Chapter 7 : A Lie Sharp Enough to Cut

There are truths that cannot be seen head-on. They live in the edges—where perception fails, where memory skips, where meaning bleeds thin. Cipher stood before the Echo Vault of Durenhal, staring at a wall that did not exist. At least, not in the traditional sense. The ruin shimmered, its architecture folding in and out of shape like a sentence half-spoken. A ruined atrium opened before him, its arches cracked with absence. Whole wings of the structure flickered between forms: classical, alien, industrial, bone. This was not illusion—it was multiple interpretations of the same ruin, each layered through some deeper schema of thought, bleeding into the next like overexposed film.

He had not come here by accident.

The coordinates had been buried in the margin of a book that shouldn't have existed—another relic from the Library of Untruths. A scrawled note beneath a falsified index: "If you can remember the shape of lies, you can walk their edges."

He remembered the phrase even though he hadn't read it.

It was waiting for him.

The first steps into the Vault required no door. He passed through a torn wall of logic, feeling thought recoil. Inside, perception twisted.

He stepped forward.

Reality buckled.

And [Edge-Walker] awakened.

It wasn't a Rune he had prepared, nor one he had studied. It unfolded in his mind like a paper cut too thin to feel. A minor glyph, scrawled in half-form across the edge of his cognition lattice, one no Cognitor would sanction. It bled sideways logic.

[Edge-Walker] — a minor passive-activator Rune. Function: Enables traversal through perceptual discontinuities. Activation Key: Believe you are not where you are. Cost: Temporary neural suppression of nociceptive channels (pain response nullified for 24 hours).

He did not remember acquiring it.

He did not care.

Because the Vault was alive now.

The structure reorganized itself every few heartbeats. Walls turned into corridors that devoured their own length. Steps inverted their gravity. Doors looped into themselves. Logic faltered. Thought became map.

[Edge-Walker] allowed him to pass through places that had no doors, step into angles too narrow for vision, and slip behind walls that only existed if you believed they did. The Rune did not teleport—it misaligned his presence from common observation frames. Not invisibility, not phase-shift. Something stranger. Cipher became part of the gap.

But every use of the Rune dulled his sense of harm. Already he had lost sensation in his left hand. He watched blood drip from a gash he hadn't felt. He smiled, teeth clenched. The numbness wasn't painless—it was worse. It removed warning.

Each step into the Vault was a puzzle. One chamber contained infinite stairwells that only led upward, yet always returned to the same broken window. Another inverted gravity selectively—only for truths the user believed to be unchangeable. Cipher survived that chamber by reciting a false memory, repeating: I have never fallen.

It was true—for the duration he believed it.

In another room, doors opened only to liars.

He told it he was here for knowledge.

The door refused.

He said he came to burn the truth.

It opened.

And beyond that threshold, the predators waited.

Cognition Beasts again—but fractured. Unlike the swarm from before, these were solitary, parasitic. They fed on incomplete thoughts. Each one matched a concept half-understood: one wore the shape of Cipher's mother, her face missing. Another spoke with his voice, but offered wrong answers to questions never asked. They stalked the Vault not by scent or heat, but by belief.

He activated [Edge-Walker] again and slipped past their gaze, becoming not invisible, but irrelevant. The beasts did not follow. They could not chase what had not been acknowledged.

But the cost accumulated.

He could no longer feel the broken bone in his foot. He only saw it when he glanced down and noticed the wrong angle of his boot. Pain would have warned him. Now it was a silent break.

He wrapped it, tightened the strap, and limped forward.

He needed the core.

Every unstable Vault had one: a central cognition anchor—usually a glyph-core, a crystal of compressed thought around which the ruin's perception instability orbited. If he could reach it, he could stabilize a pocket long enough to record the Vault's schema—and harvest it.

But the Vault did not want to be known.

The final chamber was wrong.

It did not fit spatially.

He entered a hallway with no turn and emerged in a cathedral that should not exist. The space was impossibly wide, its ceiling carved from glass that reflected no light. Stained windows illustrated scenes of events he could not recall but instinctively mourned: a funeral with no body, a wedding between shadows, a child offering a blade to himself.

The core floated above an altar of collapsed memories: glyphs etched into bone, text scrawled into melted wax, burnt paper made flesh.

Cipher approached.

And then the trap sprung.

The room folded.

No—perception did.

[Edge-Walker] activated reflexively.

Cipher watched himself die.

Three possibilities unfolded:

—In the first, he lunged for the core, triggered a false belief that disintegrated him into thought residue.

—In the second, he fled, and the Vault rewrote his existence retroactively so that he had never entered.

—In the third, he hesitated—and became part of the architecture, frozen in an eternal decision-loop.

He chose none.

He believed, with perfect certainty: I already survived this.

He stepped forward into the lie.

The perception shattered.

And Cipher emerged holding the core.

Not unscathed.

His hand had been severed.

He hadn't noticed.

The pain had never come.

He laughed, bitter and broken, holding the flickering glyph-core with his remaining fingers. The hand would not regrow. This was not a dream. Not a hypothetical.

He had paid the cost.

He walked out of the Vault with one less hand and one more truth:

[Edge-Walker] was not a Rune meant for mortals.

It was a lie. One sharp enough to cut reality.

And now it lived inside him.

To be continued…