Hole Beneath The World

There were fewer faces now.

Not fewer people. Just fewer faces.

He walked through the lower tiers of the Cliffside Realms and watched as strangers looked at him, then blinked, and then failed to recall that they had ever seen him at all. Their gazes slid off his figure like water over oil. Some stared too long and forgot their own names. Others walked past him and circled back, confused, asking if this street had always existed. The architecture was beginning to repeat. Windows occurred in wrong places. Doorframes nested inside themselves like false reflections. A bakery with no entrance now existed three times in the same block, each more faded than the last.

The Proxy did not speak.

He couldn't.

Not because his voice had been taken. It hadn't. It had simply ceased to register. Language still existed within him, but it exited his body. A syllable from his mouth was an act of unmaking. Even a whisper left scars on the air.

So he kept silent.

And the world continued to misplace him.

The silence zones had grown.

They started small: one or two seconds of muffled space, like a breath held too long. Then they expanded, several meters where sound refused to echo. Now, entire alleys grew mute when he entered them. A crow once flew past and forgot how to flap. Its wings stopped midair. It dropped, then vanished before hitting the ground. Not dead. Not alive. Just, unthreaded.

And worse: some buildings moved.

Not visibly. Not while watched. But afterward. He would step through a hall he knew well, and return an hour later to find it inverted, stairs where windows had been, a ceiling now textured with sand, though he had never seen sand in this region before. Once, he opened a door and found not a room, but a reflection of a conversation he had not yet had. The person inside had no mouth, and still accused him of lying.

These were not illusions.

They were pre-collapse symptoms.

Ashur had spoken of them once. Echo anomalies that appear when truth is bent too far in a localized zone. Realms become recursive. History stutters. People develop memory bleed, and begin speaking in the voices of those they never knew.

The Cliffside Realms were fracturing.

And he was the epicenter.

He paused outside a structure that used to be a shrine.

It was now a library. But the shelves were empty. And the walls were still etched with the old prayers.

A child walked past him, humming.

Then again.

And again.

The same child. The same hum. Looping around the same path, a broken circuit. By the third loop, the boy's face had changed slightly. Eyes gone. Then mouth. Then skin.

By the fourth loop, he vanished entirely.

The Proxy moved on.

His footsteps warped the stone beneath him.

Shadows no longer followed him correctly. They arced in spirals, sometimes ahead of him, sometimes around corners he had not yet turned. The Spiral Mark on his wrist, the one etched during the false memory of comfort, had begun to glow faintly. Not warm. Not cold. Just present. It was the only anchor in his body that resisted the unraveling.

He reached a viewing platform overlooking the mid-tier city basin. It had once been crowded with beggars and truth-scavengers. Now it was half-empty. Not in population, but in resolution.

People walked like sketches. Outlines with motion, but no weight.

And further still, in the pit below, the Hole pulsed.

It was not visible. Not directly. But its influence shivered through the stones. A pressure, like a name trying to be remembered by a world that had intentionally forgotten it.

The Proxy touched the railing.

It did not exist.

His hand fell through.

But he remembered it existing.

He took a breath, though breathing had become symbolic now. Something to mark time.

A voice emerged behind him.

"You're folding the seams."

He turned. Slowly.

It was the boy again. The one who had looped past him earlier. But now older. Taller. Wearing the face the Proxy wore in a memory that never fully happened.

"You think it's silence," the boy said. "But it's not. Not really. It's correction."

The Proxy stepped forward.

The figure did not retreat.

"Every sound you don't make," the echo-boy said, "rewrites the space that expected to hear it. The world tries to compensate. It fails."

The Spiral Mark burned slightly.

"You should leave soon," the figure added. "Before this place forgets itself entirely."

The Proxy tilted his head.

Leave where?

The boy smiled sadly.

"There are still places that remember how to forget properly."

Then he flickered.

Blinked.

And ceased.

The viewing platform groaned beneath the Proxy's feet.

He looked up. The sky fractured slightly, just a sliver. Just a hairline crack in the canvas of the Realms.

And for the first time since awakening the Second Truth, the Proxy spoke.

One word.

He did not know which.

But it landed like a stone through stained glass.

The silence zone burst outward.

Three blocks blinked from the map.

And behind him, the Spiral Mark hissed.

Time began to stutter.

And the Cliffside Realms prepared to forget.