The Sleeper's Rumor
Part I — The Mortals' Fear
Aftermath.
The twin suns had dimmed, and the city of Halveth limped into uneasy quiet.
Smoke curled from collapsed homes. Stalls lay overturned, some twice-folded where reflections of themselves had collapsed together. The surviving citizens moved slowly, uncertain whether it was morning or evening, for both suns hovered, their rhythms askew. The pale burned weak, the gold blazed weary, and between them the market stood frozen around a child who slept.
The people did not speak of her openly. They feared to. Yet every whisper turned toward her.
---
Halveth (A'Xarch)
Lyra sat on the broken steps of the Twin Archives, Codex glyphs simmering faintly in her veins. Her hands trembled as she inked fresh parchment. She wrote of the doubled suns, of the fracture of streets, of the weaver's twin dissolving into glass. Yet when her quill came to the child, her wrist locked.
The glyphs resisted. They hissed as if burned, warning her: To name this is to summon it.
So she left the page blank. A gap in the record. The first blank she had ever allowed.
Citizens gathered near, whispering their own records in voices too low for the Codex to hear.
"She froze my other self with a breath."
"The suns bowed to her."
"No, she is only a girl abandoned in the market."
"Then why do doubles vanish around her?"
No one agreed. No one dared approach. A mother who had lost her son to reflection tried once to shake the child awake, desperate to see if her boy's double would return. But when her hand neared, her body stiffened, and she wept without knowing why. It was as if the stones themselves had warned her: Do not wake her.
Lyra overheard and shivered. She knew one thing with certainty: Halveth had survived, but not by effort, not by gods, not by gambler's mercy. They had survived because a sleeper chose to keep sleeping.
---
An'Qlox (The Sea)
Veyra's storm-fleet limped across calmed waters. Sailors unbound the ropes that had kept them from tearing apart, their arms scarred with rope-burn. Relief rang across the decks in drunken laughter and prayer. Some raised their hands skyward, thanking the twin suns for mercy. Others spat and muttered about the Gambler, saying it was he who dimmed the blaze.
But none of them named the child. They had not seen her. They only felt her presence distantly, carried on winds that shifted without command.
Veyra herself leaned against the prow, stormlight flickering across her eyes. She knew storms, knew their temper, their hunger. But these storms had bowed to something else. Not to her. Not to the gods she cursed. To someone — or something — she could not yet name.
Her sailors looked at her differently now. Their faith in her lightning was thinner, shaded with doubt. She ground her teeth, fists sparking at her sides. "You can kneel to whispers if you wish," she muttered. "But storms remember their mistress."
Yet in the pit of her stomach, even she knew the truth: the storm had chosen another.
---
Tec'Misk (Fractured Cities)
Kael's boots struck the cobblestones of the Fractured Cities with cruel rhythm. Behind him, the weaker halves of citizens dissolved into dust as his engines forced the world to "decide." Yet the crowds no longer cried his name in awe or terror.
They whispered instead of another.
"The certainty is not his. The silence steadied the suns."
"We live because she allowed it."
"Even Kael bows, though he does not know it."
Kael's engines pulsed hotter with every murmur. Glyphs flared brighter across his arms and chest, not with triumph but fury. His voice boomed across the plaza: "Do you think me lessened by rumor? Do you think I borrow power? I AM the anchor! I ALONE hold this world firm!"
The crowd shrank, but their eyes betrayed them. They did not believe. And disbelief was a poison Kael could not endure. He swore then, beneath the fractured spires, that he would seek this Sleeper, crush her silence, and prove himself the only certainty left.
But even as he swore, a sliver of doubt coiled in his heart. His engines had calmed when the suns bent, not before. He knew it. And that knowledge ate at him like rust.
---
Rumors
Across Halveth and beyond, stories spread faster than trade caravans:
A child who froze reflections with her breath.
A sleeper whose dream tethered the suns.
An omen of the End, cloaked in small form.
Or only a myth, an excuse for survivors too afraid to admit they lived by chance.
Some began to call her the Sleeper. Others used older names dug from buried myths — Ender, Silent One, Shadow at Noon.
No name agreed. No truth settled. But all who had seen her, even in passing, felt the same: the world bent around her slumber. And if she woke in anger, none would remain to tell the tale.
---
The Weight of Fear
In Halveth's ruins, Lyra dipped her quill once more. She stared at the blank she had left in her Codex. It taunted her. To write was to anchor. To leave blank was to let history forget.
But her veins hissed again, glyphs warning: If you inscribe her, the world will notice.
Lyra dropped the quill. Better a blank than a grave mistake.
In An'Qlox, sailors prayed louder, not to the gods of flame or storm, but to silence itself. Some began leaving empty bowls at shrines, offerings of nothing, believing the Sleeper ate absence.
In Tec'Misk, Kael roared his defiance louder, yet found himself walking in circles, as if the streets themselves denied him a straight path to her.
And all the while, the suns dimmed and swayed above, no longer fighting, but bowing — not to mortals, not to Puppets, not to Kay — but to a child who liked the cold and the quiet, and who had not yet chosen to open her eyes.