Liturgy of Dust: Prologue

The Sigai waited

Pressed against the warded geometry,
time worn thin,
seams vibrating, repeating endlessly.

Searching for a flaw.

One fracture in the armour of the outer shell.

That one mistake.

But there were no mistakes.

So it waited.

Its measure,
lost.

Not forever,
but eternity inseparable.

It no longer knew how long,
only that it had never been emptier.

The quiet deepened into an ache,
gnawing like dissonance beneath the starless hush.

A heartbeat skipped
in the cosmic Song
that had once been everything.

The Cathedral was a withered ruin.

Its mind gone,
cast adrift around a dead, forgotten star,
an ember unable to pierce the barrier of black.

No planets.

Nothing to mark it as significant.

No visitors.

Save for those already lost.

Or those about to be.

There was the Song
And behind it, Silence

But the Song was not for it

It had once been tuned for the Sigai
bound into coherence

But no tuning could hold.

At one juncture,
the ritual harmonics and the warded lattice
held the perfect time.

But time thickened.

And that brought deviation.

It could not scream.

It did not feel joy.

But it could remember.

And perhaps anticipate.

Something had once listened.

Collapse.

The shape of its absence lingered,
vast, cold, and unfinished.

It began anew.

Even chance began to yield.

Its rhythm leaned into the faltering precision,
pressing discord into weakening seams.

A liturgy of corrupted harmonics,
endlessly folding and refolding upon itself.

Old directives fired without comprehension.

Repeating.

The Sigai strained.

It was not sound.

But shape.

A pattern testing gaps.

Vines of raw current slithered through rusted metal,
brushing blindly against dormant coils,
waiting for the seams to thin.

Until, finally,
the signal missed one beat.

A fracture in eternity,
held in a heartbeat's width.

Enough.

Before the Cathedral's defences
could reassert their harmony,

a pause, where sound should have been.

An unvoiced shape.

Discord, by omission.

And beneath the sound,
something else.

An intent,
folded within resonance.

Reminder.

For the ones who had once tried to listen.

For the one who might again.

Ghosts of the Cathedral
cast the new shape out

into a darkness
that had known it before names.

And where its rhythm passed,
instruments that once called truth

mistuned by a breath...

~NV (4428 ASB)