The silence in the shattered doorway was thicker than the black fog choking Eldermere's spires.
Grand Inquisitor Veyra's obsidian eyes, reflecting the flickering torchlight of her guards, didn't leave Kael's face.
They dissected his terror, his dishevelment, the white-knuckled grip on the unsettling book pressed against his chest. The accusing word on his wrist – *LIAR* – seemed to pulse in the strained quiet, a dark beacon against his clammy skin.
"Search this room," Veyra commanded, her voice devoid of inflection, colder than the unnatural frost still clinging to the stones near the ruined door.
"Every stone. Every shadow." Her gaze finally flickered down to the *Ashen Codex*. "And Scholar Arvantis... you will come with me. Now. Bring *it*."
Kael flinched. *Bring it.* Not 'the Codex'. *It.* The word held the same distaste one might reserve for a venomous serpent. The Eclipse guards moved with practiced efficiency, pushing past the sagging door, their black-armored forms filling the small tower room, making it feel claustrophobic, a cage within a cage.
Torchlight probed corners, glinted off overturned furniture, and illuminated the deep, unnerving cracks radiating from the point of impact on the door.
One guard knelt, running a gauntleted finger over the frosted stone. He looked up, meeting Veyra's eyes, and gave a single, almost imperceptible shake of his head. *Not natural frost.*
Veyra's expression remained impassive, but Kael saw the minute tightening around her eyes.
She turned sharply, her robes swirling like liquid night, and strode into the hallway without a backward glance, expecting obedience. Kael stumbled after her, the Codex a heavy, fever-warm weight against his ribs.
Its pulse seemed to quicken slightly as he moved, a silent, mocking counterpoint to his own frantic heartbeat. The guards followed, their heavy footfalls echoing ominously in the spiraling stone stairwell, sealing Kael in a moving prison between Veyra and the armored shadows.
They descended not to the interrogation chambers Kael feared, but deeper into the administrative heart of the Eclipse Citadel – a warren of austere corridors lit by flickering sconces that cast long, dancing shadows. The air here was thick with incense and the faint, metallic tang of old blood, a smell ingrained in the very stones from centuries of the Order's grim work.
They stopped before a heavy door of dark ironwood, unadorned save for the Eclipse sigil – a black disc devouring a silver sun – carved deep into its surface. Veyra placed her palm flat against the sigil. There was a soft click, a hum of ancient mechanisms, and the door swung inward soundlessly.
The chamber beyond was surprisingly small, dominated by a massive, scarred obsidian table.
Maps of Eldermere and its surrounding blighted lands were weighted down with polished bone paperweights. Scrolls filled with tight, angular script lay neatly stacked. This was Veyra's sanctum – a place of strategy and cold calculation, not torture. Yet Kael felt no safer. The air crackled with her contained fury.
"Sit," she ordered, gesturing to a simple, backless chair opposite the table. Kael obeyed, placing the Codex on the cold obsidian surface before him.
It looked obscene here, a thing of pulsating wrongness amidst the sterile order. Veyra remained standing, pacing slowly behind the table like a predator circling wounded prey. The torchlight deepened the hollows of her cheeks, making her sharp features even more severe.
"Explain," she stated, stopping directly opposite him, her hands braced on the tabletop. "From the beginning. Omit nothing. And understand, Scholar, that the mark on your wrist speaks volumes before you utter a word. Lies will be… excised."
Kael swallowed, his throat dry as desert stone. Where to begin? The impossible warnings on the page? The voice that wasn't hers? The *thing* that knocked from inside the walls? The consuming void? He glanced at the Codex. Its cover was still, its pages closed. Silent. Abandoned. He was alone.
"I… I was studying," he began, his voice rough. "The Codex was locked in the chest. I heard… scratching. Inside the walls. *Scritch-scritch-scritch.* Like… claws." He shuddered, the memory vivid, chilling. "Then the knocking started. On the door. But it wasn't… it wasn't just on the door. It felt like it was *in* the wood. Then… your voice. But it wasn't you. It was… wrong. Like metal scraping bone beneath the words. It demanded I open the door. It threatened…" He trailed off, unable to voice the thing's hunger for the light behind his eyes.
