The Hall of Veils looked almost gentle in the late light.
Afternoon sun slanted through the stained glass windows, turning the dust into slow-moving constellations. Radiant warriors stood in amber panes, their stylized suns driving back carefully abstracted darkness. In blue glass, a Magus reached toward a spiral of Shards, expression heroic instead of exhausted.
Cassian sat on the end of a bench and watched people instead of saints.
The Cohort had been cut loose from drills for an hour with the vague instruction to "read something." Some took that literally. Others treated the Hall as a place to sleep sitting up.
Tess sat with her feet tucked under her on a bench, an Echocraft primer open in her lap. She wasn't reading so much as mouthing along, fingers twitching as if already sketching diagrams in the air.
Orrin hunched over a doctrinal text, eyes moving too fast to actually absorb anything. His lips moved silently on familiar phrases—comforting because they were rote.
Harun leaned back against a pillar, eyes closed, looking half-asleep and half-ready to bolt. Sade was nowhere to be seen. She had muttered something about finding a real knife to sharpen and vanished.
Lyra had claimed a patch of floor near Cassian, back against the bench, one knee up, her slate propped on it. The [Echo] Shard sat on the floor within easy reach, a faint whispering note in the air around it.
"You ever notice," she said, pen tapping against the slate, "that all the official paintings and glass and whatever show people facing Nightmares with perfect posture? No one's screaming. No one's dropping anything."
"They don't put the failures in glass," Cassian said.
"They don't put the truth in glass," she corrected.
Her gaze slid past him.
Cassian followed it.
The pale trainee sat alone in a corner, half in shadow.
They had been here from the start—a quiet fixture on the Cohort list, present at drills, lectures, exercises. They spoke little, moved less, and reacted to almost nothing.
Cassian had his name written on his slate in small letters: Silas. That was how Registrar Hale had called him on the first day.
Silas sat with his back straight and hands folded loosely in his lap. His eyes were half-lidded, gaze unfocused, as if looking at something just beyond the wall. He didn't have a book. He didn't seem bored. He simply existed in the space, a small anomaly in plain clothing.
And he hummed.
The sound was soft. If you weren't listening, it slipped under the natural murmur of the Hall. But once Cassian heard it, he couldn't not hear it.
It wasn't a tune in any normal sense. No familiar melody, no simple pattern. The notes were close but wrong, brushing proper intervals and then spoiling them. They climbed, fell, twisted around each other, settling into something that felt like a question asked over and over without waiting for an answer.
Lyra winced.
"Please tell me you hear that, and I'm not just having a slow stroke," she muttered.
"I hear it," Cassian said.
Tess glanced over from her book, nose wrinkling. "Makes my teeth feel furry," she said. "It's like somebody's humming through a broken pipe."
Silas's lips moved slightly, barely enough to notice. The hum grew a fraction louder, then dipped again when an instructor passed near him.
No one else seemed to react.
Sister Elane crossed the Hall, arms full of texts. Her steps slowed for a heartbeat as she passed Silas's corner. She frowned faintly, as if she'd heard something unpleasant, then shook it off and kept moving.
"You're the one who likes patterns," Lyra said. "What's the pattern there?"
"Off," Cassian said.
He felt the ember in his chest react differently to Silas's hum than it did to the Engine's pressure. The Loop-Shard that had settled in his Path usually ground in time with Shroud logic—recurrence, correction, escalation.
Silas's humming slid sideways to that rhythm, a skidding brush of dissonance every time the notes intersected with the Engine's unseen beat.
"Does this feel like Shroud to you?" Lyra pressed.
"No," Cassian said.
She stared at him. "That is not soothing."
He tilted his head back, eyes half-closed, and listened.
He marked the moment—the angle of the light on the glass, the exact pitch of Silas's hum, the way the air felt faintly slick in his lungs.
Then he let his mind step backward.
Not far. Just a few minutes.
The Hall rewound in his head: Tess's quiet muttering, Orrin's frantic page-turning, Lyra's first complaint about stained-glass heroes. He slid through those impressions until he hit the point where Silas's humming had first pushed past the edge of his attention.
He replayed that moment.
This time, he focused not on the sound itself but on its effect.
Dust motes wobbled differently in the air near Silas, their random paths nudged into tiny spirals. The thin candle on the wall sconce behind him flickered once in a way that didn't match the air currents in the rest of the room.
The sigil etched above the door—a simple ward against minor Echo bleed—dimmed a hair. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Just enough for someone tracing loops to see a blip.
He let the scene run forward again, then opened his eyes.
"Definitely not Shroud-standard," he said.
"Meaning?" Lyra asked.
"Meaning," he said, "if the Shroud is the Engine, that song is static."
