There were no chants that night.
No soft drums or saltline bells. No whispering prayers. Just the sound of stone grinding against stone as the boy followed Ashur through the lower corridors, into a part of the temple he hadn't yet seen, a passage sealed with threads of wax and blackened string, marked by silence-glyphs smeared in chalk.
He was not blind to what this meant.
He had felt it coming, a shift in the tone of the cult, a coiling of something beneath their rituals that had nothing to do with faith and everything to do with fear.
Ashur didn't speak as they passed beneath the threshold. He only handed the boy a slip of paper marked with a name.
Not the boy's.
Not Ashur's.
Just a word scratched in fading ink: Thessek.
The boy didn't ask what it meant.
His breath caught when the walls began to pulse with heat. Not fire, memory heat. The kind of warmth that came from standing too close to something too personal. The kind of warmth people wrapped themselves in when they were grieving.
Or guilty.
The room they entered was round and low-ceilinged, shaped like the inside of a throat. Dozens of niches were carved into the walls, and in each one sat a body.
Not dead.
But not alive either.
They breathed shallowly, mouths covered by thin linen soaked in brine and stitched shut with black thread. Their eyes were open, but empty. Not blind, not hollow, just... waiting.
Waiting to be used.
"This is the Mouth Without Flesh," Ashur said quietly. "Where the Unspoken are kept."
The boy didn't answer.
He didn't have words.
"They were like you," Ashur continued, "young, bright, too loud. They didn't pass the final rite."
The boy's hands trembled. "Why are they still here?"
Ashur looked away. "Because they still have use."
He gestured toward a central dais, where a bowl of saltless ink shimmered under a flickering lantern.
"Their voices were removed," he said, "but the echo of what they once were… it remains. The Choir draws on them during sacred rites. They are vessels now. Pure. Uninterrupted by identity."
The boy stepped back. "That's not purity."
Ashur's expression hardened, just for a moment. "It's devotion."
"It's mutilation."
"Only if you see the voice as yours to keep."
The boy looked around at the still forms, some barely older than he was, others fully grown, slumped or upright, each one breathing shallowly in unison like a broken chorus.
A dull sob slipped past his lips.
Ashur turned to him slowly. "This is the path you walk. The Spiral demands sacrifice. Pain opened the door. Silence holds it. Without one or the other—"
"You lose yourself," the boy whispered.
"Yes."
Ashur placed a hand on his shoulder.
It felt heavier than it should have.
"We wanted to spare you this until later," he said. "But the mark on your wrist burns brighter than the others. The Choir… they think you're ready. Or dangerous. Either way, they've called for you."
The boy's voice cracked. "For what?"
Ashur didn't respond.
But he didn't need to.
Behind the dais, another door began to open. Slowly. Soundlessly. Lit from within by a pale, white glow, the color of breath held too long. Beyond it, a stairwell curled downward, and the boy could already hear something faint beneath the silence.
Not a voice.
Not a word.
Just the shape of something missing.
He turned back once as they descended, one final glance at the Unspoken.
One of them blinked.
And a single tear ran down the side of her face.
She wasn't gone.
Not completely.
Just caged behind the stitch.