Silence wasn't peaceful. Silence was just a container waiting to be filled.
Kaelen Vance lay on the cold marble of the Guild Hall, staring up at the floating debris of the shattered Prime Geode. The Peacekeeper—the massive iron gun she had used to shoot the gravity core back into existence—was still smoking in her hand, radiating a heat that blistered her palm.
But she didn't feel the burn. She didn't feel much of anything.
For twenty years, her mind had been a crowded, screaming tenement. The Echo of the Banker counting his coins. The Whore sobbing in the corner. The Mud-Larks hissing about the cold.
Now? They were gone.
She had loaded them all into the chamber of the gun and fired them into the abyss to save the city. She had scraped the bottom of her mental library until the shelves were bare.
"Hello?" she thought, projecting the word into her own skull.
There was no answer. No scolding. No weeping. Just the vast, white echo of a room stripped of furniture. She was tabula rasa.
Almost.
Roomy, isn't it?
The Voice—the Passenger Sterling had planted in her head—stretched out in the newfound space. It sounded clearer now, unburdened by the static of the other ghosts. I've always wanted a private suite. The neighbors were getting so loud.
Kaelen groaned and sat up. Her body felt impossibly light, as if the gravity she had restored hadn't quite taken hold of her yet.
"Vance."
Inquisitor Valerius was limping toward her. He looked like a ruin of a man. His coat was shredded, his shoulder was a mass of bruised meat where the Silencer-construct had crushed him, and his face was grey with exhaustion.
But he was moving.
He stopped in front of her, offering a hand. Kaelen took it. His grip was solid, grounding.
"Pupil check," Valerius rasped, tilting her chin up with a rough, bloody hand.
He stared into her eyes. Kaelen waited for him to flinch. She expected him to see the violet fire of the Dreg or the white nothingness of the Void.
Instead, Valerius frowned.
"They're… clear," he murmured. "The violet stain is gone. You look…"
"Empty," Kaelen finished. "I feel like a husk, Valerius. I feel like wind could blow through me."
"You discharged a lifetime of psychic mass," Valerius said, his voice returning to that clinical, analytical tone she had almost missed. "It stands to reason there would be a vacuum effect. Can you stand?"
"I can hunt," Kaelen said. She pushed herself up, holstering the cooling Peacekeeper. The weight of the gun was the only heavy thing about her.
She looked toward the pit where Sterling had fallen.
The Lord Arcanist wasn't there.
"He ran again," Kaelen spat, the frustration rising in her throat. "Just like the Cisterns. Just like the Spire."
"No," Valerius said. He walked to the edge of the pit, crouching to inspect a smear of golden blood on the marble. "He didn't run this time. Look at the trail."
Kaelen looked. The golden ichor didn't lead away from the battle, toward the exits or the teleportation points. It led deeper. Into the dark hallway behind the shattered Geode chamber.
"The Private Collections," Valerius said, standing up. He wiped the blood from his knife—a small, curved blade he had used to fight a god. His eyes were hard, calculating. He wasn't the punchline of the fight anymore; he was the hunter.
"Sterling isn't retreating, Vance. He's cornered. He's missing an arm, he's burned, and his mana is critically low. He can't teleport again. He's going to the only place in the Guild Hall that holds enough raw power to jumpstart his heart."
"The Curtain Call," Kaelen whispered, remembering Sterling's parting words.
"The Origin," Valerius corrected. "The founding spell of Obolus. It's kept in a vault that requires a Lord Arcanist's bio-signature to open. He's going to try to rewrite the city's contract."
Valerius turned to her. "He's done running. This ends in the dark."
They moved into the corridor. The air here was stagnant, smelling of old parchment and ozone. The walls were lined with portraits of Guild Masters past, their eyes following them in the gloom.
Kaelen walked with a predatory silence. Without the constant noise in her head, her senses were razor-sharp. She could hear the drip of Sterling's golden blood on the floor ahead. She could smell the charred meat of his cauterized stump.
He's afraid, the Passenger whispered. Can you taste it, darling? It's a different vintage than the others. It's not the fear of death. It's the fear of irrelevance..
"Shut up," Kaelen murmured.
"I didn't say anything," Valerius whispered back.
"Not you."
Valerius paused, glancing at her. "The Cipher. It's still active?"
"It's louder," Kaelen admitted. "Now that the library is empty… he's the only book left on the shelf."
They reached a massive door made of black iron, etched with silver runes that hummed with a low, headache-inducing frequency. The door was slightly ajar. A handprint of melted gold marred the iron where Sterling had forced it open.
Valerius signaled for a halt. He reached into his belt and pulled out a small pouch. It wasn't a weapon. It was salt.
