The Weight of Silence
The light in Aeon Lumen never dims, never wavers, never once concedes to shadow. It falls instead in perpetual, honeyed shafts through groves of trees that bear fruit no mortal tongue could name, gilding every petal and blade of grass until the whole garden seems carved from a single, breathing gem. Liora has walked this place ten thousand times and still it steals something from her chest each time she enters—not breath, for she needs none, but a kind of ache that lives beneath the sternum, a longing for something the beauty promises but never quite delivers.
Today the ache curdles into something else entirely.
She stands at the edge of the Circle of Judgment, where the grass gives way to marble the color of moonlight on water, worn smooth by centuries of bare angelic feet. Seven pillars ring the space, each crowned with a Seraph robed in white so pure it seems to drink the surrounding light rather than reflect it. At the center of the circle, suspended in a lattice of golden chains that hum with a low, funereal tone, hovers a soul.
It takes the shape of a young man, or what a young man's soul remembers of shape—translucent, trembling, the vague outline of someone who once had…
