Hole Beneath The World

The shrine was falling apart.

Not collapsing, not burning, not crumbling in a way that stone crumbles. It was falling in reverse, upward, as if the weight that once tethered memory to matter had reversed its contract with gravity. Names etched into its interior spiraled into the air like charred petals. Threads of invocation, once pinned by wax and ash, floated loose and drifted ceilingward, dissolving at the apex of their ascent.

The Proxy entered alone.

He had followed a silence trail. Not a soundless path, but an actual imprint in space, a line of rooms that had grown too quiet, where dust no longer settled and light forgot how to cast shadows. He passed through seven such rooms before arriving at the final chamber, half-carved into cliffstone, half-manifested from the Choir's collective belief. It had been the most sacred place within the sect. A sanctuary where names could be spoken and remembered, locked away so even the Hole's hunger could not consume them.

And now it was dissolving.

Acolytes had not entered. No guards remained. It was unclear whether anyone even knew it was vanishing, or whether their memory of it had simply stopped.

The Proxy moved slowly.

His footfalls made no sound.

They hadn't for days.

But now even the visual rhythm of walking was starting to blur. As if each step could not agree on the moment that preceded it. He was unstitching. Not in body, but in narrative. The world no longer registered him as sequence.

At the heart of the chamber stood the Pillar of Names.

Or what remained of it.

The pillar had once been composed of a dark obsidian monolith, inscribed with recursive sigils. Each sigil contained a name, spoken during the rites of induction. As a person rose through the Choir's hierarchy, their sigil deepened, not in brightness, but in complexity. Layers of truth and lie intertwined, making each mark a living sentence. It was said that when the Pillar chanted your name back to you, it was not repeating. It was remembering.

The Proxy approached.

The pillar no longer chanted.

It trembled. Whispered. The sound of breath failing to find form. The kind of noise a dream makes when it realizes it is being remembered incorrectly.

Names shimmered across its surface, some glowing faintly, others half-vanished. Inverted symbols hovered in place, not attached to the stone at all. Several had lifted free entirely, slow-floating upward like forgotten words in a forgotten tongue.

The Proxy reached out.

Not to touch. Just to feel.

The space around the pillar was cold. Not in temperature, but presence. It was the cold of empty memory, the kind of chill that comes when one realizes no one will recall what happened here, even if they live.

He stepped around to the left.

Then the right.

Scanning.

Searching.

Waiting.

For a mark that did not come.

For a sigil he remembered being carved, not by himself, but by Ashur, during the initiation ceremony. A sound that had not felt like his name at the time, but which he had come to accept.

He could remember the shape of it.

He could remember the cadence, the timbre.

He could not find it.

He circled the pillar again.

Faster now.

The names rippled as he moved. Some glitched, shifted sideways. Others began to hum, then cut out. A few blinked and disappeared entirely. The more he searched, the more unstable the pillar became.

Then, a feather drifted past his face.

Black.

Thin.

Weightless.

It fell upward.

He caught it. Or tried to. It passed through his palm like breath.

Another followed. Then two more.

Soon, dozens.

They rose from the base of the pillar like ash from an unseen pyre. Each feather represented a name. A binding. A sound once spoken, now unmoored. They floated upward and vanished near the cracked ceiling, swallowed into a void that hadn't existed moments before.

The Proxy stood still.

Not frozen.

Resigned.

He understood.

He had not been forgotten.

He had been unwritten.

Not lost to time.

Removed from it.

His sigil had not decayed. It had never been carved. The memory of its inscription had been edited out of reality's scaffolding.

The Hole had not eaten his name.

He had.

He had become the vessel of silence so thoroughly that the world could no longer identify a moment when he had ever been called.

He looked up.

A final feather hung in place, halfway to the ceiling. It twitched as if resisting ascent.

Then rose.

And was gone.

The Proxy turned away from the pillar.

The room, behind him, began to darken.

The feathers were not returning.

No sigils were restoring.

There was no priest to rewrite the names.

There was no god to archive the loss.

The shrine would vanish.

And he would walk forward without a title.

He placed a hand to his throat.

Not to feel a pulse.

To measure the distance between breath and voice.

There was still sound in the world.

But none of it belonged to him.

He stepped into the corridor.

And left the last piece of himself behind.