By morning, Rayon's journal page had dried into something brittle. Not paper. Not ink. Something else—etched like ash burned into memory. The words refused to lift when scraped. Even the glyph he had written in the old tongue, Vel suun, pulsed faintly, as if waiting for a second breath.
A knock came.
He opened the door to find Kess.
"The Council has summoned your unit," she said. "You'll speak to the Echo Chamber."
Rayon blinked. "For what?"
"For what you brought back."
They walked in silence.
The Council's domain was neither high nor deep, but folded—stacked like forgotten notes inside a song that no longer remembered how to end. Its chamber was an octagonal crypt of mirrored black stone, with no center. Only walls. And the glyphs, coiled in recesses between tiles, like nerves without a body.
Cyrus waited, arms behind his back.
Kess stepped aside.
One by one, the others arrived. Mirae, whose eyes hadn't slept. Bilden, twitching like something half-processed. Talia, silent but steady.
Above them all, the Council Voice spoke—not a person, but a synthesis. Male and female. Child and elder. Time collapsing into breath.
"You were sent into the Pulseveil," it said. "We wish to hear the Third Echo."
Rayon had read of the Echoes—first was memory. Second was distortion. The third was always where something changed. This wasn't a retelling. This was exposure. The kind that rewrites the one who speaks.
Cyrus only nodded once.
Rayon stepped forward. A glyph lit beneath his feet. He felt his thoughts pulled—not memory, but shape. Emotion reduced to vibration.
He began to speak.
"It wasn't silence. It was the mirror of command. The glyph did not test me—it measured absence. What was left when obedience ended."
His voice caught—not from doubt, but from something colder. The memory wasn't his alone now. It had entered the room.
"I saw my own voice fall apart. I saw commands I didn't remember giving. I saw my father teaching me not to blink when pain came. And I saw the moment I chose not to become him—by becoming something worse."
The chamber did not echo.
It absorbed.
Talia stepped forward next.
"I heard a version of myself who never joined the Academy," she said. "And another who killed Rayon in the trial."
She paused. "And she was freer," she added, almost too quiet to hear. "But monstrous."
Mirae whispered, "Mine screamed until it stopped sounding like me."
And Bilden—he didn't speak. Just stared. Not at the Council. Not at them. He reached into his coat like someone picking at a wound. Then the bone. Cold. Marked. Not meant to be seen by this world.
He held it out. A slip of bone, engraved with a spiral glyph. Cyrus took it.
"The third echo forms a pattern," said the Council. "Pattern implies meaning. Meaning is the first lie of order."
"The Third Echo is pattern," they continued. "It's also what survives," Rayon thought. "What we can't silence, no matter how we try."
"But patterns are not permission—they are prophecy misunderstood."
A long breath.
"We now name this unit under observation. Your glyph-threading will continue under Tier Constraint. One more fracture, and all glyph rights will be suspended."
A thrum moved through the floor.
Rayon flinched. It wasn't sound—it was alignment. And something in his spine, or soul, had just been re-threaded.
Rayon flinched at the phrase. Glyph suspension wasn't exile. It was unmaking. To lose his thread was to lose the shape of his own thoughts.
Dismissed.
Outside, the light looked wrong. Greyer. Too even.
Rayon exhaled slowly.
Kess stood beside him.
"You didn't give them everything," she said.
"No," Rayon replied. "I gave them what they were prepared to survive."
She nodded once. "The rest is still inside the glyph."
He looked at his hand. For a moment, it didn't feel like his.
"It won't stay there," he murmured.
"No," she agreed. "It never asks permission either."
Behind his eyes, the glyph still pulsed—quietly, like breath held in a cave. Waiting to echo again.