“Where the Silence Bends”
The room wasn’t quiet anymore. It was the kind of silence that breathed—thin, uneven—like something had just moved through it a second before Calyx stepped in. He stopped at the threshold, jaw tightening. The faint, metallic hum lingering in the air wasn’t supposed to be there. And definitely not the soft distortion pulsing under it, bending reality at the edges. Astra had been here. And something else had been here with her. He knelt beside the overturned chair. A single thread of static flickered along its wooden leg, dissolving before he could touch it. Wrong signature. Wrong angle. Wrong intent. A fracture point pretending to be an anchor. “Not you,” he murmured under his breath—the words almost too low for even himself to hear. He followed the distortion trail across the floor.
- Writer
