The Quiet Rooms had no end. Each stair she climbed, each hall she crossed, looked the same: shelves of dead scraps, air that pressed her ribs shut, silence that felt heavier than chains.
Seren kept writing anyway. Her scraps piled like breadcrumbs behind her. Record silence. Deny debt. Names don't vanish if we refuse them.
The stone sliver in her pouch pulsed faintly. She drew it out, pressed it to her palm. For a heartbeat, voices returned — Kael's rasp, Riven's laugh, her own voice-that-wasn't. They broke like glass, leaving her shaking.
The shelves stirred. Pages lifted as if by breath. From the shadows stepped a keeper taller than the last. His robe was torn, hands ink-stained. His eyes were pale and sharp. He signed slow, deliberate: You want to bend silence. Then prove you can hold it.
Seren signed back: How?
He pointed at a desk. A single blank page waited there. The keeper raised a finger to his lips — not for her, but for the world.
The system stirred faintly. She didn't hear words, but she felt them, and wrote them down with her pencil:
Rule: Hold silence for one hundred breaths. Write nothing. If you falter, record stolen.
Her chest tightened. Not writing was worse than not speaking. Her scraps were how she existed. To not write meant letting silence own her.
She sat. The blank page stared back like an open mouth.
One breath. Two. The silence pressed, thick, a weight on her spine. She wanted to write already. She forced her hands flat on her thighs.
Twenty breaths. Her mind screamed with words. She imagined Riven's voice filling the air just to break it. She imagined Kael's rasp giving shape to the dark. She couldn't. Not here.
Fifty breaths. Sweat slid down her temple. She pressed her nails into her palms. The page seemed to whisper without letters: Write. Write or vanish.
Eighty breaths. Her chest heaved. She thought of Kael clutching her scraps, using them to anchor his name. She thought of Riven pocketing her notes even when he laughed at them. If she vanished, her words vanished too.
Ninety.
Her hand twitched toward the pencil. She almost broke. Almost.
One hundred.
The page shivered. The silence lifted, thinner now, like a cloth peeled from her skin.
The keeper signed: You held. Good. Now write.
Her hand shook as she scribbled, fast, the first words that came: Silence can be refused.
The page burned faint gold. The keeper took it, tucked it into his robe. He signed again: Your words cut. Use them. But cuts bleed both ways.
Then he stepped back, fading into the shelves.
The system brushed her mind like a whisper she couldn't hear but understood anyway. She wrote it down: Reward: Echo Stone (charged). Cost: Silence strain deepened.
Her ears rang. For a second, she thought she really did hear herself whispering, but the sound died quick. She clutched the Echo Stone tight.
From deep in the Quiet Rooms, the gong rolled faint, heavy.
BOOOONG.
Her pencil scratched across the scrap, neat and sharp: The bells count even here.