"What are you doing?" Kaelen asked.
"Physics," Valerius muttered. "Sterling creates constructs from light and mana. Salt disrupts the ionization of the air. It won't kill him, but it will make his magic fizzle. I'm not fighting him with a knife this time, Vance. I'm fighting him with chemistry."
He kicked the door open.
The vault was not a room. It was a cavern carved from the bedrock of the island. In the center, illuminated by a single shaft of light from high above, was a pedestal. On the pedestal lay a massive, bound book.
The Book of Obolus.
Sterling was there.
He was slumped against the pedestal, his legs splayed out. He looked less like a Lord Arcanist and more like a broken doll. His left arm ended in a charred stump where Kaelen's Void-bullet had erased it. His white suit was rags.
But his right hand—his only hand—was resting on the open book.
"You took your time," Sterling wheezed. He didn't look up. He was tracing the lines of the text with a trembling finger.
"Step away from the book, Sterling," Valerius commanded, stepping into the room. He flung the handful of salt into the air.
The crystals scattered, creating a haze in the room. Sterling tried to summon a golden shield, but the mana sparked and died, neutralized by the simple chemical interference.
"Clever," Sterling coughed, a wet, rattling sound. "Always the pragmatist, Valerius. You bring salt to a god fight."
"You aren't a god," Kaelen said, stepping past Valerius. She leveled the empty Peacekeeper at him. It was a bluff—she had no memories left to fire—but Sterling didn't know that. "You're just a man bleeding on a floor."
Sterling looked up. His face was a ruin of burns and bruises, but his eye—the one that wasn't swollen shut—was bright. Manic.
"And you," Sterling whispered, staring at Kaelen. "You are magnificent."
He laughed, and blood bubbled over his lips.
"I was worried, you know. When you shot the gravity core… I thought you had ruined the plan. I thought you had filled yourself up with so much trauma that you would crack."
He pulled himself up, using the pedestal for support.
"But you didn't crack. You purged."
He pointed a shaking finger at her.
"Look at you. You're empty. You fired every scrap of humanity you had to save this rotting city. You deleted your mother. You deleted your guilt."
Kaelen lowered the gun slightly. The cold knot in her stomach tightened.
"I did what I had to do."
"You did what I designed you to do!" Sterling roared. The sound echoed in the vault. "Don't you see? The Door to the Void cannot be opened by a cluttered mind! The Laughing God cannot enter a vessel that is full of noise!"
Sterling slammed his hand onto the book.
"I didn't want you to die, Kaelen. I wanted you to clean house. And you did it. You scrubbed the floors. You threw out the furniture."
He's right, the Passenger agreed, and for the first time, the Voice in her head sounded… distinct. It didn't sound like a whisper anymore. It sounded like it was standing right behind her eyes. Nature abhors a vacuum, Kaelen.
Kaelen stumbled back, clutching her head. "Valerius… something's wrong."
Valerius lunged for Sterling. "Stop talking!"
Sterling didn't fight. He didn't raise a shield. He simply smiled and spoke a single word.
"Upload."
The Cipher in Kaelen's head—the geometric headache that had been ticking since the beginning—suddenly stopped ticking.
It opened.
Kaelen screamed.
It wasn't a sound of pain. It was the sound of displacement.
She felt herself being shoved into the backseat of her own body. The emptiness she had created—the silence she had fought so hard for—was suddenly flooded.
Not with memories. Not with ghosts.
But with Him.
The Passenger expanded. It filled her lungs. It flexed her fingers. It tasted the iron in her mouth.
Kaelen fell to her knees, but she didn't hit the floor. Her body caught itself with a grace she didn't possess.
Valerius froze, his knife inches from Sterling's throat. He looked back at Kaelen.
"Vance?"
Kaelen Vance stood up. She brushed the dust from her coat. She looked at Valerius, and her eyes were no longer violet.
They were gold.
"Vance is currently unavailable," Kaelen said. Her voice was a rich, velvet baritone—Sterling's voice, coming from her throat.
She looked at Sterling, the broken man on the floor.
"You look terrible, brother," Kaelen—no, the Passenger—said to the man on the floor.
Sterling slumped back against the pedestal, weeping tears of golden joy. "It worked. The transfer… it worked."
"Of course it worked," the thing wearing Kaelen's skin said. It raised the Peacekeeper and spun the cylinder. It didn't need memories to load the gun. It simply poured its own golden essence into the chamber.
"I planned it," the Passenger said.
It pointed the gun at Valerius.
"Now," the Passenger smiled, and it was the cruelest smile Valerius had ever seen. "Let's discuss the terms of your surrender."