Chapter 7: The Road to Tier Six — Whispers of the Abyss
The lift creaked downward into darkness.
Tier Six was not a place anyone willingly visited. It wasn't just the depth—it was the silence. The kind that made your thoughts turn loud and your doubts unbearable. The shaft seemed to descend forever, rattling over ancient gears carved with forgotten glyphs.
Sol stood beside Kael and Nera inside the lift, the dim glow of binding runes surrounding them like a thin cocoon.
The silence between them stretched.
Sol, still shaken from what he had learned, looked at Nera, her gaze distant.
"Your Pact…" he began slowly. "What did it cost you?"
She didn't respond at first. Only stared down at her gloved hands, covered in silver glyph-chains.
Kael, knowing the weight of the question, stepped away quietly to give them space.
Nera turned her head. Her black-glow eyes met Sol's.
"You want to know about the Abyss of Silence?"
Sol nodded. "You said you made your Pact there. That it nearly killed you."
She was quiet again.
Then she spoke.
"I was born in Tier Three. A scribe's daughter. Weak. Powerless. Infected by a Thought-Curse when I was eight. I started… hearing names. Ones no one should remember. Every time I said one aloud, something died nearby."
"The Church tried to burn me," she said, voice steady. "My mother smuggled me to the lower Tiers… but the curse grew."
She paused.
"Eventually, I was cast into the Umbral Abyss. A chasm of pure mental erosion. They say no Pactbearer who enters ever returns."
Sol swallowed. "What did it feel like?"
"Like being unmade. Thought by thought. Memory by memory. The Abyss doesn't kill you fast—it erodes your will until you forget why you were born."
"I forgot my name by the third hour."
She held out her palm. The threads of her Pact shimmered—ghostly lines shaped like closed eyes.
"But something… or someone… found me. Or maybe I found it. I don't know."
"I woke in a cavern deeper than the Abyss, surrounded by pillars shaped like tongues, all sealed shut."
"At the center, there was a Throne of Thorns and Silence."
She closed her eyes.
"No voice spoke. No contract was made. But I felt it: The Eye That Slept Beneath All. Not a god. Not a demon. Just… a watcher of silence. It offered me a pact not through words, but through forgetting."
Sol whispered, "You gave something up."
She nodded.
"I gave it my voice. My true name. And all memory of anyone I once loved."
"In exchange, it gave me the ability to bind that which should not be spoken. Names, thoughts, echoes… even the unraveling glyphs that infect reality."
Sol stared, stunned. "So… you're a Warden of Silence?"
"Not a Warden," she said softly. "A vessel. The Throne still watches through me. And I… hold the leash of what it silenced."
The lift groaned to a halt.
Kael returned beside them, tense. "Get ready."
The doors opened.
Tier Six was a grave of cities. A fractured sprawl of collapsed ruins, drifting glyph-light, and ink storms frozen mid-motion. Buildings bent at angles that defied reason, and the air smelled like old paper and rusted truth.
Far off, a strange bell tolled. Not from metal—but from something screaming in a pattern.
Kael muttered, "The rift is close."
Sol stepped forward, but Nera grabbed his arm.
Her voice, barely a whisper:
"When we enter that rift, everything you are will be tested. The Thorn isn't just inside you. It's waiting."
"Be ready… Sol. Or it will remember what you forgot."