Clad in the midnight-blue robes of the Hieratic Dominion, the Weaver of the Silent Chant approached with an unnerving stillness of pure, disciplined psychic control. He moved like a shadow, cast by moonlight with no show of haste, or heat, or Vitiated flaw. This was the perfect antithesis to the chaos Kaelen had just embraced.
"The Archon's Order is absolute, Scrivener," the Weaver's voice was a low, dry rasp, uninflected by human feeling. "Your Affliction is a fault line in the structural purity. That fault must be sealed, or excised."
Kaelen leaned heavily against the dusty shelf, the residual Psyche-Burn radiating from his temples. He felt the cold touch of the God-Blight intensifying, aggressive in seeking the new mental fissures opened by The Scrivener's Cleft. The cold was demanding the memory of the Weaver's face, of his own mother, of the purpose of a chair—any piece of personal truth it could absorb for the Blood-Tax of Memory.
The Weaver lifted a hand, his gauntleted fingers beginning a subtle, complex gesture. "You use a fractured, feral power. We use the Art of Woven Sighs."
Kaelen watched the Weaver's movements, but The Scrivener's Cleft was still ajar, providing a devastating secondary sight. Superimposed over the Weaver's body was the Structural Remnant of the Art of Woven Sighs: thousands of fine, grey, shimmering threads—the concentrated psychic residue of the enslaved populace, pulled taut and knotted with incantations.
The Weaver does not create power; he only redirects the energy stolen via the Cinder-Vow, The Scrivener's Cleft said, the painful information overriding his ability to remember his own name. His control is perfect because his source is infinite and paid for with the lives of millions.
The Weaver completed the movement, the threads tautening into a sphere of frozen psychic stasis above his palm. "A moment ago, you saw the Joint of Unmaking in that Wrought-Flesh. Now, let me see the flaws in your mind."
He thrust the sphere forward, a tool of pure, controlled psychic neutrality, one that would surgically paralyze Kaelen's erratic Affliction without annihilating the host, preserving him for interrogation by the Grand Priesthood.
Kaelen didn't duck; he used the Vitiated truth of his power. The Scrivener's Cleft showed him not the Weaver's future move, but the structural weakness in the Weaver's past incantation—a flaw in the knotting sequence that would occur 1.5 meters from the Weaver's hand.
Redirect the energy. Don't fight the stasis; make it fight itself.
Kaelen tossed the Endowment-Breaker. Not at the Weaver, but at the precise coordinates of the subtle flaw in the psychic thread-sphere displayed by The Cleft.
The crude Mechanism of Null-Entropy activated mid-air. It created a localized pocket of absolute absence—not chaos, not order, but pure Nothingness. The Art of Woven Sighs sphere, reliant on the structural integrity of the psychic threads, hit the Null-Entropy field and instantaneously frayed.
The Weaver gasped, the first sign of emotional distress Kaelen had seen. His own disciplined power had betrayed him. The fraying threads snapped back, cutting across the Weaver's exposed hands and cowl.
The momentary disruption was Kaelen's only chance. He sprinted off, not toward the entrance, but deeper into the catacombs of the archive, toward the forbidden Crypts of Perpetual Silence.
"Stop, Scrivener! Do not breach the Crypts!" cried the Weaver's voice, sharp with urgency, its cold control finally gone.
The Crypts held the most Vitiated memories—the records so dangerous that even the Hieratic Dominion feared to expose them fully. Kaelen, as he ran, deliberately slammed his shoulder against a stack of granite tablets, which were records from the pre-Archon history of the city. The impact was purely physical, but the Affliction registered the destructive energy.
Payment for escape, the internal voice of the Scrivener's Cleft rasped; and Kaelen felt a horrifying sensation-the deliberate, organized Memory Fragmentation.
The face of his long-lost ally—the only person who knew his father was the true Heretic-Scrivener—slipped from his mind. It wasn't fading; it was being archived. He could recall the coordinates of her safehouse, the passphrase to her lockbox, and the structural weakness in the foundation of her home, all provided by the Structural Remnant. But the sound of her laughter, the color of her eyes—the things that proved his humanity—were neatly excised.
The payment was made in full. Kaelen gained a purified fugitive's speed and focus. He burst through the thick, steel door into the Crypts, slamming the Endowment-Breaker into the lock and triggering a secondary Null-Entropy field. The Archon's Order hated scientific technology, and the lock dissolved into dust. Behind him, the Weaver screamed a full, complex incantation of the Art of Woven Sighs—a desperate Knotting of Wrath. The air compressed violently, but the steel door slammed shut, giving Kaelen the few seconds he needed to disappear into the heart of most suppressed history the Hieratic Dominion possessed. Now a fugitive, he was fueled by stolen knowledge and a steadily emptying mind.