Veyra's expression didn't change. "Go on."
"The Codex… it wrote warnings. It said… it said that wasn't you. That it wore your skin. It told me to be silent, to be shadow." He held up his wrist, the word *LIAR* stark and accusing. "This… it burned when a drop of ink fell from the page. Then the door… something hit it. Hard. Not like a battering ram. Like… like concentrated darkness. It cracked the wood from the inside. Frost spread. And I saw…" He hesitated, the memory threatening to unravel him. "Through the cracks… not the hallway. Nothing. A void. And something… shifting. Hungry. It pressed in. Tendrils of shadow. Cold. So cold it burned." He looked down at his hands, clenched in his lap. "Then I heard your real voice, down the stairs. The guards. The… the presence recoiled. It vanished. Then you were there."
Silence stretched, taut as a garrote wire. Veyra stared at him, her obsidian eyes unreadable. Kael braced for derision, for accusations of madness or malingering, for the order to seize his tongue.
Instead, she straightened. "The Whisper Sickness," she stated, the words dropping into the silence like stones into a dark pool. "It manifests in the weak-willed. Auditory hallucinations. Visual distortions. Paranoia. A creeping madness that hollows the mind from within, making it susceptible to… influences." Her gaze flicked meaningfully to the Codex. "The Codex is a known vector. Its presence alone can induce symptoms in the unstable. Your recent… failures… your punishment… have clearly left you vulnerable, Scholar Arvantis."
Kael stared, a cold different from the Void's touch seeping into his bones. She was pathologizing it. Dismissing the impossible reality he'd witnessed as a symptom of his own broken mind. The *LIAR* on his wrist throbbed, a hot brand of irony.
"Your Grace, what attacked my door–"
"Was likely nothing more than a structural weakness exploited by the storm winds howling through the upper towers," Veyra interrupted smoothly, though her eyes briefly darted to the guard who had examined the frost. "The 'frost' was condensation, exacerbated by your heightened state. The 'voice'? An auditory hallucination, triggered by stress and the Codex's proximity. The 'void'? A trick of shadow and fear." She leaned forward slightly, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous register. "The Codex *wants* you to believe it is sentient. It *feeds* on fear and credulity. It is a tool, Arvantis. A dangerous, complex tool, but a tool nonetheless. Your task is to decipher it, not converse with it. Not *believe* it."
She straightened, her decision made. "You will continue your work. Your chamber will be repaired and warded. A guard will be posted outside your door at all hours – for your protection, and for ours. You will report *only* linguistic findings. Any further… episodes… of this 'Whisper Sickness' will be treated as a failure of focus, or deliberate obstruction. Do you understand?"
It wasn't a question. It was a sentence. Kael understood. Speak of the whispers, the scratches, the void, and he was mad, unreliable. Disposable. The Codex, sensing his despair, pulsed warmly against the obsidian table. A faint, almost smug vibration.
"Yes, Your Grace," Kael whispered, the taste of ash in his mouth.
"Good." Veyra gestured dismissal. "Return to your tower. The guard will escort you. Begin anew at dawn. The High Diviner expects progress."
The walk back was a blur of torch-lit stone and the clank of armored footsteps. The repaired door to his tower room was already underway – heavy timbers replacing the splintered oak, thick iron bands reinforcing the frame. A masked Eclipse thrall was meticulously inscribing warding symbols around the frame with a brush dipped in something that smelled faintly of copper and grave dirt. Another guard, a silent, hulking presence in black plate, stood rigidly beside the doorway. He didn't acknowledge Kael as the escorting guards deposited him inside.
The room felt different. Smaller. The lingering scent of sawdust and the acrid tang of the ward-ink couldn't quite mask the underlying smell of wet rot that seemed to emanate from the Codex, now resting once more on his desk. The high window showed the perpetual black fog of Eldermere, thicker tonight, swallowing the lower spires. Three bells tolled again – the Hour of the Hollowed. Kael sank onto his cot, head in his hands. Veyra's dismissal echoed in his mind, warring with the visceral memory of the void, the hunger, the *wrongness*. Was he mad? Was the Codex weaving illusions from his own fear and guilt?
