Chapter Four – Shatter Noodles Never Closed
Part One – The Hum That Didn't Belong to Morning
The hum returned before the sun did.
It wasn't loud. Not enough to wake anyone else. But for Zephryn, it pressed through the walls of his dorm like water soaking into cracked stone—gentle, steady, wrong. Not the natural resonance of a Lyceum morning, which typically began with distant chants or the low roll of the Veilpulse bells.
No… this hum was foreign. Uninvited.
He opened his eyes to gray light bleeding through the window. His breath sat still in his chest, as if the air itself was unsure whether it belonged here.
Three seconds passed before he moved.
He sat up slow, shoulders tense, spine straight. His hair, silver now without question, clung slightly to the side of his neck. It always did that when he woke from dreamless sleep—the kind where time forgets to pass.
There was nothing visibly wrong with the room. His glyph book still sat on the shelf beside a sealed Pulse Crystal. His uniform was folded with precise creases. His boots were clean. Yet he could feel it—
Something beneath the stone was vibrating too fast for sound.
He didn't know when the hum started visiting him in the mornings. Maybe it began after the flare. Maybe after the dream of Solara. Maybe it had always been there, and only now had he started waking up wrong enough to hear it.
As he dressed, he moved with practiced silence. Not the silence of caution—no. This was the silence of a boy who had learned too many times that noise invites questions. And he wasn't ready to answer any.
He fastened the glyph-thread across his forearm. The threads shimmered faintly. His Veilmark didn't react—not yet.
"Third morning in a row," he muttered under his breath, voice more breath than sound. "Always just before dawn. Like it waits for the world to forget itself."
The window faced east. But the sky didn't rise with gold or lavender today. It was just… colorless. Not stormy, not overcast. Just voided. Like someone had peeled the vibrance out of the sky and left only the memory behind.
He hated that kind of sky. It reminded him of the memory nexus. Of walking inside himself.
But that was just a dream.
It had to be.
He kept telling himself that, because the alternative meant the Hollow Choir had reached deeper than he'd allowed.
He opened the dorm door. The hallway stretched long and quiet. A few lower-tier students walked it already, clutching satchels or murmuring morning verses. They didn't look at him.
Which was somehow worse than when they did.
He passed them like a ghost—head held still, steps measured. Not drawing attention, but never hiding. Zephryn had learned long ago that the trick to being invisible wasn't to disappear—it was to act like the world should already know you're there.
As he entered the Lyceum's lower hall, the hum faded.
Not abruptly. Just like it had walked a different direction.
But even without it, the weight stayed in his chest. That subtle ache just beneath the ribs, like a string inside him had been pulled taut and left that way.
Instructor Liraen's voice met him before he saw her.
"Pulse Harmony and Fracture Resistance," she said as he stepped through the classroom arch. "Today, we review the difference between synchronization and containment."
Her tone was clipped. Not unkind—but focused, relentless. She stood at the head of the crescent-shaped room, glyphs swirling faintly above her wrist as she wrote into the air.
Selka was already seated. So was Kaelen, arms crossed, expression unreadable. Yolti nodded at Zephryn as he approached, but didn't smile.
No one said anything about his glyph.
No one asked how he'd slept.
And that was the part that sank deepest.
He took his seat near the back. Not to hide—but because from here, he could see the whole room. Measure the rhythm of every other pulse.
Liraen continued the lecture.
She spoke of how a glyph cast too early without resonance risks backlash. How a fractured mark can still respond to instinct, but without harmony, it doesn't obey—it panics.
Zephryn scribbled notes, though his mind was somewhere else.
Each sentence from Liraen hit like an echo of something he'd already lived. Each phrase, a warped reflection of that place the Choir had brought him.
"The Veilmark doesn't protect the soul," she said. "It remembers the soul. What you cast is not what you want—it's what you were."
He stopped writing.
That line—it rang too close to the truth. To the memory that wasn't supposed to be his.
His hand clenched. The ink on the page bled slightly where he pressed too hard.
But nothing else happened.
No glyph flicker. No outburst. No heat in the bones.
He sat still, and class passed like it always had before he returned.
And that's what bothered him most.
"When nothing breaks," he thought, "I don't trust the quiet."
When the lesson ended, Liraen dismissed them without flourish. Selka didn't look at him. Kaelen stood, shouldered his bag, and walked out first. Yolti trailed behind.
Zephryn didn't move right away.
He just stayed there in the empty room, staring at the slowly fading glyphs above the board—waiting for them to vanish completely before standing.
When he finally stepped into the outer courtyard, the sky was still empty of color. But the hum?
It had returned.
Somewhere behind the stone. Beneath the garden. Underneath it all.
Waiting.