Chapter Six: The City That Doesn’t Speak (Part 1)
Scene 1 — Echograss and Ash Wolves
The land changed slowly. At first it was just the dust. Finer now. Greyer. It clung to Bramble’s boots in ways it hadn’t before, not heavy, not thick, just… persistent. Like it remembered other travelers and wanted to stay attached.
The goat snorted.
They were maybe three days past the Holdfast, though days were a loose concept now. The sun hadn’t behaved since they crossed the broken pass into the no-parish lands. It didn’t rise so much as reassert itself, shifting from one dull quadrant of the sky to another with the bored consistency of a bureaucratic eclipse.
The Concordian Route Atlas had ended two ridges ago. Bramble put it back into his satchel and kept walking.
The path, if it could still be called that, was winding through fields of echograss now: thin, silver blades that rustled after you stepped past them. Every movement left behind a whisper of its own making. It was unnerving at first. Then exhausting.
Step. Rustle.
Step. Rustle.
Step. Bramble.
Step. Bramble.
Step. Still Bramble.
He cursed under his breath. The goat didn’t seem to mind. It munched the grass experimentally. Then spat it out, offended.
Bramble scanned the horizon. A line of dead pylons stretched across the hills to the east, broken towers of spellglass and rusted sigil iron. At their peak, a network of old covenant wards crackled faintly. Lightning spells flickered through the fractured lattice, chasing phantom circuits across the sky.
They passed a stone marker half-buried in lichen. Bramble brushed it clean.
ZONE 7 — CLAIM RETRACTED
Silencing Protocol Enacted 3rd Era, Cycle 91
No cleric permitted beyond this point without auditory binding.
He frowned. “Comforting.”
The goat attempted to urinate on the sign. It shimmered and hissed at him. Bramble turned to the west. And froze.
Something moved.
Far out. Maybe half a mile—just beyond the rise. He saw it only for a breath: a flicker of motion where the light bent wrong, like someone walking inside the shimmer of a spellfold. Then it was gone. He squinted. Nothing. The echograss behind them was still whispering.
And then it stopped. All at once. The silence hit hard. The goat’s head snapped up. Bramble reached for the oathblade.
Too late.
The dust shifted. And from beneath the pale soil, they rose.
Three of them.
Lean. Sinewed. Covered in layered ash-hair and armored runes, the kind that flicker only when they’re about to pounce. Teeth like shattered bone. Eyes like hollowed runes. Silent.
Ash wolves.
Bound constructs. Cursed predators. And worst of all? They hunted by sound.
Bramble took a slow step back. The goat growled. The wolves didn’t move. Not yet. But the echograss around them started whispering again. Only this time, it wasn’t Bramble’s name.
The wolves didn’t move. Not in the usual way. They unfolded. Joints cracking the wrong direction. Skin flexing like paper soaked in ink. Their bodies were stitched with silence sigils—glyphs burned into bone that pulsed faintly as they aligned into formation. One crouched low. One flanked right. One disappeared entirely.
Bramble didn’t breathe.
He held the oathblade tight. Its paper edge shimmered with latent ink, still dulled, but listening. He muttered a short clause under his breath. Old field binding. Improvised.
“By clause and contract, let this not tear me today.”
The blade pulsed once. An acknowledgment.
The goat crouched beside him, nostrils flared. Its horns glowed faintly with memory. The kind of resonance that only came when something sacred was watching through your eyes.
“Move on three,” Bramble whispered.
The goat didn’t blink.
“One…”
The first wolf vanished again—blinked sideways, cloaked in field silence.
“Two…”
The second lunged.
“Three.”
Bramble threw a binding glyph. Not a spell. A scrap. A ripped clause from a sanctified contract he’d stolen in a much holier time. He crushed it in his hand and threw it at the wolf mid-leap.
The glyph snapped open in mid-air. A ring of copper-rune light exploded outward, silent, but the wolf hit it mid-bound and twisted, limbs locking. It landed hard, skidding in dust, muzzle choked with force.
