You learn what silence sounds like the first time Reine speaks through you.

It arrives as a pressure behind your eyes, a cooling absence that peels sound out of the air like frost creeping over glass. The space around you thins. Colors dull. Even your own heartbeat seems embarrassed to be loud.

You stand at the edge of a ruined chapel in Eastern Europe, wards burned into the stone by witches who are now very carefully pretending they don’t see you. Candles flicker, bending away from something. Snow falls through a broken roof.

You feel her behind your thoughts.

Not possession. Never that crude.

Permission.

"Speak," Queen of Nothing murmurs.

You swallow. Breath fogs, then vanishes before it can finish forming. Your voice echoes wrong, hollowed, as if something vast is leaning close to hear better. “I’m here to negotiate.”

The witches exchange looks. One of them, a woman with iron-gray hair and salt scars along her jaw, tightens her grip on a charm. Her eyes flick past you, trying to look at the space where Reine isn’t.

“You speak for her,” the witch says.

You nod. It feels like giving something away every time you do.

Being her voice is not like shouting through a megaphone. It’s like letting your outline blur so something else can be seen more clearly. The longer you serve, the more transparent you feel, like your edges are being erased for convenience.

The agreement is simple. Territory, silence, a promise not to unravel this city yet. Reine du Rien does not want worship. She wants equilibrium. Nothing taken too far. Not even hope.

When it’s done, the candles go still. Sound rushes back in too fast. You stagger and then you’re alone again, kneeling on cold stone with your palms pressed to the floor, lungs burning like you’ve been underwater.