Tess frowned. "Static… like interference?"
"Yes," Cassian said.
"Cool," Lyra said. "We live in a big broken clock, and someone's learning the worst possible way to jam it."
"Someone," Cassian said, "or something using someone."
Silas's gaze slid toward them for a heartbeat.
His eyes were pale—not the bright, eager pale of a Radiant, not the hard ice of a Chain wielder. Just… washed-out. As if someone had scrubbed color from them gradually.
He smiled, very slightly.
The hum went silent.
Cassian smiled back, equally slight.
Silas's expression didn't change. He turned his head away, humming resuming under his breath, quieter now.
"Did he hear us?" Tess whispered.
"He heard something," Cassian said.
A bell tolled somewhere above them, marking the hour.
The Hall began to empty as instructors pointed people toward their next listed duties. Lyra groaned, flipped her slate over to see the schedule, and cursed.
"Doctrine again," she said. "If I have to listen to one more gentle explanation of why suffering is good for my soul, I'm going to test the doctrine on whoever's nearest."
"You could skip," Tess suggested. "Hide in the library."
"And get assigned latrine duty," Lyra said. "Again. No thank you."
They split at the Hall's doors—Lyra and Tess veering toward the doctrinal wing, Orrin trailing in their wake like a ghost seeking absolution. Cassian's slate glowed a different symbol.
ARCHIVE ACCESS – SUPERVISED
He followed the arrow etched on the wall sigils down into the tower's inner flank.
The Sanctum's archive was smaller than he'd expected and denser than he'd hoped.
Shelves marched in neat ranks up to the low stone ceiling. Books, scrolls, crystal slates, bundled papers. Each spine or tag carried sigils denoting content: SHROUD THEORY, NIGHTMARE LOGS, SHARD CATALOGUES, DOCTRINE, INTERNAL MEMORANDA.
A single clerk sat behind a wide desk near the entrance—an older woman with ink-stained fingers and a look that suggested she knew exactly how many people had died for every scrap of paper in the room.
"Cohort three?" she asked, glancing up.
Cassian nodded.
"You have one hour," she said. "You are allowed to request three items at a time. You are not allowed to take anything out. You are not allowed to write in margins. You are not allowed to spill anything on anything." Her gaze sharpened. "You are allowed to ask questions if you understand that I am allowed to refuse to answer them."
"Understood," Cassian said.
She slid a small slate across the desk. "Write what you want," she said.
He did.
NIGHTMARE RECURSION – THEORY AND OBSERVATIONSSHARD–PATH INTERACTION CASE STUDIES (NON-RADIANT)RECORDS – SANCTUM INCIDENTS, INTERNAL (REDACTED IF NECESSARY)
Her eyebrows rose a fraction at that last line.
"You don't start with the light reading," she said.
"I don't sleep lightly," he said.
She stared for a moment more, then snorted and disappeared into the stacks.
He spent the next half-hour with a spread of texts on the table before him.
The theoretical works used the polite language of academics who had never bled on their own diagrams. Phrases like "Subject demonstrated unexpected resilience in non-standard scenario." "Path resonance diverged from predicted curve." "Anomalous retention of Echo structure."
He traced patterns through the sentences, skipping the self-congratulation.
Recursion. Shroud correction. Fragmentation of anomalies. Occasional, rare instances of assimilation—cases where the Nightmare adapted to an anomaly instead of the other way around. Those entries were short. Some had lines scratched through them in a careful hand, as if someone had reconsidered their inclusion after the fact.
The Sanctum incident logs were worse.
Even redacted, they carried weight. "Containment breach, Echo Lab." "Unauthorized Shard consumption." "Suspected cult influence in lower wards." Names were blacked out with ink thick enough to bleed through the back of the pages.
He marked each reference to "hymn contamination" or "auditory aberration," even when the context had been scraped away.
The words repeated enough to form a ghost of their own.
He was halfway through a paragraph on "Echo-laced hymns and resultant reality distortions" when the air in the archive changed.
It was subtle. A slight tightening of pressure, like the storm-breath before a Shroudfall. The hairs on his arms lifted.
The clerk frowned and looked up, as if hearing something he couldn't hear.
Cassian felt it in his teeth.
A faint vibration. A low, discordant hum.
Not Silas's voice—not directly. But kin to it. A familiar wrongness layered over the tower's usual song.
Somewhere below them, something sang a note that didn't belong.
A sigil on the archive wall flickered once, then steadied. The clerk's eyes narrowed.
"Stay here," she said. "Do not touch anything you have not already touched. Do not move anything."
She pushed back from the desk and went to the doorway, peering out into the corridor.
Cassian's slate, resting at the edge of his documents, pulsed softly.
