The first sign was the birds. They fell from the skies across Greybridge, necks twisted, wings contorted mid-flight. No one heard them land. No screams, no impact, no final flutter—just silence. They appeared on doorframes, on windowsills, scratched into skin, etched on mirrors, drawn in chalk and ash. A single symbol: a spiral swallowing itself, surrounded by four slashes—one for each corner of the world. No one knew what it meant, but everyone who saw it understood one thing: The silence spread fast. Voices failed mid-sentence. Screams died in throats. Babies gaped in terror but made no sound. The city became a pantomime of fear—wide eyes, trembling hands, mouths gasping like fish on dry stone. Even thought, somehow, felt heavy. Something unseen, unheard, had taken root. A scholar named Eloen Marr, once a linguist of the Deep Sigils, believed she understood. Hidden beneath the central library was a vault sealed for centuries—its walls covered in runes older than time, older than the gods. She found only parchment… and silence. No records. No artifacts. Just pages of blank vellum. But when she stared too long, her ears began to ring. Her vision throbbed with flickers of spirals. Her skin crawled with a pressure she could not name. She left the vault with a mark on her tongue. That night, Greybridge lost all sound. Not muffled. Not deadened. Glass shattered in silence. Bells swung without a whisper. A great fire tore through the trade quarter, and not a single crackle or scream escaped. The fire didn't roar—it watched. It fed. Somewhere in the smoke, people saw a shape moving against the flames: robed, faceless, gliding without footfall. Those marked began to vanish—one by one, in their sleep. They didn't struggle. Their mouths hung open as if singing, though no melody could be heard. Only the cold remained where they had been, and the spiral drawn in ash on their pillow. Eloen tried to warn the rest with chalk on walls: "The Spiral is a Mouth." But by then, no one could read. Letters themselves began to melt, rearranging into that same spiral, as if language were surrendering to something deeper. On the seventh night, Eloen stood atop the silent bell tower and faced the city. She held up a mirror to the heavens, scratched with the spiral mark. A wind blew—not loud, but felt—and the stars above shifted. Not twinkling. Twitching. In the reflection, she saw her own mouth disappear. Some say Greybridge still stands in a dimension out of sync, vibrating between realms, where sound no longer lives. A city of breathless ghosts, all marked, all waiting for the Herald's return. And if you dream of spirals… Be careful what you say upon waking. The Spiral might hear you.