The parchment came wrapped in saltstring. Thin as rice skin, covered in curling marks like malformed letters, it fluttered slightly when the cult elder held it aloft, not from wind, but from breath. Every breath in the room moved it differently. The boy could tell: this wasn't paper meant for writing.
It was meant for swallowing.
"The tongue sins," said the elder in his low, steady rasp. "It speaks out of order. It invites echoes. It tries to name what should not be named."
The room was dim. Half-circle benches pressed inward around the speaking pit, where the elder stood, robed in gray that shimmered with dried salt. Dozens of faithful sat in stillness, masks lowered, mouths closed, waiting.
Ashur stood nearby, silent. Watching. A shadow with sharp eyes.
The elder knelt before the boy. "You will carry silence beneath your words," he said. "So that what you say is filtered through forgetting."
He placed the parchment on the boy's tongue.
It tasted of dried salt and old wax. Heavy. Older than the room.
"Fold it," the elder instructed.
The boy obeyed. Tongue pressing the paper against the roof of his mouth, then the bottom, curling it without teeth. It moved like it had no spine, but remembered being alive.
When it settled, the air shifted.
The parchment melted into his mouth.
Not dissolved, merged.
And with it, the first symptoms began.
His voice, when he next spoke, came out softer. Not in tone, but in consequence. Words no longer hung in the air, they slipped past listeners like mist. Even his own thoughts, when whispered aloud, struggled to rebound.
No one in the room responded to what he said.
Not out of rudeness, they simply didn't seem to hear.
The elder nodded in approval. "Now," he said, "we will stitch your silence."
They led him into a smaller chamber after the ritual. Walls of dark clay lined with faded tapestries depicting mouths, some open, some bound with thread, some bleeding ink. In the center stood a stone pedestal where masks lay in neat rows.
Each was different.
Each bore a word carved in a language the boy didn't know.
Ashur placed a hand on one. "This was my first," he said.
The mask was bone-white, and on its surface was etched a single spiral, jagged, imperfect, almost broken.
"You don't choose the mask," Ashur said. "It chooses you. It listens for your loudest unspoken word."
The boy reached forward.
Before he touched any of them, one slid forward on its own.
Smooth gray.
No markings.
No eyeholes.
It was perfectly blank.
The boy lifted it. It felt warm.
"You wear it during the inner hymns," Ashur said. "You wear it when words become dangerous."
Later that night, the mask clung to his face like breath turned solid. When he took it off, he found fine gray dust along the rim, not from the mask itself, but from him.
The paper tongue had done more than soften his voice.
It had begun to alter the boundary between thought and speech.
Some thoughts now echoed before they were formed.
Others repeated themselves after they'd already passed.
And a few came in voices he didn't recognize.
He tried to tell Ashur about it the next morning, but Ashur didn't respond.
Not because he didn't care.
But because the words never reached him.
The boy spoke them aloud, felt the shape of the sounds leave his throat, but nothing followed. Not even an echo. It was like the world had chosen not to acknowledge the attempt.
That night, he dreamed of shouting into a cave and hearing the cave whisper back something different.