*Scritch-scritch-scritch.*
Kael froze. His breath caught in his throat. It was faint, barely audible beneath the sounds of the thrall working outside, but unmistakable. Coming from the stones near the base of the wall opposite his desk. Where the frost had been thickest.
*Scritch… scritch… pause… scritch.*
It wasn't aggressive. It was… patient. Insidious. Like something burrowing. Waiting.
*"She lies,"* a voice breathed, not aloud, but directly into the fabric of his mind, a dry rustle like pages turning in a tomb. It was the Codex. *"She fears what she cannot control. She fears the Void remembers. They all lie. They are hollowed already. You see it."*
Kael squeezed his eyes shut. "No," he whispered hoarsely. "It's the sickness. You're causing it."
A low, psychic *hum* vibrated from the desk, a sound felt more than heard. *"Is it sickness? Or sight? Look. See."*
An image, unbidden, flashed behind Kael's eyes. Not a dream this time. Sharp, immediate. The Eclipse guard outside his door. His featureless black helm. But in the vision, Kael *saw* beneath it. Not a face. A swirling vortex of grey ash, held in a crude semblance of shape by the helm, two pinpricks of cold light where eyes should be. *Hollow.*
Kael gasped, snapping his eyes open. The image vanished, leaving a residue of profound dread. He stared at the door. The guard was just a silhouette against the light from the corridor. Solid. Real.
*"Peel back the light,"* the Codex whispered. *"See the cracks. They are everywhere. In the stones. In the Order. In their empty heads. The Whisper Sickness isn't madness, Kael. It's awakening."*
The scratching in the wall ceased. Silence descended upon them , heavier than before. Kael looked at his wrist. The word *LIAR* seemed darker, the edges slightly blurred, as if the ink was… seeping. A faint tracery of thin, black lines, like minuscule roots, seemed to extend a fraction of a millimeter from one letter. He covered it with his other hand, but the faint, sickening warmth remained.
He needed air. Not the stale, warded air of his prison.
He needed to see the city, to see if Veyra's explanation held, or if the rot was truly spreading.
He waited until the thrall finished his warding and departed, leaving only the silent guard outside. The Citadel's lower levels were less heavily patrolled at night, especially near the old postern gate used by the kitchen thralls for refuse. Kael knew its rhythms, a remnant knowledge from his days as a trusted scholar.
Moving with a thief's caution born of desperation, he slipped past the guard's line of sight during a routine shift change murmur down the hall.
He navigated the shadowed corridors, the Codex's whispers a constant, unsettling murmur at the edge of his perception, pointing out patrols, suggesting turns. *"Left… wait… now… the guard dreams of ash…"* He felt like a puppet, yet the compulsion to see, to *know*, was stronger than fear.
He emerged not into the familiar, fog-choked courtyard, but into a narrow alley choked with refuse and the stench of decay. Eldermere's underbelly.
The black fog was thinner here, ground-level, replaced by a greasy, yellow mist clinging to the gutters. The buildings leaned drunkenly, their upper floors lost in the gloom. And the silence… it wasn't peaceful. It was watchful. Oppressive.
He saw the graffiti first. Crude, frantic symbols daubed in what looked like charcoal and rust-brown paint on the damp brick walls. Not the gang signs he'd seen before. These were the angular, unsettling glyphs of the Old Script.
*DO NOT SLEEP. IT LISTENS. THE WALLS HAVE TEETH.*
Further down, a hunched figure shuffled through the mist, muttering incessantly, clawing at its own face with grimy fingers. Another figure stood perfectly still in a doorway, head tilted at an unnatural angle, staring blankly upwards into the swirling fog, its mouth slightly open, emitting a faint, wheezing sound like wind through a crack.
The Whisper Sickness. It wasn't confined to his tower. It was here. Festering. Spreading. Veyra lied. The Order lied. Or perhaps they simply couldn't see it yet.
A hand, cold and surprisingly strong, clamped onto Kael's arm from a shadowed doorway, yanking him off balance.
He stumbled into the reeking darkness, choking back a cry. The grip didn't loosen.
"Easy, Scholar," a voice rasped, low and rough as sandpaper. It smelled of stale smoke, cheap gin, and something sharp and feral. "Didn't yer mam teach ya not to gawk? .