Chapter 5 : Truthfeeds

The descent into the Nescient Vaults began with a lie.

I will return.

Cipher had whispered it to himself as he sealed the Vault's upper iris behind him, carving the rune-lock into the corroded metal with a flick of his thought-blade. Even then, he knew it wasn't a promise. It was a protection—against what, he hadn't yet understood. The truth had a scent in Hollowwise's deepest strata: rust, wet limestone, old blood and newer secrets. Down here, even certainty decayed.

The Vault's passage twisted as if grown, not built, its architecture mimicking spinal bone. He walked through a corridor shaped like the vertebrae of some god that had died curled in upon itself. Each step closer to the Vault's center made his cognition itch. The air here resisted linear thought. Past a certain threshold, even remembering why you'd entered became effortful.

He reached the Atrium of Doubt at depth-marker -70. The name wasn't metaphor.

The Atrium was a circular chamber carved from grey choralite, its walls engraved with the ten thousand untruths whispered by the original Hollowwise seers before their minds liquefied. The inscriptions writhed faintly. Living script. Language that rejected stasis. Cael—no, Cipher now—felt his breath catch as the room's resident occupants stirred.

Cognition Beasts.

They did not have names. They had needs.

First he heard the sound: a layered clicking, like thoughts misfiring in sequence. Then came the shadows. Not cast by light—there was none—but by belief.

They were shaped by contradictions. Faces that were not faces. Bodies stitched from reversed anatomy, suggestion without structure, like a painter trying to render despair without lines. Cipher's cognition filtered them instinctively, blurring their outlines with conceptual static. But the effect was not protective. It was recursive.

Because to see them was to begin doubting your ability to define them.

And that was how they fed.

They emerged slowly from the atrium's periphery. Drifting. Breathing. Whispering fragments of truth twisted at the hinge of conviction.

You were never born.

She never loved you.

You will die here, forgotten.

Their voices bypassed his ears entirely. The truths they spoke were felt, not heard, crawling directly into his self-perception. Cipher flinched.

That was mistake one.

The smallest of them surged. Not in body—there was no mass—but in presence. Like a certainty coalescing into terror. Its shape solidified just enough to snap the edge of his confidence. Eyes not eyes met his. Doubt spiraled.

Cipher reached for his Cognition Core, but his thoughts scattered. Intent diluted. The Rune Matrix glitched.

He staggered.

They grew stronger.

It became obvious then—this was not a fight of flesh or mind. It was a siege on belief. The Beasts thrived on erosion. They didn't wound. They unmade. And the more he questioned the validity of his thoughts, the larger they became.

One spoke a lie so believable it rang with the chime of a half-remembered lullaby:

You never escaped the Library. This is still the hallucination.

He believed it for a fraction of a second.

The largest of them doubled in size.

They weren't individual entities. They were fragments of a singular meta-organism: the Swarm of Reversal. A Thoughtform Hive. A Truthfeed.

The Vault records had spoken of them in legend. He had assumed metaphor.

He was wrong.

No weapon in his mental arsenal functioned. Logic was poison here. Rationality only confirmed their hunger. To think in linear causality was to invite them into the joints of his beliefs.

He tried to retreat.

The doorway behind him had vanished.

No—he had forgotten where it had been.

That was mistake two.

The swarm surged.

He knew, with the cold precision of approaching annihilation, that he would be absorbed soon.

Unless.

Unless he changed the rules.

Truthfeeds fed on doubt.

Then—perhaps—they could be starved by certainty.

But certainty wasn't enough. They didn't just resist falsehood—they required truth spoken as conviction. Self-reinforcing, recursive belief. In this place, survival required not accuracy, but dominance of perception.

He did the impossible.

He whispered: I have already escaped.

The Thoughtfeeds slowed.

It wasn't a lie. Not here. Because here, what he believed became true the moment he declared it with enough conviction.

He repeated it, louder.

I am not here. I already left.

The swarm hesitated.

The chamber flickered—like a memory uncertain of its continuity.

He pressed the thought deeper into himself. Not as hope. As certainty.

I escaped before I entered.

The Beasts began to unravel.

One shrieked as its structure collapsed under the weight of his belief, like a failed hypothesis retracting itself. Another froze mid-lunge, shattered by the logical paradox of its own hunger.

He kept speaking.

Not aloud, but internally. A constant stream of truth-belief.

I am Cipher. I am not prey. I do not feed you—I erase you.

The strongest one lunged.

He met its absence with a thought so violently self-affirming it reversed its trajectory.

The air cracked.

He stood alone in the chamber.

His thoughts returned in sequence. The Rune Matrix stabilized.

He turned toward where the door had never left.

And stepped through it.

Back into the upper strata.

The light from the vault's iris struck his eyes like a benediction. But Cipher knew what he had seen could not be forgotten. Not just the Beasts—but the nature of reality as shaped by perception.

Truth, in this world, was not fixed.

It was grown.

Fed by belief. Eroded by doubt.

He understood now why the Guild mandated such harsh mental disciplines for Cognitors. Not to protect the world from them—but to protect them from themselves.

For any mind that hesitated could become feeding ground.

He sat alone on the threshold of the Vault.

A single statement looped in his mind, now carved into the core of his cognition like a latent Rune:

What I believe becomes real if I believe it hard enough.

The power was monstrous.

And addictive.

But there was another realization—one far worse.

As he rose and began the long ascent back to Hollowwise's surface, Cipher noticed something.

A single mark on his inner wrist.

It hadn't been there before.

A black glyph. Small. Elegant. Resembling a spiral feeding on itself.

It pulsed.

Not with life.

With belief.

He hadn't left the swarm untouched.

Something had believed in him, too.

And now, it was part of him.

To be continued…