When No One Answers

Time didn't pass normally in the Deep-Quarters.

There were no clocks. No day-bells. No window to the surface. The light in Dareth's cell shifted between amber, blue, and gray in unpredictable cycles, none long enough to sleep through without interruption. It wasn't torture. But it made time into something soft and unreliable, like old cloth.

Meals arrived through a slit in the wall. A compressed tray, sealed in resin. Nutrient paste. Water thickened with minerals. It never came at the same hour twice. At first, Dareth tried to track them, counting heartbeats or tracing light changes. But that had gone quickly sideways. Eventually, he stopped trying.

Instead, he listened.

There were no sounds from the other cells. No voices. No footfalls. Just a low ambient hum through the floor, the same constant pulse from the fossil-lined systems that regulated the structure. And yet… he heard something.

Breathing.

Not his.

Sometimes soft footsteps. A cough that echoed faintly when he moved too fast. The sense of someone sitting just beyond the wall.

He approached the side barrier again, the one that had shown the pale boy.

Empty.

But the air felt different there. He pressed his hand to the fossil-glass. Warm. Barely.

"You've noticed it too," a voice said.

Dareth jumped, spinning.

The pale boy sat on the cot. Same cross-legged posture. Same impossible calm.

Dareth stared. "How did you get in here?"

"I didn't," the boy said. "You're the one drifting."

Dareth stepped back slowly. "That cell was sealed. There's no door."

"There are always doors," the boy said. "You just don't always see them the right way."

The boy stood. He moved without sound.

"You're not dreaming," he added. "But it's okay if you think you are. That's how most of them cope with seeing me the first time."

Dareth felt a chill crawl up his spine. "What does that mean?"

The boy didn't answer. He walked to the wall and placed a hand on it. A flicker ran through the stone, brief, like a memory of motion.

"You should stop asking the guards about me," the boy said without looking back. "They don't like being reminded."

"I haven't said anything," Dareth said.

"Not yet."

He turned then. His smile wasn't unkind. But it wasn't human either.

"Stay in your own thoughts as long as you can," he said. "Before the echo catches up."

Then he blinked.

And Dareth was alone.

The next time Dareth woke, something was wrong.

He hadn't heard a sound, hadn't moved. But his hand throbbed with a dull ache. He sat up slowly and saw the smear of blood on his palm.

He checked the cot. No sharp edges. No corners. The walls were smooth, fossil-glass and bone-welded stone, designed to prevent harm. He looked down at his hand again. A fine, shallow cut ran across the base of his thumb. Not deep. But fresh.

Then he saw the wall.

Near the upper corner of the cell, where the fossil-glass curved closest to the ceiling, three shallow marks had been scratched into the surface. Not deep enough to damage the containment, but visible.

He hadn't put them there.

He stood slowly, pressing a hand to the wall for balance. The marks were recent. No dust, no fading. But the strange thing was, they hadn't been gouged in like a message. They looked careful. Like someone marking time.

Dareth stepped back, unsettled. "You did this?"

No answer.

He turned. The pale boy sat in the corner again, where the shadows were thinnest, where no shadows should have fallen at all in the even amber light.

Dareth's voice was low. "Why are you following me?"

"I haven't moved," the boy said. "You keep waking up where I already am."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Most true things don't."

Dareth stepped closer. "You scratched the wall."

"No," the boy said. "You did. In your sleep."

"I would've remembered."

The boy stood. His face didn't change. "You don't remember all the things your Sigil wants from you yet. That's part of why they lock you down here. You think they're worried about escape?"

Dareth opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked back at the marks.

Three lines.

"How long have I been here?" he asked.

The boy didn't answer.

Instead, he said, "You've started dreaming again."

Dareth's skin prickled. "How do you know that?"

"Because you're talking like someone who's hearing things that don't use words. That's the sign the gate is thinning."

He took a step forward. His eyes were too clear.

"Don't sleep too long, Dareth," he said. "You won't always wake up on this side of the wall."

Then he vanished.

No blink. No fade.

Gone.

And for the first time since his capture, Dareth realized he wasn't sure which side of the wall he was on anymore.

------

Dareth didn't resist when the guards came for him.

They entered without a word, two of them in pale bone-plated armor, a third holding a coil of thick cord etched with inked runes. Dareth had seen that cord before, used when moving prisoners classified as volatile. He didn't argue. He didn't ask questions.

Part of him wanted to. But something deeper told him it was pointless.

The cord was fastened around his chest. Not tight. Not threatening. Just inevitable.

They walked him through narrow corridors, each lined with thick fossil panels and marked at intervals with house glyphs. The deeper they went, the colder it became, not a natural cold, but a sterile one, like every surface had been scrubbed free of sound and warmth.

