The road north was dead.
Not in the way a ruin sleeps, but in the way a corpse lingers—unnatural, unburied. Debris from long-forgotten train lines and derelict freight crawlers lay half-subsumed beneath the soot and cracked asphalt. The deeper they traveled into the Undercity's northern fringe, the quieter everything became. No market noise. No rogue scanners. No sirens. Just silence that breathed with intention.
They followed the coordinates burned into Xander's memory—a whisper from the Eye, echoing in his blood like a second pulse.
Beneath the Tesseract Bridge. Where the blind children sing.
The phrase lingered, cryptic and cruel.
"How much farther?" Veyr asked, his voice low. He kept close to the shadows, Hollow Pulse flickering faintly around his knuckles—ready.
Xander paused. The static in his head had faded into something else—an alignment, like tuning into a forgotten frequency. "It's not far. The grid's thinning. I can feel the Vein pulling again."
Lyra didn't speak. She walked ahead, her hand lightly brushing the rusted rails of an old railline, as if they might whisper secrets to her. Her presence had changed since the Eye. More grounded. More watchful.
Xander's voice broke the silence. "Lyra. You okay?"
She glanced back. "I saw what that thing did to you. And I felt it… pulling me too. Not the same way, but enough to know—this is bigger than just breaking a coin."
Xander nodded.
They turned a corner—and there it stood.
The Tesseract Bridge.
What remained of it.
Once a monorail conduit for high-clearance tech, now the skeletal structure hovered mid-collapse over a yawning chasm of black circuitry. It shimmered faintly—each beam refracting light like prisms, warping the surroundings like folded glass. Gravity didn't behave properly here. Dead birds floated mid-air beside flickering error glyphs. The bridge stretched across an endless depth that wasn't part of any known sector map.
And below it… music.
Soft.
Children singing.
Off-key.
Veyr paled. "That's… not natural."
Xander stepped forward. "It's the gate. The second chain."
As they crossed the first beam, reality stuttered. The air trembled with heat and freezing wind at once. Code etched itself into their shadows—glyphs in a language none of them knew. Lyra's hand went to her blade again.
The song grew louder.
They reached the bridge's center—and time bent.
— Phase Shift: The Silencer Gate —
The world cracked.
Not in sound—but in structure.
They found themselves standing in a courtyard that did not exist a heartbeat before. No bridge. No sky. Just black pillars and children in masks—standing in a circle, singing a single phrase again and again:
> "Speak not the true name, or silence will claim…"
> "Speak not the true name, or silence will claim…"
Lyra drew her weapon.
Xander stopped her. "They're echoes. Memory-bound."
And then the ground split.
From the void beneath them rose a figure—faceless, silver-skinned, with no mouth—only a sliver where a mouth should have been, stitched shut by code-threads. A symbol glowed on its chest: a broken bell.
> THE SILENCER.
It raised its hand, and sound died.
Completely.
Even their thoughts struggled to take shape.
Xander reeled back as if struck. No words. No voice. His breath wouldn't even echo in his own mind.
The silence was a cage.
But not for long.
Lyra, already moving, carved a sigil into her palm and slammed it into the ground. Fire surged—but no sound. Only light.
Veyr activated Phantom Glyphs—his feet surrounded by defensive runes that glowed in a violet hue. The children didn't react. Their song was part of the room itself now. Unbroken. Eternal.
The Silencer lunged.
Xander countered.
With no words, he dove into the Croft Protocol, but it twisted. No incantation, no cast time. He reached instead with instinct. With will.
The air around him fractured.
Mirrorshade Vein: Reflex Copy
He mirrored the Silencer's pulse—the way it had muted everything—and inverted it.
A pulse erupted outward—not sound, but Echo, raw and jagged, snapping the silence apart like shattered bone.
For a moment, the world made noise again.
The Silencer staggered.
"Now!" Lyra shouted, her voice returning with violent clarity.
She leapt into the air, blade spinning, carving the glyph of Flamebound Verse across the Silencer's chest.
Veyr followed, launching a series of Hollow Pulses that disrupted the binding code-threads sewing the creature's face shut.
And Xander—
He activated the inner thread of the Eye's memory.
> "You were bound to protect the gate. But the Eye has seen through your silence."
A ripple spread through the floor. One of the chains appeared—this one of silence, wrapped in cracked obsidian, screaming without sound.
Xander touched it.
And broke it.
The chain shattered into shards of stillness that fled in every direction.
The Silencer screamed for the first and last time.
Then it imploded—folding inward into a single point of vanishing code.
— Return to the Bridge —
They stood where they had been—at the center of the Tesseract Bridge. The chasm below now glowed with a deep silver hue. The song was gone. The children, gone. Only a faint echo of ringing silence lingered.
"That was the second contract," Lyra whispered. Her hands shook slightly. Not from fear—but reverence.
Veyr looked at Xander. "How many more like that?"
Xander answered without hesitation.
"Seven."
A pause. Then he said:
"But we're not alone in breaking them. Thorne is moving. And Victoria… she's still alive."
Lyra turned sharply. "You saw her?"
"Trapped. Not herself. She has something—something he wants."
"A fragment?" Veyr asked.
"No. A mirror," Xander said. "The Unspoken Mirror."
Lyra's eyes widened. "Then Thorne's trying to rewrite the Veil itself."
"Exactly," Xander said.
Behind them, the bridge began to hum. Code shifted in its structure. A path had opened.
Xander looked north.
Then at his allies.
"We don't rest. Not now."
And together, they stepped through the next door.
— Elsewhere – The Vault of Red Memory —
Victoria Slade's eyes opened.
The mirrors around her cracked.
The piece in her chest pulsed—part reflection, part shard.
She didn't remember her name.
But she remembered one thing.
A boy who saved her once.
> "Xander..."
And the Veil whispered back.
> "You are not broken yet."