The silence following the lightfall was unlike anything Lynchie had heard before.
Not the quiet of sleep, or death, or space. It was the absence of memory.
She lay curled beneath the burning sky, her breath shallow, the scent of scorched ozone clinging to her skin. All around her, the stone trees of the ruined grove whispered not in language, but in ache. Her ears rang not with pain, but with question.
Who are you?
Her fingers trembled. The glyph had vanished from her hand, burned into her thoughts instead, etched along the backs of her eyelids. She dared not speak. Not yet.
A whisper stirred the ashes beside her.
Then another. Then many.
Her eyes snapped open.
The grove was no longer empty.
They stood in a ring—twelve silhouettes, flickering like reflections in shattered glass. Some tall and cloaked, others childlike, winged, limping, ancient. They shifted with each blink, identities melting like candle wax. No two were the same. All were wrong.
Voices poured from them. Not in unison, not in harmony. Each spoke over the other in a cacophony of languages, dialects, instincts. Some sounded like wolves. Others like broken music boxes. One wept.
"It begins."
"She remembers."
"No, she dreams."
"We are not ready."
"She should not be ready."
Lynchie sat up slowly. The pain had dulled. Or she had left it behind.
The glyph in her mind pulsed.
She stepped forward, but the figures did not move. They watched. Or rather, they did something deeper than watching—as if seeing her was only the faintest ripple of what they were doing.
Then one of them—a hunched one, wearing the face of a friend she had never met—spoke in a voice that silenced the others.
"You bear the splinter. Do you know what it means?"
She opened her mouth. Her tongue felt like ash. Words came anyway.
"No. But I remember the name that remembers itself."
The world paused.
The wind froze mid-gust. The trees bowed backward, reverent or afraid.
The figures leaned inward. One knelt. One turned away.
And the grove itself... listened.
"Then he knows," another figure rasped.
"The sleeping center stirs."
"He dreamed himself apart to ask the question."
"The name was a door. She has touched the lock."
Lynchie swayed.
Something ancient uncoiled behind her eyes.
A city with no sky. A voice split into ten thousand echoes. A rift of light that screamed in all directions.
Her knees buckled. She fell, catching herself on stone that pulsed with her pulse.
"He... he's afraid," she whispered.
"Good," said the first one.
Then, one by one, they dissolved.
Not into smoke. Into syllables. Into fractured tones, symbols, shivering sounds she could not hold in her mind. They did not fade. They became part of the world again—hidden.
And in the space they left behind, a sigil burned itself into the sky above the grove. The Splinter Glyph. Complete for a moment, then broken once more. A promise half-fulfilled.
Lynchie raised her hand.
The same mark glowed upon her palm. Her breath caught. Something deep and cold within her began to hum.
From far away—a voice.
"Lynchie!"
A shadow crossed the shattered path. A new arrival. Not one of echoes, but of breath and blood.
Zev.
He looked like he had run through fire.
Behind him, smoke. Screams. Another rift.
And as she rose to her feet, the Splinter Glyph pulsing across her skin, Lynchie understood the truth she had not dared to believe:
This was not the beginning of her story.
It was the echo of someone else's ending.
And the world was breaking all over again.