ALERT – LOWER LEVEL DISRUPTIONREMAIN IN CURRENT LOCATION UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
He ignored the instruction.
Instead, he closed his eyes.
He reached backward again, this time only half a minute.
The hum had a beginning. He wanted to see it.
In his mind, the archive rewound: pages turning, ink scratching, the clerk shifting her weight. Then, faint and far, the first thread of discordant sound curled up from the floor. Sigils along the walls dimmed—just a shade, just for a breath—before their stored power compensated.
He focused on that dimming.
He followed it down in his mind, like tracing a leak in pipes. Picture by picture, he let the world under his feet unfold: steps, corridors, chambers, each with their own ward-lines. At a particular junction, the sigils weakened more than in other places. Down past that point lay the Echo Labs.
Of course it started there.
He opened his eyes.
The clerk was gone. The archive door stood half-open, corridor beyond lit in a pulsing red wash—the Sanctum's version of an annoyed shout.
He stood.
The sensible thing to do would be to stay where he was, as ordered.
The problem with doing the sensible thing was that it left all the interesting choices to other people.
He moved to the doorway and looked out.
The corridor was empty. The red pulses came from sigil-lines along the walls, shifting from steady gold to warning crimson and back.
Voices floated up from lower levels—distant, muffled, frantic.
"…containment wall—"
"—not supposed to react to—"
"—shut it down, shut it—"
A sharp, metallic ringing cut through the noise. Then a wet, ugly sound that might have been stone or a throat.
Cassian stepped into the corridor.
He did not run. That would attract the wrong kind of attention. He moved at a brisk walk, just fast enough to look like someone trying to obey an order to shelter elsewhere.
At the nearest stairwell, a Radiant Warden stood with his arm outstretched, blocking the steps.
"Upper levels sealed," he snapped. "All non-essential personnel stay above the third ring."
"I'm headed to my dorm," Cassian said.
"Your dorm is two levels up," the Warden said. "Not down."
Cassian made his expression appropriately chagrined. "New here," he said. "Still learning the directions."
The Warden snorted. "Up," he said. "Now."
Cassian went up.
For three steps.
Then he slipped through an unmarked side door onto a maintenance path that wound behind the main stairwell, narrow and half-forgotten.
He had seen it earlier in his mental mapping, when he'd been bored following Hale on a tour. The Sanctum's builders had loved redundancy. Where there was one path, there were usually two.
The maintenance passage was lit only by occasional glowstones pressed into the walls. Dust lay thick on the floor, scuffed in a few places by boots that had passed recently. The hum was louder here—not in his ears, but in his bones.
He followed it.
Down one level. Then another.
At the third, he hit a warded door—a simple slab of stone with a chain of sigils etched across it. The lines had been overlaid three times, updated and reinforced. The faint scent of recent Chalk still clung.
He rested his fingertips lightly against the stone, careful not to press too hard.
The ward vibrated under his skin.
Stressed. Not breaking. Yet.
The hum on the other side rose in a brief, discordant spike. The sigils flared, flinched, then held.
Voices filtered through the stone, warped.
"—bleed through—"
"It's singing into the seal—"
"Wrong resonance, that's not Shroud, that's—"
A deeper voice cut them off. Varin.
"Do not answer it," he snapped, tone like a blade. "Do not hum along, do not speak to it. Hold the containment channels. Nero, status."
A pause. Nero's lighter tone, sharpened.
"Echo mass still within primary circle. Hymn contamination at… impressive levels. If it keeps trying to harmonize with the Shroud, we'll need to damp it before reality gets bored and chooses a side."
Cassian's fingers tightened on the stone.
So.
Someone had been singing to something in the Echo Labs. Or something had been singing back. Either way, this was not a simple containment breach.
He closed his eyes again, just for a heartbeat.
He marked this moment.
The feel of the stone under his hand. The flavor of the hum. The ward-lines' exact flicker pattern. Varin's cadence. Nero's forced humor.
He filed it all away.
"Rael."
The voice behind him was quiet.
He opened his eyes and turned.
Sister Elane stood at the end of the maintenance passage, robes hitched slightly to keep from dragging in the dust. She looked more tired than startled.
"Of course it's you," she said softly. "I should start betting on that."
Cassian dropped his hand from the wall. "I was sent up," he said, which was technically true.
"And yet," she said, "you came down."
He didn't bother denying it.
"You aren't supposed to be here," she said. "If containment fails, this is not where you want to stand."
"If containment fails," he said, "I want to know what fails first."
Her lips compressed in a way that suggested she wanted to argue with that and couldn't find a point of leverage.
"You do not need every answer," she said instead. "Some things… are not your concern."
