Ten days were a frantic, condensed eternity. The careful preparations were compressed into a whirlwind of grim efficiency. The expedition was pared down to its absolute essentials: Kaelen, Elara, Nylas, and six of her most seasoned, magically-resilient Shade-Walkers. They were specialists in survival in dead zones, veterans of battles against entropy-spirits and magic-draining creatures.
Their gear was a testament to the strangeness of their mission. No shimmering silks or elegant armor. They were clad in layers of treated, non-magical beast-hide and insulated with null-fiber batting. Their weapons were simple: blades of cold-forged iron, bows with non-enchanted strings. Kaelen carried his shadow-glass dagger, its inherent disruption a last resort in a place that killed magic. Elara carried nothing but the clothes on her back and the vast, quiet reservoir within her.
On a morning shrouded in particularly thick, mournful mist, they assembled at the northernmost gate. Lord Caelan was there to see them off, his face etched with worry. "The Greenwardens will hold the realm steady in your absence," he promised, clasping Kaelen's forearm. "May the memory of growth guide you into the stillness."
Felwin arrived, breathless, clutching a small, lead-lined case. "A theory," he said, handing it to Elara. "Based on Lyros's harmonics. If the Silence 'sings,' it might have a resonant frequency. This is a tuning fork of soul-crystal. If you can sense the 'song,' strike it against something non-magical. It might… make the silence audible. Give it a shape you can analyze." It was a desperate tool for a desperate task.
With final nods, they passed through the gate and into the barren north.
The journey was a gradual descent into nothingness.
The first few days took them through the familiar, if increasingly stark, landscapes of the Shadowfell's outer territories—forests of grey-barked trees, plains of whispering grey grass. The magic was thin but present. Then, the color leached away entirely. The world became a study in monochrome: black rock, white frost, grey sky. The air grew bitterly cold, a dry cold that stole heat and hope with equal indifference.
Then, the sound began to fade.
First, the distant, ever-present hum of the realm's magical background vanished, leaving a ringing in the ears. Then, the wind lost its voice, becoming only a movement of freezing air. Soon, even the crunch of their boots on frost seemed muffled, swallowed by the growing, pervasive lack.
It was the Unmaking, not as a violent attack, but as an ambient condition. A leprosy of reality.
Elara felt it most acutely. Her Siphon senses, usually overwhelmed by the world's noise, were now straining in a vacuum. The hunger inside her grew restless, not because there was magic to consume, but because there was nothing. It was disorienting, like a deep-sea creature brought to the surface.
They made camp in a shallow cave, lighting a fire of precious, carried coal that gave heat but no cheer. The flames were oddly listless. Nylas posted watches, but the concept of danger here felt obsolete. Danger implied action. This place was the antithesis of action.
On the fifth day, they found the first scout.
Or what was left of him. He was a Fae from the outpost, frozen in a kneeling position, leaning against a boulder. His eyes were open, staring at nothing. There was no ice on him, no visible wound. He was simply… empty. His magic was gone, not ripped out, but utterly dissolved. His spirit had followed. He was a shell, preserved by the very nullity that had killed him.
"Don't touch him," Kaelen warned, his voice a hollow sound in the silence. "The dissolution might be contagious."
They gave the corpse a wide berth, a somber monument to what they walked toward.
Elara's training in the null-zones was the only thing that kept her functional. She maintained a tiny, precise draw from her reservoir, just enough to fuel her body's heat and her mind's focus. It was a careful balancing act—using power without letting the surrounding nothingness amplify her internal void into a panic.
Kaelen walked beside her, a solid, silent presence. Through the bond, she felt his own struggle. His shadow-magic was a part of him, like a limb. Here, it was atrophied, asleep. He felt cut off, diminished. But his will was a forge-fire, burning all the brighter against the cold. He was here for her, for the realm, and his determination was a rock she could cling to.
Nylas and the Shade-Walkers were eerily unaffected. They were soldiers. Their purpose was their compass, and it required no magic. They moved with a grim, mechanical efficiency that was more frightening than fear would have been.
On the eighth day, they crested a rise of black, glassy rock and saw it.
The Mirror of Absence.
It was not a lake as they understood it. It was a perfect, circular plane of… not-water. A substance so still and so clear it seemed not to be there at all, reflecting only the featureless, grey-white sky above, creating an illusion of infinite, empty space. It was miles across, ringed by a jagged shore of the same black glass. No snow touched its surface. No wind rippled it. It was a hole in the world, covered with a film of perfect, dead calm.
