There was no light.
Not the absence of it—the abolition.
This was not darkness. Darkness was a presence, a thing that pooled and shifted. This was null-space: a silence so absolute it scraped the mind raw. No warmth. No glow. No echo of breath or pulse. Just the hollowed-out carcass of perception.
Hatim hung in the void. Or perhaps void hung inside him.
Direction had no meaning here. His body existed only in fragments—
- The ache in his limbs, trembling against unseen bonds.
- The fevered sting where the Whispercloak's glyph-bindings had seared into muscle, still pulsing like embedded parasites.
- The emptiness where his Node should be.
Not severed. Not muted.
Erased.
As if the concept of connection had been excised from his bones.
The Null Cells were not made of stone or steel. They were silence given shape, geometry twisted so tightly it strangled light, sound, and Akar into submission.
Only he remained.
Only breath. Only bone.
A flicker—no, a memory of sensation. He curled inward, knees to chest, sweat slicking his palms. But even his sweat felt wrong. Thin. As if the null-space refused to acknowledge the reality of his flesh.
—Time was a serpent eating its own tail.—
Minutes? Hours? Cycles?
The silence wasn't passive. It pressed. A suffocating weight, a whisper turned inside out.
And beneath it—
A pulse.
Faint. Treacherous. Wrong.
Not the golden rhythm of Asha's Veins. Not the ordered hum of glyph-lattice.
The violet thread.
Buried in his ribs.
Still there.
Still watching.
It hadn't been nullified.
Not fully.
Not this.
His teeth chattered. His breath hitched.
It didn't speak in words. Glyphs were language, structure, law. This was not.
This was a question. A presence. A breath beneath breath.
Something deeper than Akar.
Deeper than Veins.
Something the Null Cells could not touch.
"You do not belong to their order."
Hatim flinched. The voice wasn't heard—it was unearthed, rising from marrow, from the spaces between his cells.
Instinct screamed to reject it. To claw it out. But the truth was colder:
There was nothing else left.
He was hollow.
Except for it.
"Call it."
"Not with glyph. Not with order. With will."
His pulse thundered.
Was it memory? The forge? The fracture? The impossible braid of gold and violet?
He didn't think. He reached.
No glyph. No script. His fingers trembled, tracing nothing, yet in his mind—
A fracture. A tear. A fold.
The cell resisted. Geometry shrieked—not sound, but a vibration that tasted like shattered teeth.
Hairline cracks spidered through the air. Not in the walls. In the idea of walls.
A flare of violet beneath his sternum—cold, sharp, intoxicating.
The bindings trembled. Threads frayed. One snapped.
Hatim gasped, air flooding his lungs like a drowning man breaching surface. His Node did not return.
But something else rushed in.
Something jagged.
"You do not draw."
"You unmake."
The power was not gentle. His bones locked. Vision splintered. Nausea surged from depths too profound to name.
His fingers spasmed—clawing at the void, trying to shape the unshapable—
The bindings reacted.
A sigil blazed overhead—Containment Prime, inverted, devouring.
The fracture slammed shut.
The violet recoiled, collapsing back into his ribs. Dormant—but not gone.
Never gone now.
Hatim collapsed. The null-pressure returned, crushing. Silence absolute.
And then—
Footsteps.
Not sound. The impression of sound.
Glyph-seals hissed.
The door did not open. Space unfolded, peeling reality aside like a wound.
Two Whispercloaks entered.
Then a third figure.
Not Aethel.
A man. Broad-shouldered. Robes heavy with woven silence. His mask—obsidian, matte, swallowing light—bore glyphs in closed loops. No exits. No openings.
A Warden of the Null Order.
His voice was polished iron:
"Bring him. The Council awaits."
Hatim's body refused to obey—but the glyph-chains moved for him. He rose, suspended, a marionette of shuddering flesh.
As the null-door sealed behind them, one truth remained:
This was not just a prison.
This was a threshold.
And something had been waiting on the other side.
Something that knew his name.