The silence was a physical presence, following Elias as he moved away from the old port. It wrapped around him, muffling his footsteps, swallowing the distant sounds the city should have been making.
The early morning light felt cold, illuminating a world that looked familiar but felt profoundly wrong.
Navigating the streets was an eerie exercise. Cars sat idle in intersections, their forms mundane but their stillness unnerving. A bus was stopped halfway through a turn, its doors closed, empty seats visible through the windows.
A delivery truck was parked haphazardly near a bakery, its cargo undelivered, the driver sitting behind the wheel staring blankly ahead.
Elias moved through this tableau of frozen activity, climbing over the hood of a minivan to cross a blocked street, sidestepping around a silent bus.
His body protested with every movement – the throbbing in his head was a dull drumbeat, his muscles screamed from exertion, and the exhaustion felt like a lead blanket. But the sheer, unsettling strangeness of the city propelled him forward.
He saw people. They walked on sidewalks, singly or in small groups, but there was no conversation, no laughter, no hurried steps. Their faces were vacant, their eyes distant and unfocused.
A man sat on a park bench, holding a newspaper he wasn't reading, his expressionless face turned towards the sky. A woman pushed a child on a swing set, the swing moving in a slow, silent arc, the child's face as blank as the adult's.
There was movement, but no life, no energy, no spark. The vibrant, chaotic tapestry of human emotion that normally defined the city was simply... gone. Erased.
He passed a street performer's usual spot; the ground was empty, the usual music absent.
A couple sat outside a cafe, untouched coffees growing cold between them, staring into the middle distance. There was no anger, no sadness, no joy, no frustration. Just a terrifying, pervasive apathy.
The silence felt like a judgement. Like the city had been found wanting, and its most vital component had been summarily removed.
This wasn't physical destruction, but a fundamental re-ordering, an existential muting. Anya hadn't just harvested emotions; she had somehow used them to neutralize the very capacity for feeling on a massive scale.
He reached his safehouse neighborhood, a quiet, tree-lined area that normally buzzed with the low-level activity of residents heading to work, cafes opening, distant school bells. Now, it too was silent.
Cars were parked neatly, but motionless. A few residents walked dogs with slack leashes, their faces the same empty masks. The familiarity of the street was overlaid with this profound, unsettling alienness.
Getting into his building was straightforward – his key worked, the door opened silently. The lobby was empty, the usual busy atmosphere absent.
The doorman's station was unmanned, the chair neatly tucked in. Ascending in the elevator felt strange without the usual faint mechanical hum from other floors or the distant sounds of life within the building.
He reached his apartment door, the familiar wards a faint shimmer only he could perceive. He keyed in the code, the lock clicking softly. Stepping inside felt like entering a pocket of comparative normalcy, a bubble against the city-wide anomaly.
He quickly secured the door, engaging the full suite of wards – physical, magical, sensory. The subtle energy fields expanded, sealing his space, providing a fragile sense of protection against the unsettling emptiness outside.
He dropped his go-bag by the door, its weight a solid, comforting presence in the terrifying quiet. He stumbled towards his lab, the contained Betrayal object still in its pouch, the contained courthouse model in its locker. His headache pulsed, his body screamed for rest, but his mind raced.
He activated his main console. The screens flickered to life, displaying familiar data feeds and sensor readings. He ran a comprehensive environmental scan of the apartment and lab.
The results confirmed his initial sense – the wards were strong, intact, registering no active external threat. But the scan for general emotional and psychic energy within the apartment registered significantly lower than normal baseline readings, not zero, but muted.
And his 'null' energy detector picked up a faint, almost imperceptible trace of that same 'absence' energy he'd found on the tower platform, permeating the wards, a subtle pressure from the outside. The Oblivion effect wasn't completely blocked; it was merely dampened within his protected space.
He sank into his lab chair, looking at the glowing screens, the contained objects, the rows of reference texts on the shelves. He was a Curator.
His job was to find, contain, and understand cursed objects. He was equipped to deal with localized magical anomalies, with dangerous artifacts, with rogue practitioners like Anya.
But this... this was on an entirely different scale. A city of millions, their emotional core silenced. An effect that permeated physical barriers.
A problem with no precedent, no known magical countermeasure, no entry in any grimoire. He had stopped the Architect's ultimate goal, perhaps. He had prevented... whatever complete Oblivion would have been. But the consequence of his intervention was this pervasive, terrifying Quietus.
He looked out the warded window, seeing the top of a building across the street against the now fully bright morning sky. It looked normal.
But he knew the silence was out there, the emptiness was out there, affecting everyone.
He was the only one who seemed aware of it, the only one unaffected inside his bubble of wards, the only one left with the memory of the city's vibrant, messy, emotional life.
The task ahead felt utterly insurmountable. How do you restore the soul of a city? How do you reverse Oblivion on this scale? He had the contained objects, artifacts of the process, but they didn't offer a solution, only a chilling record of what had been done. He was just one person, exhausted and alone, facing a problem that encompassed millions.
But he was a Curator. And this was the biggest, most terrifying cursed object he had ever encountered. The silent city itself.
He took a deep, shaky breath, the quiet air of his lab feeling heavy with the weight of his new, impossible mission. He had to try. He had to find a way. The research began now.