And the silence here was no longer an absence of sound. It was a presence. A physical pressure on the eardrums, on the soul. It was the silence of a breath held forever, of a heart that has forgotten its next beat.
Felwin's tuning fork felt like a child's toy in Elara's hand.
They made camp on the glassy shore, far back from the edge. The coal fire here seemed a blasphemy, its weak crackle an impertinence. They ate tasteless rations in wordless communion.
"The alignment," Kaelen said, his voice barely disturbing the heavy air. "According to Lyros's notes, the effect will be strongest at the center. The 'song' will be clearest there." He looked at the vast, silent mirror. "We need to get you to the center, Elara."
It meant crossing that dead plane. A place that had killed a scout just by proximity.
"How?" Nylas asked, her pragmatic voice a welcome anchor.
Kaelen looked at the Shade-Walkers' gear. "We have rope. We anchor it here. We move in a line, staying connected. Minimal magic. Physical contact. The moment anyone feels… dissolution… we pull back."
It was a plan of terrifying simplicity.
In the flat, unchanging light of the northern void (there was no day or night here, only a permanent, grim twilight), they prepared. They tied themselves together with strong, non-magical rope, leaving ten paces between each person. Elara was in the middle, between Kaelen and Nylas. She carried only the tuning fork.
They stepped onto the Mirror.
The surface was not slippery. It offered no purchase at all. It was like walking on solidified air. Each footstep made no sound. Their breath didn't fog. The rope between them was the only proof they were moving, the only connection to a world that had rules.
The pressure of the silence increased with every step. It wasn't just auditory. It was a weight on the mind, a chill in the spirit. Elara felt her own thoughts slowing, becoming simpler, tending toward stop. The vast reservoir inside her felt heavy, sluggish, like cold tar.
She focused on the bond with Kaelen. She felt his will, a steady, defiant drumbeat against the silence. I am here. We are here. This place does not get to win.
They were a hundred paces out when the first Shade-Walker, at the far end of the line, faltered.
He didn't cry out. He simply stopped walking. He stood, swaying slightly, his eyes fixed on nothing.
"Halt!" Nylas's command was a razor in the cotton-wool silence.
The line stopped. They watched as the Shade-Walker's form seemed to… blur. Not fade, but lose definition, as if the concept of "soldier" and "man" were unraveling from him. He was becoming part of the silence.
"Pull him back!" Kaelen ordered.
They hauled on the rope, dragging the unresponsive man back toward the shore. The moment his boots left the Mirror's surface and touched the black glass of the shore, he collapsed, gasping, his eyes wide with a terror beyond battle. He was alive, but something in him had been scoured away. He would not be walking back onto the Mirror.
They had lost one. They were not even a tenth of the way to the center.
Elara looked at the infinite, empty plane ahead, felt the crushing, silent weight, and knew with cold certainty that the rope and their wills would not be enough. They would all unravel before they reached the middle.
They needed a different path. A path only she could make.
She looked at Kaelen, and through the bond, she didn't send words, but an image: the Void. Her void. Not as a weapon, but as a bridge. A path of controlled negation through the greater negation.
He understood instantly, his eyes flashing with alarm and then, grimly, with acceptance. It was a risk that made the raid on the Athenaeum look like a stroll in the garden.
She closed her eyes, there on the dead mirror. She reached deep into her reservoir, not to draw power out, but to project its nature. She focused on the emptiness within her, the disciplined silence of the Siphon's potential. She shaped it, not into a shield, but into a narrow, concentrated channel—a road of her own branded void, leading from her feet out into the heart of the Mirror.
She imposed her "I am here" upon the "There is nothing."
And the perfect, dead surface of the Mirror… accepted it.
A path, a foot wide, darker than the surrounding nothingness, etched itself from her feet, shooting out across the plane toward the distant, unseen center. It was a road made of her own soul's hunger, a tiny thread of defined void in the face of the featureless one.
It would not last long. It was a massive, continuous expenditure. But it was a way.
She opened her eyes, her breath coming in short gasps. "Follow the dark path. Don't step off it."
Without a word, Kaelen stepped onto the narrow, darker strip she had created. Nylas and the remaining Shade-Walkers followed. Elara walked at the head, maintaining the path with every fiber of her being, a solitary lamp-lighter in an ocean of night.
They walked into the heart of the Silence, on a road made of her own defiant emptiness, toward a song that promised the end of all songs.