Chapter Two – The Silence in His Glyph
Part Two – The Smiling Cantor Watches
Date: Maelis 27, Year 204 PCR
Location: Hollow Choir Spiral Tower – Unseen Listening Vault
Time: 10:26 Veil Standard (simultaneous)
The chamber was quiet.
Not from silence—but because the sound here knelt.
A massive crescent-shaped platform hovered above nothing, suspended by resonance threads spun from memory fiber and forgotten song. Below, an endless spiral spun inward—not down, but deep—into the old frequencies where names were rewritten and history was sung backwards.
This was no throne room.
It was a vault of observation.
The center held only one presence.
Seated sideways on a suspended crystal beam, legs crossed, arms folded under a long coat stitched from doctrine seals and Choir scraps—
Rethel.
Watcher of the 3rd Spiral.
He smiled before the broadcast even stabilized.
"I told you," he murmured, his voice sweet with static. "He's not forming glyphs. He's folding memory."
—
Another figure hovered above, barely more than a voice-shaped shimmer.
The Smiling Cantor.
His tone was smooth, bright, layered with echo like a hymn recorded too many times.
"And now they want to contain it," the Cantor said, sighing like it amused him.
Rethel laughed—quietly, like a child watching insects crawl across their own trap.
"The Doctrine doesn't realize they're not watching a subject…"
He turned, grinning at the projection of Zephryn pacing inside the Doctrine chamber.
"…They're watching a mirror."
—
The Cantor leaned in—his face masked by a gold-threaded veil, smiling without expression.
"That glyph," he said. "The ∞."
"It's Caelus' mark," Rethel replied.
The Cantor nodded once.
"But broken. It's not spiraling outward. It's collapsing inward."
"A wound trying to remember itself," Rethel said.
—
A pause.
Then the Cantor whispered—no longer amused:
"And what happens if he finishes remembering?"
Rethel's eyes glinted.
"Then it's not our problem anymore."
—
Below them, the spiral glowed red.
A memory signature pulsed beneath the tower—ancient, wrong, echoing a humline last used during the Pre-Crystalline Rebellion.
The Cantor noticed.
He didn't react.
Just reached into the spiral—
And plucked one chord.
—
Doctrine Tower. Zephryn's Chamber. Same moment.
The suppression field cracked.
Not visibly.
Resonantly.
One of the Recorders collapsed—imploded inwards, sucked into its own humline.
Zephryn didn't flinch.
Because he felt it.
A laugh. Not his. Not Doctrine.
A smile pressed through the glyphs behind the wall—
Like someone was testing how close they could come before he noticed.
He whispered under his breath:
"…You're watching me."
—
Rethel leaned back on his crystal beam.
The Cantor folded his hands.
"He's getting too close."
"Then step in?"
The Cantor shook his head slowly.
"Not yet. He's still just remembering."
—
Rethel's voice grew soft:
"And if he remembers the name Caelus gave him?"
The Cantor's smile didn't change.
His reply did.
"Then we kill him the way we killed the first."