The dawn came late to Ashmount Monastery.
The sun, unsure of itself, loitered behind the shrouded peaks as if unwilling to rise. Light touched the land only in muted whispers, a hesitant grey that clung to stone and snow like memory. And in the highest cell of the monastery, where silence was kept like scripture, Telvar knelt with his hands buried in frost.
He had not moved in hours.
He did not dare.
The weight that pressed upon him now was not physical, yet it was suffocating. It filled the hollows behind his ribs, sank into the marrow of his bones, and hummed beneath the chantless air. It was not divine—not wholly. Nor was it profane. It was… both.
No. That was too simple.
It was a presence that defied names and broke old categories. It was like trying to bottle the smell of burning truth or describe the color of silence.
"The balance falters," Telvar whispered.
His breath came out as a fragile plume. Around him, the wards carved into the floor—runes older than the sky over them—had begun to bleed. Not in color, but in meaning. The lines curled like frightened worms, twisting upon themselves, trying to escape the stone.
His blind eyes wept tears that were not his own.
He could feel the boy—the Tongueless One—now more clearly than ever. And what had once been a flicker on the edge of Telvar's spiritual sight now burned like a black star, pulling thought and fate into orbit.
But the boy was not alone.
Lazhar.
The name echoed through the monk's soul, though no one had spoken it aloud in a thousand years. It was a name erased from canon, scoured from scripture, struck from the Codices of Binding and Hope. Not because he was a devil.
Because he was worse.
A truth unshaped by reverence.
A laughter born in the void between holy lies and the reality beneath them.
Telvar did not know when he had fallen to his side. His body no longer responded. The prayer beads lay scattered like spilled teeth, each one now pulsing faintly with a different rhythm. He recognized none of them.
"They're out of step," he murmured, voice cracking. "The prayers… they don't rhyme anymore."
The mountain wind screamed across the peaks above him, not like air—but like an alarm.
Something was waking. No. Someone.
And not all awakenings were merciful.
…..
Far from Ashmount, in a chamber carved into the alabaster heart of the Temple of the Weeping Flame, Eliara stood before a pool of still light.
Her wings—neither fully manifest nor withdrawn—fluttered with a restlessness she could not suppress. The mirror-water before her usually reflected only divine echoes: a prayer answered here, a birth sanctified there. But today?
The pool did not reflect.
It listened.
She stared at it with furrowed brows, heart hammering with a dread she refused to name. Every time she tried to focus, it offered her not answers—but impressions. Disjointed, seared into the edge of her consciousness:
The taste of rust on a child's tongue.
A chapel sighing like a tired heart.
A boy, no older than fsixteen, standing in silence so loud it cracked stone.
And beneath all of it… him.
Not the boy. Not even the Presence. But something else.
Lazhar.
She hadn't heard that name since her earliest days among the Thrones, whispered only in apocryphal accounts and scratched from every divine ledger. The older gods had spoken of him once, during a War Council at the edge of the Everdusk. Back when the heavens still agreed on truth.
Eliara had been younger then. Arrogant. She had laughed.
"How dangerous could a whisper be?"
But now?
Now, the echo of that laugh returned—not from her lips, but from the darkness in the corners of her sanctum.
A whisper, sliding against the bones of the world.
"Mercy… mercy… how soft the word becomes when rubbed against truth."
Eliara turned swiftly, her wings flaring out with a snap of incandescent light. "Show yourself," she said, though her voice lacked certainty.
Something shifted behind her.
In the reflection pool, her image no longer stood alone.
There, beside her, towered a crooked shadow, impossibly tall and bent like an apology made too late. It wore no face. Instead, it bore a grin—not drawn or etched, but implied by the air itself curving wrong.
"I've always liked you," the thing purred. "Mercy is the softest kind of blade."
"I am not yours," she said, stepping back, light boiling from her skin.
"You say that now," the shadow said. "But what happens when justice forgets how to be just? When the heavens lie and call it law?"
"I serve the Throne."
"The Throne is cracked."
The air grew heavy, bending inwards. Eliara fell to one knee, gasping as invisible pressure wrenched her thoughts into spirals. She tasted salt and flame and snow. She felt time stutter, as if the present were trying to escape her future.
Then it spoke again—lower now, softer.
"The boy doesn't seek power. He is power. And I… I am simply his clarity."
The pressure vanished.
Eliara collapsed forward, panting. Her light dimmed. The pool rippled once, then stilled.
She rose to her feet slowly, hands trembling. Her connection to the Choir above was fraying. She could no longer hear the songs clearly. Every note felt… contaminated.
There was no more time to delay.
She needed to find the Tongueless One. She needed to reach him before Lazhar whispered him into something unrecognizable.
But even as she gathered her strength, she knew she wasn't the only one searching.
…..
Beneath the earth, in the broken sanctum of Cael'Belen, the boy stood motionless as echoes rippled outward from him like the beating of wings. Though he did not move, reality around him strained and fractured like old glass.
His silence was no longer absence.
It was presence.
Every moment that passed, the power inside him became less contained—less shaped by the rules of heaven or hell. And Lazhar, coiled around his thoughts like smoke through bone, was no longer content to be a passenger.
He whispered not In words now, but in meanings.
And the world listened.