He tried to speak.
The word hovered on his tongue — shallow, nameless, caught in that strange place between thought and breath. He shaped it with his lips. Nothing came out.
Not a whisper. Not even a rasp.
Kesh watched him without moving. She didn't look surprised. Just... grim. Like she'd been waiting for this. Her compass was open in one hand, but the needle spun freely, lost in its own orbit.
"That's how it begins," she said softly. "Your voice remembers it's not yours."
He reached up and touched his throat. It felt intact. No swelling. No damage. But the space inside felt too wide. As if his words had been scraped out and left hollow.
He opened his mouth again.
Nothing.
Kesh stepped forward and tapped the spiral etched into his arm. It didn't glow. It pulsed — slowly, with the cadence of a heartbeat that wasn't quite his own.
"You haven't accepted it," she said. "That's why you still feel pain. Why your voice hasn't vanished completely."
He gestured, frustrated. His hands didn't know how to speak for him.
"You're not silenced," Kesh clarified. "You're unspoken. There's a difference."
He looked at her, eyebrows raised.
She sighed. "A silenced thing can still scream, given the chance. An unspoken thing was never meant to be heard."
For the rest of the day, he wandered through a world that felt suddenly unfamiliar.
The sky above the Cliffside Realms had always been cloudy — smoke-gray and ash-hung from the fires deeper in the Halves. But now it looked wrong, like the color had been repainted by someone who'd never seen clouds before.
When he passed people, they moved with strange hesitation, like they almost didn't see him. Or worse — saw through him. One girl bumped into him and muttered an apology, but when he turned to respond, she flinched and looked confused, like she'd forgotten why she spoke at all.
The world around him was still loud — boots on stone, market stalls clattering, metalwork echoing in distant tunnels — but his place in it had grown soundless.
Every time he opened his mouth to try again, he felt it. The pressure. The weight of a question waiting to punish the answer.
"Is the thing wearing your skin still you?"
He didn't know anymore.
That night, Kesh made him draw.
Not for art. For anchor. She gave him chalk and told him to mark every sound he remembered hearing since morning. He filled the floor slowly: the bell chime of the water carts, the grind of a gate hinge, the wheeze of a drunkard's laugh, the hiss of boiling copper, the murmur of someone praying three levels below.
By the time he finished, the whole floor looked like a spiral in fragments — sound broken into memory, curved back on itself.
Kesh nodded.
"That's good," she said. "You're still tethered. Just... faintly."
He tapped his throat again.
Kesh looked at him, then knelt and scratched a fresh symbol into the stone — not one he recognized. It looked like a mirror that had cracked once and never healed.
"I've only seen one other Proxy pass the second test," she said.
He pointed at the sigil.
"She didn't speak for seven weeks. When she finally did, the words weren't hers anymore."
His fingers curled.
"But they worked," Kesh added. "And she learned when to not use them."
He hesitated, then mimicked writing in the air. Kesh shook her head.
"No paper. Not now. If you write, it counts as speech. The Truth knows."
His chest tightened. Even thought felt risky.
"So stop thinking in words for now," she said. "Think in shapes. In echoes. In meaning. Let the silence carry your weight."
At some point, he dreamt again.
Not vividly. Not like before.
It was quieter. Still.
He stood in a black corridor with no walls. No floor. Just lines drawn in light — like someone had chalked the outline of a room into the dark. Shapes flickered faintly at the edges. Figures, maybe. Memories.
In the distance, something sang.
Not a tune. Not a voice.
Just pressure again. A sound almost born.
He stepped forward.
The light cracked beneath his feet.
And in the space where his shadow should have been — there was nothing.
No reflection.
No outline.
Just a name.
Not his.
But close.
He woke up before he could read it.
The next day, he didn't try to speak at all.
Kesh watched him quietly from across the chamber, nodding once.
"You're learning," she said. "Good. Let the silence speak for you."
He watched the chalk floor.
All the sound symbols had faded.
Not smudged. Not erased.
Just gone.
He walked forward and tried to redraw them — but the chalk wouldn't mark the stone.
The room wasn't just quiet now.
It had forgotten sound.