presence that had chosen him. The voice that had no mouth. The echo of a law older than Heaven. It was not cruel. Nor was it kind. It simply was. A force of balance too immense for human scales.
But the other?
The other laughed.
Lazhar.
It was not a name given. It was a name chosen—stolen from madness itself and whispered like a joke at the edge of nightmares. Lazhar had no shape, yet he moved like oil over water, like fire beneath skin. He was not the void's counterpart. He was its mirror held backward.
"Balance," Lazhar mocked within the boy's mind, each word a smirk pressed between thoughts. "They speak of balance like it's something noble. As though the scales are ever truly even. As though the heavens do not bleed injustice in silence."
Where the Spokesman walked in solemn steps, Lazhar danced in spirals of thought and memory. He had been born in that moment of agony, when the boy's tongue had been carved out—not in punishment, but as tribute. Screaming not in pain, but in disbelief. Disbelief that the divine, the holy, the sacred… could be so brutal.
He was not a demon.
Demons had purpose.
He was not madness.
Madness had boundaries.
Lazhar was the sneer of truth—the knowing smirk behind every failed prayer, every unanswered cry. He didn't want the boy to destroy the world. No. He wanted him to expose it. Unravel it like old parchment and let everyone read the punchline.
He whispered often, in riddles and irony:
"They called you a blasphemer. But what is blasphemy in a world already forsaken?"
"You speak with silence, but silence is a tool. Let me show you how to sharpen it."
"Don't worry. I'll keep you sane. Mostly."
The Spokesman—what the boy was becoming—did not resist Lazhar. Nor did he embrace him. They were like oil and flame. They did not mix, but they burned together.
And the world… was beginning to feel the heat.
…..
Far above, Ashmount Monastery stirred.
The blind monk, Telvar, stood on the cold stone balcony with the mountain winds tangling his robes. His beard had gone white in his years of silence, but his sight—though absent in eyes—burned brighter than ever. The prayer beads clicked between his fingers, each one etched with forgotten verses from before the Shattering.
"The Balance walks," he whispered, his voice barely louder than the wind. "But it walks with a shadow."
He saw nothing, but in his inner vision, he beheld the boy—his body fractured between judgment and jest. And behind him, two paths spiraled out like twin helixes. One paved in light too blinding to behold. The other in a darkness that smiled.
And in that smile… Telvar heard laughter.
He had heard it once before, long ago, when a dying oracle muttered the name "Lazhar" between blood-choked sobs and fell silent forever. He had buried that name for decades, fearing its echo. Now, it sang again.
…..
Elsewhere, in the desert city of Tharel, a woman stirred in her sleep. Eliara—the Seraph of Mercy—jerked upright in her quarters, golden sigils flaring along her arms. Her breath came in sharp, staggered bursts. The dreams had returned.
Bleeding altars. Screaming stone. A boy's silhouette wreathed in silence—and a second, flickering shape behind him, a grinning shadow that smelled of incense and ash.
Anira… she thought, heart pounding. The girl saw something. Felt something. I need to—
She froze.
In the corner of the room, her shadow moved against the candlelight. Not flickering—shifting.
Eliara stood slowly. Her wings shimmered into view, not feathered but woven from divine light. "Who's there?" she asked, voice edged with celestial command.
A whisper, low and velvet-slick, slithered across the floor.
"Mercy. Such a pretty name for complicity."
The candle snuffed itself out.
When the light returned, the shadow was still. But the room smelled faintly of rot and roses.
Back beneath Cael'Belen, the boy—no, the Tongueless One—wandered into what once had been a chapel. Ivy had claimed the altar. Statues of saints had cracked down their middles like broken promises. The floor was littered with candle stubs and burnt offerings.
He stepped into the center and opened his mouth.
No sound came.
And yet… the world listened.
The stone remembered prayers. The air held echoes. The ruins bent toward him, not in reverence, but in recognition. They had seen this before. A vessel. A reckoning. A voice too loud for words.
From his open mouth came not a cry, but a pressure. It radiated outward like ripples in still water. Dust lifted. Windows cracked. Somewhere, deep beneath the ruins, a bell tolled once—its iron tongue rusted but obedient.
Truth will not be silenced.
But within, Lazhar stirred.
"Speak your truth, little vessel," he cooed. "Then let's see what lies they use to cover it."
The Spokesman's head bowed. Whether in grief or preparation, no one could say.
…..
And far beyond even the eyes of angels, deep in the folds between worlds, something old began to open its eyes.
Something that remembered the first judgment.
Something that hated both silence and sound.
Something that had waited for the boy… and Lazhar… to awaken.
And now that it had stirred, the whispers between worlds would become screams.