第7章 The Last Match

The other side of the threshold was silence.

Not the silence of a sleeping city. Not the silence of a held breath, of a pause before something that had been building all night finally arrived. This was the silence of a place where sound had never existed, where the concept of sound was as foreign as the concept of warmth, where the very idea of vibration traveling through air had been forgotten so completely that even the memory of noise could not survive here. It was not empty silence. It was full silence. Silence that had been accumulating for millennia, layer upon layer, until it became a substance rather than an absence. Silence that pressed against Elin’s ears and her chest and the space behind her eyes with the weight of everything that had never been said in a place where there was no one to say it.

She opened her eyes.

The landscape of fractured winters stretched before her, and it was vaster than the vision had shown. The vision had been a window. This was the room. The vis