The city of Eostera was not made for walking at midnight. Not for the likes of Lucien Varro.
Shadows clung to the brick walls like ink stains, and the gas lamps flickered with a sputtering rhythm that almost seemed coded—warnings written in Morse by flame. Lucien’s boots struck the cobblestones with a quiet determination as he headed deeper into the city’s old quarter, following no map but the pull in his bones.
The summons had been clear: Come alone. Do not write your name.
He had considered writing it anyway, testing the edge of the warning. But something in the book’s whisper—less voice than intent—had wrapped around his spine and said no. Not yet.
A sudden gust of wind pulled at his coat, and for a moment, Lucien could have sworn the street behind him folded inward, the shadows snapping shut like pages in a closing book.
He didn’t turn.
Instead, he reached the alley behind the old blacksmith’s forge—a long-abandoned workshop that now served as nothing more than a graffiti-covered husk. The air was colder here. Stiller. As if breath itself had been exiled.
Lucien placed his palm on the stone wall.
The glyph from the book burned faintly in his mind’s eye, and as he whispered its rhythm—a sequence of syllables that felt like swallowing sand—the bricks shifted.
A door appeared where there had been none.
It was not made of wood or metal, but of ink—frozen mid-drip, its surface writhing subtly like a living oil painting.
Lucien hesitated. He reached out, touched it.
The door accepted him.
It did not swing open. It simply let him in.
What lay beyond was not a room, but a descent.
There was no staircase.
Lucien was falling.
Not through air, but through thought. The sensation was vertical, yet he remained upright. Light flared and vanished around him in jagged pulses, like the afterimages of ideas never fully formed.
Then: ground.
He landed softly on stone, though no fall had truly occurred. A long, circular corridor stretched before him, lined with mirrors blacker than pitch. Each one reflected not his form, but a possibility—fragments of himself in clothes he’d never worn, bearing expressions he’d never made, walking paths he hadn’t taken.
He forced his eyes forward.
The passage narrowed into an arched entrance veiled in shadow, beyond which lay a wide chamber carved of something ancient—bone, or fossilized ink. The air inside pulsed softly, as though the chamber breathed.
Lucien stepped forward.
Nine figures sat around a circular table in absolute silence. Their robes were colorless, shifting between shades of gray like the sky before a storm. Each face was hidden behind a mask—one of feathers, another of glass, one a rusted clockface frozen at midnight.
No one spoke.
Then the clock-mask turned toward him.
“You have touched the First Glyph,” the voice echoed, mechanical and wet. “You have seen through the Skin of the World.”
Lucien tried to reply, but his voice caught in his throat.
Another figure, the one with a mask made entirely of quills, leaned forward.
“You are not yet one of us. Not until you sign with something more than ink.”
A blade appeared on the table before Lucien—slender, ritualistic, its edge inscribed with runes that crawled like ants.
Blood, he understood.
But before he could act, a soft whisper rose from behind him. Not a voice—more like a breath, warm against the nape of his neck.
“Do not obey.”
Lucien turned sharply. No one stood there.
But the whisper remained.
“Choose the Unwritten Path.”
The chamber flickered.
The masked figures turned to each other, murmuring in a tongue older than the city.
Lucien reached for the blade.
Lucien’s fingers brushed the blade.
It was cold, unnaturally so, and yet it did not bite skin—only memory. Images flashed behind his eyes: his childhood room, his mother’s perfume, a white-gloved hand reaching through smoke. Things he had forgotten. Things he had buried.
“Bleed, and become one of the Bound,” the clock-mask intoned.
Lucien’s heart pounded.
But the whisper returned, stronger now, curling around his ears like a serpent.
“There is a way between.”
He froze.
His instinct screamed to obey the figures before him—to follow the script, to join the rite. But the book… the book had never promised a path of safety. Only truth, raw and devouring.
Lucien let go of the blade.
Instead, he pulled from his coat a sliver of paper—the page he had torn from the ancient tome in Chapter 2. The glyph upon it shimmered with a new light now, a light that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.
The masked figures recoiled.
“He bears the Unchained Word.”
“That path is forbidden.”
“It leads to the Fourth Chamber—unsanctioned.”
Lucien spoke for the first time.
“Then I will walk it.”
The chamber shook. The walls wept ink. Mirrors behind him shattered inwards, revealing staircases made of language—sentences that formed steps, grammar that twisted into bridges.
The masked council stood in unison.
But none stopped him.
As Lucien stepped onto the shifting staircase, he felt something press into his mind—not an entity, not a thought, but a concept: a truth so vast it could only be understood in fragments.
The whisper returned once more, now within him.
One of the Forgotten hears you. The Echo has begun.
The staircase folded out of the chamber, up into a void of stars. Below, the chamber and its masked denizens vanished into a blur of memory.
Lucien ascended, alone, but no longer unbound.
He had not signed in blood.
He had chosen the unscripted.
And the Echo was listening.