The dream began softly.
A scent first, clove and cedar. Then warmth, like a hearth fire, steady and golden, humming beneath skin. He was younger in the dream. Maybe six. Maybe smaller. The bed was too big, the blankets impossibly thick. Someone's hand brushed his hair back gently, fingers thin and calloused. A lullaby he didn't recognize echoed low in the room, not sung but hummed, a tune without words, one that wrapped around his bones and made his eyes sting.
She was there.
His mother.
Or someone meant to be her.
She sat at his bedside, a small smile on her lips. Eyes that shimmered with saltwater light. She said his name, not his new name, not the whispered one, but the one he'd forgotten. The one he'd left behind when the spiral burned his wrist.
And he believed it.
He believed it so deeply it hurt.
When he blinked, she was pressing her forehead to his, whispering promises of safety, of days where the sky was just sky and the world didn't carry mouths in jars.
"You were always loved," she said.
He wanted to answer, to throw himself into her arms and let the memory hold him, but his mouth wouldn't move. His body stayed still. The warmth remained, but it was thin. Off-color. Like sunlight through dirty glass.
The dream didn't end.
It just stopped making sense.
Her hands blurred. Her eyes stayed locked to his, unblinking for too long. The room behind her folded and re-unfolded, shelves became walls, became doors, became stairs. She began repeating her last sentence. "You were always loved." "You were always loved." "You were always…"
He woke with a choking gasp.
The cot beneath him was soaked in sweat. The brazier had gone cold. Ashur sat across from him, silent.
The flask of brine sat half-finished on the floor.
"You gave me a memory," the boy said hoarsely.
Ashur nodded once. "You needed it."
"But it wasn't mine."
"No," Ashur admitted. "But it should have been."
Silence stretched between them. Not the sacred kind the Choir sought, this was brittle, cracked silence, the kind that hides too much behind it.
"Why?" the boy asked.
Ashur looked tired. Not physically, his face still held the sharp lines and measured calm of a man in control. But his eyes flickered too often now. Toward the shadows. Toward the boy.
"Because sometimes," Ashur said carefully, "a false peace is better than a true wound. Especially for a child."
The boy didn't respond.
He turned toward the mirror shard nailed to the far wall. His reflection looked unfamiliar. Not because he was older, not because of the spiral on his wrist, or the ink-thin veins creeping toward his throat.
It was his eyes.
They looked like they no longer belonged to him.
"You lied," he whispered.
"I softened."
"You lied."
Ashur stood, slowly. "And you're still here. Stronger. More grounded. That was the point."
The boy rose from the cot, legs unsteady.
He picked up the mask, the one meant to protect him from his own voice. It felt heavier now.
"Don't do it again," he said.
Ashur didn't answer.
Later that day, during a silent procession, the boy walked past one of the newer initiates, a girl no older than he'd been in the dream. She reached toward him, eyes wide with some word she didn't dare speak.
He saw the lie behind her gaze.
The same shape, the same stillness.
And he felt it again, that feather-thin line between comfort and cruelty.
It was easy to cross.
Too easy.
That night, he sat alone in the record room, staring at the jars of stolen voices. One of them still buzzed faintly, a soft, rhythmic hum like a lullaby without a source.
He picked it up.
Held it.
Listened.
And heard her voice again.
"You were always—"
He smashed it against the floor.
The lullaby didn't end.
It just slipped through the cracks.