He glanced at the wall. "The Choir is everyone's concern," he said.
The word slipped out before he could decide whether to use it.
Elane went still.
"I see you've been doing some… extracurricular reading," she said. "Or listening."
"The humming in the Hall," he said. "The way the wards respond when it rises. The phrase 'hymn contamination' in three different incident reports. I can add."
"This is not the place to say that name," she said sharply. "Not when it is already pressing against the walls."
The hum rose again, as if offended.
One of the ward lines flared too bright, then dimmed alarmingly.
Varin's voice snapped a command Cassian couldn't make out. The hum dropped, sulking.
Elane pinched the bridge of her nose.
"We are not ready for this," she muttered. "Not with half-trained Cohorts and a repository full of volatile Shards."
"I thought Concord was about preparation," Cassian said.
"It is," she said. "Preparation is not… immunity."
She stepped closer, putting herself between him and the door as if that would matter to anything on the other side.
"You need to go back up," she said. "If something goes wrong, more bodies here will not help. You'll have your chances to die heroically later."
"Not interested in heroism," Cassian said. "Just data."
"Data can be pulled from the aftermath," she said. "You being on the list of casualties makes it harder."
He studied her face.
She believed that. She believed in the sanctity of data. In survival as a means to an end, not just as an end. That made her rare among priests.
"It won't break through?" he asked.
"Not today," she said. "Not in a way you can fight with a sword."
He held her gaze for another beat, then nodded and stepped back.
The hum followed him up the stairs, a faint pressure behind his eyes that eased as he crossed the threshold into the upper levels. By the time he reached the Cohort dorm wing, the warning sigils had shifted from red back to their usual steady gold.
Lyra waited in the corridor, leaning against the wall.
"What did you do?" she asked as he approached. "The bells went all weird and the doctrine instructor made us all sit in a circle and pray. You know how hard it is to pretend to pray when you're trying to hear the walls?"
"Echo Lab incident," Cassian said. "Containment glitch. Something trying to sing its way out."
"The off-key humming?" she asked.
"Yes," he said.
She grimaced. "Silas was in Doctrine with us. He stopped humming right when the bells started. Looked… happy."
"Happy," he repeated.
"Content," she amended. "Like someone listening to a story they've heard before but still enjoy."
He filed that away.
Later, in the dorm, Tess burst in, hair more static-frizzed than usual.
"You heard?" she said without waiting for an answer. "Some idiot in the labs keyed the wrong hymn on an Echo and it tried to harmonize with the Shroud. Varin's group had to pile three containment fields on it. I heard someone puked blood from the feedback."
Orrin made a faint choking sound.
"Do you ever lead with the non-horrifying part of stories?" Lyra asked.
Tess considered. "No."
Cassian eased himself down onto his bed.
He felt… tired. Not in the way sore muscles made him tired. In the way too many half-formed connections pressed against the inside of his skull.
The Shroud's Engine liked patterns. It liked loops, repetition, correction.
The Choir—if that was what Silas sang for—seemed to like cheap sabotage. Off-key notes. Stressing the system in the wrong places at the wrong times.
He closed his eyes.
He went back.
The hum in the Hall. Silas's pale eyes. The sigil dimming over the door. The archive ward flickering. Varin's voice. Elane's warning.
He laid the moments side by side in his mind, like Shards on a table.
They weren't a story yet.
Stories needed sequences.
But there were enough pieces now to see the rough shape of a fissure.
The Engine, grinding on in its preferred cycles.
Static, building in the chambers where Echoes were bound and studied.
A boy humming in a corner, matching the dissonance, maybe without even understanding what he carried.
Lyra flopped onto her bed, making the springs complain.
"So," she said. "Between the nightmares, the Shards, and the humming cult nonsense, how doomed are we on a scale of one to 'laughable'?"
"Depends," Cassian said.
"On what?" she asked.
"On whether the people who built this place know they built it on a fault," he said. "And whether they can live with someone like me trying to widen it on purpose."
She stared at him.
Then she laughed, short and sharp.
"I hate that that actually makes me feel better," she said.
He didn't.
But it made him feel… positioned.
The Sanctum wasn't as secure as it pretended.
The Choir wasn't as quiet as it hoped.
The Engine wasn't as omniscient as it sounded.
And Cassian was sitting in the middle of all three, with a Path that had been designed, somewhere in some other cycle, to remember every failure and turn it into leverage.
He opened his eyes.
The room was dim, lit only by the faint glow of the ward-line above the door. Silas's hum drifted up the corridor, softer now, almost soothing if you didn't know what it was.
Cassian listened.
Then, very quietly, he marked the moment and filed the sound away with the others.
One day, when the crack finally ran from theory to stone, he intended to be holding it.