Bramble turned just in time to block the second. The oathblade screamed. Not aloud. Inside his bones.
A sonic counterspell, etched into its edge, ignited on contact, the wolf’s claws raked across the blade and burst into paper ash. One paw vanished. The beast snarled without sound, twisting backward.
But the third wolf was already there.
Behind.
Too close.
The goat reacted first. It leapt. Not quite at the wolf but through it. The goat's body blurred, hooves striking not the creature’s flank, but the runes inside its ribcage. The spell etched there cracked. A backlash snapped the wolf inside-out for a blink, glyphs spiraling into malformed syllables. It collapsed, twitching, trying to reform the shape of its own silence.
Bramble didn’t wait. He spun, slashed downward with the blade, and spoke—just once, just a word he didn’t know he knew:
“Unbind.”
The paper edge tore through air. Through spell. Through wolf. The construct shredded like cursed vellum. Its limbs scattered, evaporated into dust mid-collapse.
Then silence again. No breathing. No grass. Just the two of them, standing in the stillness, surrounded by smoldering ash.
The goat blinked. Then sneezed. A low whistle drifted across the plain — faint, haunting.
The echograss began to whisper again. This time with different words.
“Closer now.”
“He is closer.”
“The vowbreaker walks.”
Ash started falling. Not from the sky—from the wolves.
Their remnants hadn’t fully faded. The dust hovered in mid-air, then spiraled upward in slow, searching arcs, like spell residue trying to report home. It didn’t vanish. It withdrew, as if summoned back into whatever lattice had sent the wolves in the first place.
Bramble watched it go.
“Bound tracking system,” he muttered. “We weren’t being attacked. We were being verified.”
The goat stomped a hoof. Not aggressively. Just once. Affirmation. Or annoyance. Or both.
Bramble sheathed the oathblade. It hummed quietly, satisfied. For now. He looked out across the plain. The echograss had gone still again. But the whisper lingered.
“The vowbreaker walks.”
It wasn’t accusing. It was reciting.
Bramble knelt and brushed the blades near his boot. The grass pulled back, ever so slightly. Like parchment curling beneath the warmth of an old inkpot.
He exhaled slowly. “This whole place is alive with leftover language.”
The goat snorted and began walking again, toward the next ridge. Bramble followed.
The terrain shifted with each step. The soil turned soft, then hard again. Glass shimmered beneath the surface, old spellglass veins, relics of divine infrastructure. Once, this had been a channel of pilgrimage, lined with audit-wards and echo beacons. The kind of path pilgrims used to chant down, spellsong rising to keep the wild magic quiet.
No one sang here anymore. No one spoke at all. The further they went, the more Bramble noticed it. Not silence.
Suppression.
There were sigils burned into the cliffsides, entire slabs of stone rewritten by runes designed to mute vibration. Cursed phrases held mid-syllable in glass fragments. He passed a ruined totem made entirely of mouths, stone mouths, metal mouths, even one made of bone, all sealed shut with gold thread.
He paused at that one. Curious. A single inscription carved beneath the base:
“This is what it took to forget.”
He stared at it a moment longer. Then kept walking.
They reached the ridge at twilight. Not the real twilight, this sky didn’t dim like it should. But something in the color changed. The wind slowed. The air cooled. And then they saw it.
Far below, across a stretch of broken hills and half-buried ruins, ringed in spell-light and silence barriers, stood a city. Angular. Sprawling. Cursed into stillness. Towers bent inward like listening horns. Gates held open by tension spells older than truth. No fire. No sound.
But from here, Bramble could feel it. The pressure. The invitation. The containment.
And above the city, carved into the wall of the distant ridge, the old phrase was visible at last:
THE CITY THAT DOESN’T SPEAK.
The goat bleated once. Not loudly. Not at all. But Bramble heard it.
Clear as a bell.