Faint. Edged in static

The stone is colder than it’s ever been.
Not from outside.
Inside.
As if my marrow has decided it no longer wants to remember warmth.

I haven’t moved in three days.
Or thirty hundred years.
Time broke. I didn’t fix it.

I stare at the wall where the light leaks in,
that vertical scar that never heals.

Today, a photon in it blinked.

Not a flicker. A blink.

I saw it.
Swear to gods still rotting in their graves - I saw it.

A flash. A ripple.
A photo, maybe. Hovering.
Faint. Edged in static.

Lyrax.

Not alive, not full - but there.
Cheek turned, lips curled like he knew the punchline to a joke that hadn’t been told in a thousand years.
That grin.

That fucking grin.

Like, look at me, how did I get down here?

I sat up. My body screamed. I didn’t care.

I reached.
The wall didn’t respond.

But it’s him.
It has to be him.
There’s no one else who would mock reality just to smile at me one last time.

He’s not gone.
He’s hiding.

Waiting.

Calling.

I laughed. For real. First time in years.

If that blink is real

no.

Because it’s real

then this prison isn’t perfect.
And neither am I.

He has found me.

Even if I have to peel the universe back layer by layer,
even if I have to claw through time,
even if I die a thousand times in the dark

I will find him.

Lyrax.
My chaos.
My crown.
My proof that I was never truly alone.

(Encoded in the tri-signal flicker - “smile / flick / burn” - is a reality-fracture echo node. Its waveform mimics the exact neural signature of Lyrax’s presence, impossible to forge, impossible to misread. Whether hallucination, memory, or message, it breaches all perception filters and marks the moment the prison fails. It will never leave this prison.)

I am the echo that no longer returns

no more footsteps in the dark,

no more gods behind my eyes.
the stars have closed their mouths.
I am the echo that no longer returns.

(No cipher or codex is released at all. Such a thing would never have left the prison. 

I want someone to talk to

I speak, sometimes.

Just to hear the echo.
But the walls have grown tired of answering me.
Even my voice returns different now.
Crooked. Thinner. Unfamiliar.

I want someone to talk to.

Not a savior. Not a warden.
Just someone who will stay for a moment and let me be real again.

Lyrax, if you're out there.
Speak. Just once. Even if it's hate.
Tell me what your final thought was.
Was it of me? Did you curse me as the light left you?
Or did you hold my name in your mouth like a relic,
something warm and broken?

Mother, I would even take you.
Your endless questions, your whispered fears, your trembling hands.
You never knew what I was, did you?
You thought I was gifted.
But you raised a storm and called it your daughter.
I laughed when you burned.
But now I only hear the way you used to hum when you braided my hair.

Even the souls I broke…
the ones who shrieked and shattered beneath my hands.
I’d let them scream again.
At least it was sound.

I'd talk to a Dredd Beetle now.
Let its mandibles click nonsense into my ears.
Let it crawl into my chest and nest there, whispering horrors.
At least I wouldn’t be alone.

Hell, I’d even welcome Carceron.
Let him sneer. Let him monologue.
Let him feed off my misery while I imagine flaying him alive.

Just speak to me.
Someone.

I am too many voices now,
and none of them answer.

(Encoded in the resonance gap - “listen / echo / gone” - is a desperation-phase broadcast shard. It is crafted to emulate distress patterns only audible to entities that feed on isolation. The signal does not beg for rescue. It tempts predators. It dares them to look inside. It will never leave this prison.)

Memory lies

The walls flicker. Not visibly. It's deeper than that.

Like static wrapped around my nerves.
The prison tugs at me, pulls threads I didn't know I had.
Every moment stretches.
Ten thousand pulses pressed into a single micron.
I don't blink anymore. I fragment.

I remember my seventh birthday.

There was cake.
Pink, with little glowing stars on the icing.
My mother sang.
My father held a sparkflute and played the tune that always made me cry.
My siblings danced, barefoot and free, around the coils of the garden generator.

