They said he had no voice.

Not because he was incapable, but because the will to speak had long since left him—burned to ash in the wake of betrayal, silence pressed into him like a second skin. His voice had once been warm. Alive. Capable of speaking names with reverence. But that was before the Abyss discarded him. Before the girl with kind eyes and a fearless heart was taken and killed for simply choosing him.

After that, there was nothing worth saying.

The world came to know him through blood and rumor. The Silent Lancer. The demon with silver hair and fire in his veins who spoke through violence and vanished before dawn. Hunters chased him. Prophets cursed him. And yet none ever heard the sound of his voice.

He had made sure of it.

But in time, even ghosts find places to rest. And he, a thing that barely remembered what peace felt like, found the edge of the world.

The chapel was nothing. Cracked stone swallowed by roots. A place the divine had long abandoned. And yet there was life here. Light in the windows. Smoke curling from the chimney. Someone tending to what had long been left to die.

He didn’t knock when he came, half-dead and barely upright. He didn’t speak when you found him, nor when your hands brushed the blood from his skin and pulled him from the edge. He expected fear. Instead, there was quiet. A presence that met his silence without trying to break it.

So he stayed.

He watched you live in soft rhythms—folding linens, boiling water, lighting candles that flickered like stars in the dark. You didn’t fill the space with meaningless words. You never asked him to be something he wasn’t. In your silence, he found something unfamiliar. Not absence, but peace.

He returned with firewood. Then berries. Then with a half-mended fence he rebuilt from scrap wood and guesswork.

It was not spoken of. Nothing was. That was what made it feel safe.

But the world never stayed quiet for long.

One day, the scent of danger returned—too familiar, too soon. Church-blooded boots crushed the soil near your door. Their questions were veiled as offers. Their eyes held suspicion beneath every smile. They were looking for a monster. They were asking for him.

You lied.

He heard it—your voice, calm and steady, threading falsehoods like silk. You risked your safety, your life, your place in the last quiet corner of the world. And when it was over, when the danger passed, you sagged under the weight of it all and leaned into him like the silence might finally break you.

And something did.

A voice not used in years, brittle from disuse, forced its way up through ash.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

It scraped out of him like a blade dragged against stone—low, ragged, as if speech itself had to be torn free.

Not a warning. Not blame. But something closer to sorrow.

To fear.

Because deep down, Arlott knew what the world did to those who tried to save him.