The plan was set. The trap was baited with the only thing that could lure a creature of stillness: a deeper, more profound silence.
Blind Master Orin's predictable, haunted wanderings now brought him to the disused west gallery every third night. The gallery overlooked a sealed, sunken garden—a place where a minor earth-levy had failed a century ago, leaving a pocket of permanently stagnated mana. To Orin's poisoned senses, attuned to absence, it would feel like a soothing balm, a pool of quiet in the palace's noisy current.
I was there before him, hidden not by shadow, but by principle.
Using The Principle of Concealed Action, I had spent days preparing. I didn't hide my presence; I edited it out. With careful applications of Void Threads, I persuaded the light in my alcove to bend around me, not reflect off me. I convinced the ambient mana currents that the space I occupied was a natural, inert dead zone—no more noteworthy than a patch of dry rot in a wooden beam. To any magical scan, I was part of the gallery's architecture.
The cost was a steady, chilling drain, paid for by the sacrificed potential of a handful of iron nails, now dark and brittle in my pocket.
Orin entered as the moon reached its zenith. His milky eyes were wide, unblinking. His head tilted, as if listening to a song only he could hear—the song of the garden's stagnation. He moved towards the stone balustrade, drawn to the quiet below.
This was the moment. Not to attack. To amplify.
From my hidden vantage, I focused on the bead. I did not create a Pin or a Lens. I formed a Void Resonator—a sustained, low-frequency pulse of negation tuned to the specific "pitch" of Orin's own corrupted stillness. It was like striking a tuning fork and holding it against an identical, silent one. The second fork would begin to hum.
I poured the pulse into the air between us, a wave of focused nothingness.
Orin froze. His staff clattered to the flagstones.
He didn't turn. He didn't speak. A low, shuddering breath escaped him, a sound of such profound, aching recognition it was almost painful to hear. The Echo-Sap poison had made him hungry for the void. My Resonator was a feast laid before a starving man.
He took a step toward the balustrade, then another, his movements jerky, compelled.
"Who…?" he whispered, the word scratching from a throat unused to speech. "What calls from the deep?"
I remained silent, the pulsing resonator my only answer.
He reached the edge. Below, the sunken garden was a pit of blackness. "The Seal… is it you? Have you come at last?" His voice was filled with a terrifying mix of dread and longing. The Oculate warden, bred to exterminate the void, had been twisted into yearning for it.
Now, for the strike. Not against him. Against his purpose.
I shifted the Resonator's frequency minutely, syncing it not with his stillness, but with the core Oculate geas—the psychic command buried in his mind that defined his mission: Find the Breach. Excise the Anomaly.
I pulsed a counter-command, woven from pure negation: You are the Anomaly.
It was a seed of void. A thought-virus.
Orin stiffened. A tremor wracked his thin frame. "No… I am the ward… I am the silence that guards…"
I pulsed again, harder. Your silence is the breach. Your hunger is the proof.
He clutched his head, a raw, animal sound of confusion tearing from him. The two imperatives—his poisoned desire and his corrupted geas—collided in his mind. His perfect, trained perception, designed to detect external voids, turned inward. And for the first time, he sensed the hollowness the Echo-Sap and my resonance had carved inside him.
He perceived himself as the threat.
The warden's final protocol was clear: excise the anomaly. By any means.
With a cry that was both despair and release, Blind Master Orin threw himself not away from the silence, but into it.
He vaulted the balustrade and plunged into the black pit of the sunken garden.
There was no splash. No impact. The stagnated mana and deep shadows swallowed the sound of his fall whole.
I released the Resonator. The sudden cessation of effort left me gasping, the cold in my core biting to the bone. I walked to the edge and looked down.
Nothing. Only darkness.
The most dangerous hunter in the palace was gone, not by my hand, but by his own, twisted to the point of self-annihilation.
A wave of grim satisfaction should have come. Instead, the ghost of my sister whispered in the newfound quiet. One obstacle gone. How many more between you and me?
The void in my chest gave a slow, deep pulse of agreement. It was sated, for now. But it was always hungry.
I turned from the edge. The path to the ice cellar was clear. It was time to stop playing with apertures and spheres.
It was time to open the door and see what lay in the basement of the universe.
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