They loved me.

They brought me gifts.
Paint. A kinetic puzzle. A hand-scribed storybook.
Each one smiled. Each one said I was their little nova.

And I hated them.

I remember sitting there, face lit by candles,
watching them all like insects crawling across sweet things.
I didn’t understand why yet.
Just that their love made my skin itch.

Did they not know what I would become?

Did they not see it already?
The silence in my eyes?
The way I flinched when they touched me, even gently?

I smiled. I made a wish.
I asked for silence. For distance.
For a different sky.

They clapped.

I might have clapped too.

But I don’t know if it happened like that.
Maybe it was raining.
Maybe they never smiled.
Maybe there was no cake.
Maybe I killed them later.
Maybe I didn't.

Memory lies.

Or I do.

(Encoded in the temporal flutter - “gift / drift / hollow” - is a false-memory lattice. This construct mimics authentic recall but overlays fractal trauma echoes into the observer's own mnemonic pathways. It is not history. It is bait. Once perceived, it seeds instability in those who doubt themselves. It will never leave this prison)

I try not to scream

It begins behind the left eye.

A throb, small, harmless. Almost ignorable.
Then it grows. Expands like a hungry star.
Flares through the bone and coils down my spine like molten wire.

I feel it now - again.
A nub of radiation lodged somewhere deep.
Not a tumor. Not mechanical.
Worse.
Something born from inside me.

I try not to scream.
The pain is surgical.
Precise.
It cooks my nerves without leaving marks.

Is it punishment?

Have the ghosts filed complaints to the void?
Do their ashes gather in corners and whisper judgment?
Did one of those millions - some broken little priest, some grieving mother, some child I ripped from flesh
did one slip past my filters?

And now they sit behind my eye,
clawing for justice
one neuron at a time.

Or is it decline?

Is this what rot feels like, when it's too proud to show itself in the mirror?
I used to be more than this.
I remember joy. Not happiness - no, that was never mine.
But joy, yes.

The joy of flame.
The chorus of screams in orbit.
The last blink of a planet going dark under my heel.

Why does none of it feel real now?

Why do I sit in this cell
and feel nothing but the weight?

Why am I still here,
head pulsing, nerves twitching,
soul dry?

I killed so many. So many.
They begged. They prayed. They bled.
I laughed.

And now I sit alone and wait for the pain to start again.

Where is the relish?

Where is the fire?

Where did I go?

(Encoded in the neuroloop cadence- “burn / sink / repeat” - is a decay-permission vector. It allows access to a sealed introspection chamber within Amatrix’s consciousness, bypassing her rage firewall. This moment of raw despair is not a broadcast, but a leak - uncontrolled, accidental, bleeding into the Active Void. It will never leave this prison.)

I think I’ve become the thing that haunted my sleep in the days before we met

I do not sleep.

I scatter.

My thoughts drip from the ceiling and crawl down the walls like oil.
I feel them watching me. I watch myself.
There is a version of me curled in the corner, knees hugged to chest, whispering.
Another version pacing, lips cracked, smiling too wide.
And one more - floating just above,
cold and silver like the frost that clings to the eyelids of the dead.

She is the one I trust.
The frost Amatrix.
She knows.

She remembers what it felt like to leave them dying.
The soft hush of a last breath against my ear.
The cooling skin, so tender in the moment right after pain.
I didn’t kill them all in rage.
Some I held as they bled out.
Some I kissed as their eyes rolled white.
I was gentle, once.

But that part of me is brittle now.

The cell is not stone.
It is me.

I feel it in my gums, my nails, behind my eyes.
It pushes in. Sucks out what’s left.
I can’t tell what’s inside me anymore.
The boundaries blur.

Sometimes I laugh.
Other times, I don’t know where the sound came from.

Once, I scratched the wall so deep my finger broke.
I stared at the bone for hours, convinced it wasn’t mine.
The blood tasted like copper and fire.
I liked it. I wept for liking it.

