The climb back to the surface was longer than it should have been. The iron stairs bent slightly beneath his feet, groaning with a sound that echoed deeper than the walls could carry. He didn't look behind him, though once—just once—he thought he saw something crawling along the ceiling. A shadow without a shape, watching.
He emerged through a stone hatch set behind a row of cracked crates in an unused storeroom beneath the bell tower. The walls were damp again. Familiar. The air buzzed faintly with the hum of the old water pumps that powered the cliffside dorms. Dust lay thick on the floor, undisturbed. No one had entered this place in weeks, maybe longer.
The bell hadn't rung.
That was the first thing he noticed when he slipped out into the corridor above. Usually, by now, the second call would've rung through the halls, a long chime struck three times. Children shuffled to assigned stations after that. Meals, washing, collection. But today, silence clung to the dormitory like mold.
He pressed his hand to the wall and felt nothing. No vibration. No movement. Only the warmth in his wrist, just under the skin, where the spiral had started to pulse again.
He walked quietly back toward the dorm. The other children hadn't stirred. Through the narrow slits in the doors, he saw rows of cots and figures curled in stillness. No one blinked. No one breathed deeply. It wasn't sleep. It was suspension. Like time had paused without permission.
When he reached his room, he stopped in the doorway. His bed was still unmade. The others hadn't moved. A boy on the far cot still had one foot dangling off the mattress, just as it had been when the first whisper woke him.
He sat down slowly. His hands rested in his lap, fingers clenched and unclenched without rhythm. The room smelled faintly of damp cloth, soapstone, and rust—exactly the way it always did. But it no longer felt familiar.
He didn't know what the man from below had done to him. Not completely. But he knew what he had lost.
Something in his mind was missing. Not just a memory, but the weight of it. Like remembering the smell of a mother's hair or the shape of a hand you once held without knowing who it belonged to. The sensation lingered, but the anchor had snapped.
He touched the mark again. It didn't hurt. But the skin around it felt… different. Like it didn't belong to him anymore.
A sound broke the stillness. Not the bell. A creak of old floorboards just outside the door.
He turned his head quickly, heart kicking. The hallway beyond the slit was empty. He stared longer than he should have, waiting for movement.
Then he heard a whisper.
Not a voice. A single breath, drawn low and sharp like the intake before a word.
His own name.
Not the number the wardens had called him. Not the placeholder used on his ration tag. But the name the Hole had spoken. The real one.
He stood.
The whisper came again, softer, from behind the walls.
He stepped out into the hall. Everything still felt suspended—frozen in a way that shouldn't have been possible. The pipes hissed overhead. A rat skittered across the stone. But the children slept on, and the bells remained silent.
Following the sound wasn't a choice. It never had been.
He moved past the dining quarter, past the washing hall, past the cellar doors locked with chains. Toward the staircase that led upward—where only the stewards were allowed.
The whisper continued, drawing him higher.
At the top of the tower, there was a locked wooden door. He'd seen it once, opened by a steward with a ring of iron keys. Now it hung ajar.
He pushed it gently.
Inside, the tower's bell hung above a wide circular room of open stone. Large arched windows let in the pale, polluted light of dawn. The sky was the color of ashwater. The sun hadn't quite cleared the eastern peaks.
And there, in the center of the tower's floor, sat a shape.
Not a person.
Not quite.
A figure robed in gray, with no face. No hands. Only folds of fabric, seated cross-legged where the shadow of the bell touched the floor.
The boy didn't speak.
The figure raised its head—or what passed for a head. And slowly, the bell above began to vibrate.
No one struck it. No wind moved.
The sound was low at first. A hum so deep it resonated in his teeth.
Then it began to rise.
The figure stood. Not walked—rose. Its robes shifted without motion. Its shape flickered like heat over stone.
"You are awake," it said, though the voice did not pass through air.
The boy stepped back, but only once.
"Your Truth is breathing," the figure said. "Others will come to take it."
He gritted his teeth. "What am I supposed to do?"
"Remember," it answered. "Before you forget too much to try."
Then it was gone.
The robe crumpled where it had been. No sound. No wind. Just the bell still humming above.
He stood alone beneath it, staring down at the spot where the figure had spoken.
Something cracked behind his eyes. A memory not his own. A child, alone at a cliff's edge. A question carved into stone. A hand reaching upward as the sky unraveled.
Then the bell stopped.
And the world resumed.
He heard shouts below. The distant slam of trays. The first ring of the real morning bell, loud and clear.
He was back in time.
But not in the same place.