Finally, they stopped at a sealed door marked with a single phrase:

"SILENCING CHAMBER 04 – OBS. RELIC INTERFACE."

One of the guards tapped the rune. The door hissed open.

Inside, the chamber was round, smooth, and seamless. The walls weren't just stone, they were embedded with fossil arranged in concentric circles, layered like the inside of a massive shell. At the center of the room was a chair, not strapped, not bound, but unmistakably meant to hold someone still.

They motioned.

Dareth sat.

The fossil ring around the room began to glow.

A soundless pressure filled the air. His ears rang. Not from sound, but from the absence of it. A deliberate, manufactured silence. It pressed inward. His breath felt slow. Thoughts sluggish. The Sigil under his skin cooled.

This was what they meant by "silencing."

A figure entered the room, faceless beneath a mask of etched bone. They wore no armor. Only robes made of folded leather and relic-thread. A handler. Their voice, when they spoke, came from a small resonator pinned to their collar.

"You are entering a cognitive interface session. Your Sigil will be suppressed. Your mind will be monitored."

They placed a flat plate of obsidian-glass in front of him, circular, etched with faint, moving lines. Dareth felt something shift in the air.

"We will now observe your fossil imprint."

Then they activated the glass.

The moment it lit, something in him twitched.

A flash, too fast to see clearly. A sound not heard but remembered. Wind through dead ribcages. Thunder beneath sand. And behind it all, pressure. Not pain. Not fear.

Recognition.

His Sigil surged.

It didn't flicker. It fought. The suppression ring buzzed, then flared white. The handler stepped back. The walls began to ripple with residual heat. Dareth's skin split with light. The lines of the Sigil that had once lain dormant now moved.

They weren't symbols. They were veins.

A scream escaped him.

He didn't see the room anymore. He saw ash. A skyless plain. The echo of ribs miles long. Something moved across it, slow, monumental. Its eyes were stars dying in reverse.

Then it saw him.

And his Sigil exploded.

The suppression ring shattered. The obsidian-glass liquefied. The chair beneath him cracked. Fossil script on the walls flared red, then blinked out. The handler hit the wall hard and did not move.

Dareth dropped to his knees.

The room filled with smoke and flickering sparks. Somewhere above, an alarm tried to sound, but in the silencing chamber, it never made it to sound.

Dareth pressed his hands to the floor, panting. His skin was still glowing, the mark fully visible now, no longer shifting in ambiguity.

It had settled.

He'd crossed into the second stage.

Burning.

But that should've taken months maybe even longer. He had just barely survived the Pulse.

He looked around the broken and scorched room.

How long had he been down here?

------

They didn't return him to his cell right away.

Dareth sat alone in a different room now, small, sterile, its walls smooth and featureless except for a faintly glowing ceiling panel that buzzed like a dying lantern. His wrists were bound again, but the restraints were new. Heavy. Reinforced with bands of fossil inlaid metal that pulsed faintly with heat.

His body still hurt. Not like an injury, more like every nerve had been overused. The mark on his chest had stopped glowing, but it hadn't gone dormant.

Something had changed.

The handler hadn't spoken a word after they pulled him from the Silencing Room. Two more had joined them. They'd said nothing either. No one explained what had happened. No reprimand. No reward. Just silence and a new room with a locked door.

And yet, he wasn't alone.

Dareth turned.

The pale boy sat in the corner.

Not cross-legged this time. Knees drawn to his chest. Head tilted slightly.

Dareth's throat was raw. "You saw that."

The boy nodded. "It woke up."

"What did?"

The boy didn't answer right away. He stood slowly and walked to the far wall, placing a palm against it. A faint shimmer rippled outward.

"Your mark. It's not just yours now. It never was, really. But now it remembers that too."

Dareth stared at him. "How long have I been down here?"

The boy smiled. "That depends. Are you counting the hours between meals, or the ones between dreams?"

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one that matters," the boy said. "Time moves strange when you're close to the fossil memory. You drift. Your body tries to count days, but your Sigil dreams in centuries."

Dareth's chest tightened. "They said i was still in Kindling."

"You were."

"I'm not now."

"No," the boy said. "Now you burn."

The door hissed open.

A new handler entered, holding a dataplate and wearing the same relic-woven robes. Dareth turned to speak, but the handler didn't acknowledge him. He stepped in, tapped a few glyphs on the panel, then turned to face the corner where the boy sat.

His eyes passed over it. Paused.

Then moved on, like nothing was there.

Dareth frowned. "You—"

The handler turned. "Speak again and the restraints will tighten."

"But—"

"Don't invent distractions." the handler said coldly.

The door shut behind him.

Dareth stared at the wall.

The boy was still there.

"Why can I see you?" he asked.

The boy's smile faded.

"Because," he said softly, "your door never closed."