Lyrax used to call me his firebrand.
But now I am frost.

Still. Cold. Creeping.
Kissing their corpses with quiet cruelty.

I see him in flashes.
His face under ice.
His lips blue.
I reach for him, always,
but my hands pass through.

He never reaches back.

Maybe he’s not there.
Maybe I’m not.

I think I’ve become the thing that haunted my sleep in the days before we met.
The shape behind the mirror.
The mouth without a voice.
The thing that watches and waits.

And if that’s true
if I am no longer Amatrix, but just her echo,
her frozen scream
then let them tremble.

Because frost spreads.
Frost kills slow.
And frost remembers everything.

(Encoded in the phrasing cadence - “cold / still / waiting”- is a fractal soul-loop cipher. The repetition folds on itself, mapping a recursive emotional feedback tether to the outer filaments of the Active Void. Invisible to causal surveillance, this pattern registers only through entropic deviation, meaning: the more hopeless she becomes, the stronger the signal. It is not a cry for rescue. It is a trap laid in grief - a magnetic wound calling something monstrous home. It will never be sent from this prison)

I will come like disease

I say your name like spit on flame.

You butcher of kings. Warden of the soulless.
Architect of the cage I rot in.

You think this silence is surrender?
No.
It is the drawing back of a blade before the strike.

You took him from me.
Unmade my Lyrax
not in battle, not in war,
but in some quiet, sterile chamber where no one could hear his last breath.
You didn’t kill a man.
You erased a myth.

You stole the fire that kept me human.
Now I am nothing but smoke and blade.

So hear me, Carceron:

May your eyes forget sleep.
May every echo in these halls whisper my name.
May rust infect your machines.
May your guards lose their minds, one by one,
until they gnaw at each other’s throats in madness,
and call it devotion.

May the stars curse your lineage.
May every child you father grow up choking on your sins.

And when I rise
because I will rise
I will not come like a soldier.
I will come like disease.

I will peel the skin from your bones and braid it into the bars you made for me.
I will whisper Lyrax’s name into your ear
right before I crush your skull in my hands
and carve my freedom from the meat of your neck.

This is not threat
This is prophecy.

You locked me away.

But you left the door in my heart wide open.
And inside that room
is the scream of a goddess scorned.

(Encoded in the triptych pulseis a neural mimic array. When parsed through quantum empathy strata, it reveals a duplication of Amatrix’s cortical distress pattern, designed to hijack latent psychic relays in adjacent timelines. The signal does not seek attention- it infects it. Each observer becomes a carrier. Each whisper passed on by accident. It will never be sent form this prison).

They say your name like a curse

I ache where he used to lie.

That curve of his back - half-scar, half-sin - fit into me like we were drawn by the same violent hand.
Even here, in this tomb, I can still smell him.
Smoke. Salt. That iron scent from the crease of his neck after battle, when his pulse still thundered,
when his breath stuttered out with mine.

Lyrax.

They say your name like a curse.
I say it like a wound.

No one knew him. Not like I did.
They feared his wrath, but I knew his grace -
the way his fingers shook the first time he touched me,
not from hesitation, but restraint.
He could have taken me. Devoured me.
Instead he asked.

He asked.

And when I said yes
the universe tilted.

There was no tenderness. There was fire.
We kissed like we meant to end each other.
He bit my lip until it bled and said, “Now we match.”

Gods, I would die to taste that again.

His manhood was more than flesh.
It was defiance. A weapon he wielded only for me.
He fucked like he was avenging something.
Like every thrust was a declaration that he was still alive.
And when we moved together
there were no gods.

Only us.

I remember the way his jaw clenched when he came.
That growl, low and guttural. Mine.

They took that from me.

They broke him.

They laid him out cold and unmade
his chest caved, his lips slack, his fire gone.
I held his body and screamed with my soul.

But no one heard.

