Chapter Three: The Carvers of Silence
Sound died differently in Ký Giới.
It didn't fade.It didn't echo.It erased.
Kha was running. Not from footsteps—there were none. Not from shadows—there was no light. He was fleeing from the sound of absence, the subtle, growing hush that devoured the air around him like a contagion.
Everywhere he stepped, the shimmering script beneath his feet flickered and dimmed.
He clutched the Seal of Meaning in his palm, still warm. It pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat, guiding him like a compass toward something unseen. Ahead lay a jagged ridgeline of black monoliths—half-ruined, slanted, their surfaces inscribed with half-formed glyphs.
A forgotten language.
He ducked between them just as the silence arrived.
They didn't walk.
They sculpted.
Three figures emerged from the shimmerless void. Cloaked in fractal rags, faces hidden beneath shifting masks of static, they drifted forward—chipping away at the world with invisible chisels. Where they passed, symbols broke. Structures collapsed into blankness. Even memory seemed to tremble and retreat.
"They are not beings," the Reader's voice echoed in his head. "They are edits. Corrections made to a reality that speaks too loudly."
One of them tilted its head. From its fingers sprouted a tool—not metal, but concept—a contradiction turned solid, shaped like a calligraphy brush made of absence.
It wrote in the air:
∅
The glyph shimmered toward Kha like a living deletion.
He raised the Seal instinctively. The brushstroke shattered midair, dispersing like smoke.
A hiss. Not sound—lack of it.
They moved faster now.
Kha stumbled backward, heart hammering. His mind raced, searching for patterns. He remembered something from his father's journal:
"Do not speak meaning. Write it. In Ký Giới, to speak is to echo. To write is to bind."
Hands shaking, he pulled a shard of obsidian script from the monolith nearby—its edge etched with a partial glyph. He sliced it across the air, mimicking the flow of the spiral he'd traced the night before.
⥀
The spiral shimmered. For a second, the world paused—literally. The Carvers froze mid-motion. Time hiccuped.
It worked…
Then the spiral shattered.
Two of the Carvers began to dissolve into gray mist—but the third, larger and more refined, lunged.
Its hand struck Kha's chest.
Pain was not the worst part.
The worst was forgetting.
For a split second, he forgot what "running" was. Then "fear." Then his own name.
He screamed—not in pain, but to remember.
"Vu Minh Kha!"
His voice wrote itself into the air.
Letters carved from light burst outward from his throat, slamming into the Carver like a wave of raw syntax. The creature recoiled, cracking at the seams. Its mask split.
For the first time, Kha saw its face.
There was none.
Only a mirror.
The creature collapsed into silence.
The world snapped back.
Breathless, Kha fell to his knees. The glyphs beneath him flickered once more, returning to light.
From the horizon, a faint structure rose—a city of twisted towers, suspended midair by chains of words.
The ruins of Ngôn Tâm.
Behind him, the echo of the Reader returned:
"You've done it, Weaver. You've cast a Word."
"But be warned—the world now hears you."
To be continued...