By the third day after glyph alignment, the silence had begun to echo.
Rayon sat in the Vault of Veils, a training dome so tightly layered with dampening runes that even a scream wouldn't reach the outer walls. He wasn't alone. Talia was across from him, seated in lotus stance, her eyes shut tight as if trying to keep something from spilling out. Mirae stood between two obsidian pillars, tracing invisible patterns in the air, her gestures increasingly hesitant. Bilden paced at the dome's far edge, gauntlets still stained from yesterday's trial, muttering to himself in clipped, broken sentences.
Cyrus circled them like a warden of ghosts.
"The glyph lingers," he said, voice low but crisp. "And now it tests you. This is the nature of the Pulseveil. Your mind presses outward. If it is not anchored, it bleeds."
No one spoke.
Rayon's temples throbbed. He had not drawn a blade in three days, yet his body felt bruised—internally, molecularly. When he closed his eyes, he didn't see darkness. He saw coils. Not of rope, but language.
"The glyphs do not imprint like ink," Cyrus continued. "They ripple. You aligned with Silence. Now you must walk through Noise."
He pointed to the center of the dome, where a new structure had formed overnight—a spindle of translucent glass, rotating slowly, surrounded by glyphlight that bent unnaturally.
"That," Cyrus said, "is the Pulseveil. A living feedback array. Step into it, and your thoughts become echoes. Step in with doubt, and you fracture."
No one moved.
Rayon rose.
The others didn't stop him. Kess was not present. No warnings. No mirrors. Just the hum of blood and glyphlight. He stepped into the veil.
Instant dislocation.
He saw himself across the dome. Saw Talia whispering—but not with her mouth. Saw Mirae flicker in and out of sync, like a stuttering candle. He blinked, and the dome became a corridor. He blinked again, and it turned into his father's training hall.
"Obedience is not control," a voice whispered.
Rayon turned. His own face stared back.
"You carve too cleanly," the reflection said. "You erase too much."
He tried to speak. His mouth moved. But no sound emerged. Just shape.
The glyph flared across the glass walls of the Pulseveil. He reached for it, and pain spiked—not in the hand, but in memory. His mother's face, unreadable. Her silence, deeper than training.
He dropped to one knee.
Somewhere outside the veil, someone shouted. Talia?
Then—clarity.
He remembered Kess's words: Some glyphs want to be obeyed.
But some don't. Some want to be broken.
He stood. Focused not on resisting the Pulseveil, but listening to it. Letting it unravel, layer by layer. Each echo a test. Each voice a mask. He saw through.
The dome returned.
Cyrus stood, arms crossed.
"You didn't fracture," he said. "Interesting."
Rayon nodded. "It tried."
Talia looked at him differently now. Not softer. Sharper. Mirae said nothing—but her hands were steady again.
Later that night, alone in his chamber, Rayon sat before his journal.
He wrote: The glyph doesn't teach. It remembers.
Then beneath it, in the old tongue: Vel suun. The wound that listens.
The ink sank deeper than the page should have allowed.