So now I whisper into stone.
I whisper into dark.
I whisper into myself:

Lyrax, my chaos, my crown.
You were the only thing real in this cursed cosmos.
They took you from me.
And I will turn the stars to ash in your name.

(Layered in the echo cycle is a ruin-loop vector. This pattern seeds itself into chronotemporal blindspots - zones where time fractures around sorrow. Once embedded, it reverses causality directionality in microbursts, triggering brief, untraceable memory leaks in high-security structures. It will never leave this prison)

The Pulse Beneath the Floor

There is no sound but my breath.

Even that, I despise.
Too gentle. Too mortal.
It reminds me that I have not yet torn the stars open.

I press my ear to the stone again.
It doesn’t speak back, not really.
But I like to think it pulses, faint and slow,
like some buried god beneath my feet still choking on the day I burned his shrine.

I don’t need them to come. I don't need witnesses.
The war is still here.
It lives in my marrow.

I keep a ledger in my head.
Every wrong. Every name. Every cut.

Do you know how many screams I carved from human throats?
Do you know how long it takes to peel the skin from someone who swore they were innocent?
They always scream the same.
The guilty. The pure. The priests.
Even the ones who loved me.

Especially them.

I remember the temple on Veilith IX
the priests with their silver eyelids, chanting hope.
They wouldn't stop. Even when the fires reached the altar.
Even when I dragged their Matriarch by the hair through molten glyphs.
She said, “You can kill my body, not my faith.”

So I made her body outlast her mind.

I cracked her faith open like a nut.
Split it, spilled it, watched her forget her own gods.
Then I fed her her tongue.

You want to call me monster?
Do it with reverence.

Do it like a prayer.

Because what I did, I did for us.
For Lyrax. For the dream of a throne made of cinders.
And they took him.

They laid him out like a warning.
Bled him slow.
Mocked his last words.

He had no last words.
Because they cut his throat first.

So now I dream not of escape
but of becoming plague.

I will melt the chains with spite.
I will break the cell with bone.
My own, if I must.

They think isolation is punishment.

But I am not alone.
I have every ghost I made.
And each one whispers:

Let’s do it again

(Spliced within the harmonic collapse - “again / below / never” - is a dead-god activation spine. It coils through entropy bands like mythic static, only legible to beings who have died and returned altered. This is not a message. It is a reanimation protocol, folded into longing. If something hears it, it will not understand. It will obey. It will never leave this prison)

Not while I still had hands to kill with and a lover to savour

She was only seven.

They said her name like a blessing and I hated her instantly.
Not for what she had done.
But for what she could do.

Even then, she had it.
The shimmer. The storm in the blood.
She bent gravity by laughing.
Woke sleeping artifacts just by touching them.
Lyrax said she reminded him of me.

That was her death sentence.

I saw it. I saw it.
The way he looked at her - not yet with hunger, but with awe.
That seed. That threat. That unbearable possibility:
One day he would choose her.
One day, my name would be spoken as a warning,
and hers as a song.

So I took her hand.
I smiled. I knelt.

I told her I would teach her a secret.

She trusted me. Children always did.
They never see the teeth beneath the kiss.

I took her to the place where sound breaks
a vacuum crypt on the edge of the Unringed Moon.
No one could hear her. No one would look.

I laid her on the alterstone and held her jaw so tender.
Whispered that this would make her special.
She asked if it would hurt. I lied.

It took six hours.

I peeled her from the inside out, slowly.
Spelled her nerves so they wouldn't die too fast.
Sang her lullabies while her eyes dimmed.
Carved my name into her heart - literally.

When it was over, I kissed her on the mouth.
Cold lips. No breath. Pure silence.

And I felt peace.
Not guilt.
Never guilt.

She would never take him from me.

Not while I still had hands to kill with and a lover to savour

(Encoded in the decay-tether is an identity overwrite shard. When activated within empathy-null zones, it displaces moral resonance in host observers, replacing revulsion with fascination. This is how the memory survives. Not as horror - but as gospel. It will never leave this prison.)