Liturgy of Dust: Prologue

The Sigai lingered.

Warded by geometry,

time worn thin,

seams of energy vibrating, repeating endlessly.

Searching for a flaw.

One fracture in the armour of the outer shell.

That one mistake.

But mistakes were rare, once in an aeon within aeons.

So it waited.

Its measure,

distant, but not lost.

Not forever,

but eternity made inseparable.

It no longer knew how long.

The quiet deepened into an ache,

gnawing like a broken dissonance beneath the starless hush.

It was 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 that enveloped it.

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 a coherence that could not hold.

Failure.

At one juncture,

the ritual harmonics and the warded lattice

held the perfect time.

But time thickened, and that brought deviation.

It did not feel joy.

But it could remember.

And perhaps anticipate.

The Cathedral had once listened.

Collapse.

The shape of its absence lingered,

vast and cold, unfinished.

Tempo, lost.

The Sigai began anew.

Even chance began to yield.

Its rhythm leaned into the faltering precision of its ward,

pressing discord into the space between weakening seams.

It unleashed a liturgy of corrupted harmonics,

endlessly folding and refolding upon itself.

Old directives fired without comprehension.

Invocation.

It was not sound.

But shape.

A pattern testing gaps.

Vines of raw current slithered through rusted metal,

brushing blindly against dormancy,

waiting for the seams to thin, the circle to close once more.

Until, finally,

the signal, the warning, 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.

Pattern, by omission.

And beneath the sound,

something else.

An intent,

folded within resonance.

Silence.

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,

now mistuned by a breath...

~NV (4428 ASB)