Chapter Two: Scrivener's Sleep
Scene 1: Echo Traces
Narein didn't sleep long. When he opened his eyes again, only minutes had passed. The room was still and cold, the kind of stillness that followed a name being spoken too loud in a place it shouldn't exist.
He sat up, heart thudding in his chest like a bell struck under water.
His cot creaked as he stood. The Inkstone Chapel's dormitory was dark except for the moonlight filtering through narrow panes. Around him, the other apprentices breathed slowly, untouched by whatever had pressed against his thoughts.
He looked to the small slate beside his bed, where he scribbled stray insights in the night. A word was written there in his own hand:
> Kharveth.
He didn't remember writing it.
Didn't remember ever hearing it.
But it was a name. That much he could feel, and it wasn't his.
He quickly wiped it away.
Then paused.
When he blinked again, the word had returned. Same curve, same pressure, same signature of his own hand. As if it had never been erased at all.
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Scene 2: Morning Redacted
At morning bell, Narein joined the others in the mess hall. Porridge and rationed tea. Conversations low, brief, always in earshot of someone else.
Sister Elith sat at the far table, reading a scroll half-concealed behind a privacy glyph. Her expression never changed.
No one mentioned the storm that had howled through Ilharin before dawn.
No one acknowledged the two empty cots in the apprentice wing.
Narein didn't ask.
He stirred his porridge slowly, watching it congeal. The silence around him wasn't absence of noise—it was compression. As if everyone was trying not to think the same thing.
When the bell rang again, he made his way to the eastern hall for his assigned cleaning shift. As he walked the long corridor of cracked statues, he passed a figure dressed in black mourning robes—head covered, hands clasped.
They whispered as they passed:
> "It saw you. That's enough."
He turned.
The corridor was empty.
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Scene 3: The Red Archive
His shift had been altered.
Instead of sanitation duty, a new scroll instructed him to report to Archivist Yurel in the sublevel Red Archive—an area typically off-limits to initiates.
He obeyed.
The spiral stairwell into the sublevel was deeper than he expected. The deeper he went, the more oppressive the silence became. His Veilband warmed faintly at his wrist, reacting to the ambient pressure of warding glyphs layered through the stone. A faint hum rose in his ears, too low to name.
At the bottom, a door of flesh-colored wood waited. A single eye glyph blinked once as he approached, then vanished.
Inside: shelves of sealed boxes, some iron, some bone. The walls were stitched with copper veins that pulsed faintly.
Yurel sat at a central desk beneath a dome of quartz. She was younger than he'd expected—hair cropped short, hands ink-stained. Her eyes had a sleepless sheen.
"You're here," she said, without looking up. "Good. Copy this."
She slid a worn folio toward him. It was marked 5V.
Narein hesitated. "Archivist… I was assigned yesterday to a 7V scroll."
Yurel stopped moving. Her fingers twitched once.
"No, you weren't," she said. Calmly. Coldly. "Your assignment yesterday was to clean dormitory floors."
"But—"
"You were not in Scriptorium Nine."
She looked at him now. Really looked. Her pupils were pinpricks.
"Understand?"
He swallowed. "Yes, Archivist."
"Good. Remember it that way."
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Scene 4: Black Ink, White Fire
He began copying.
The script was old—pre-Synod dialect, with markings meant to suppress comprehension. He didn't understand it, but as he copied, parts of it sank into him, like iron filings into cloth.
After the fourth page, his hand began to twitch.
He stopped.
The ink in his inkwell was rippling.
He looked up. Yurel was gone.
A different figure stood across the room—hooded, robed in the mourning-black of the scribes who transcribe death notices.
Its hand lifted and made a small turning motion.
The door slammed shut.
Narein's Veilband cracked.
> The glyphs on the page blinked.
One line rose, pulsed, then burned away, leaving a smear of white fire behind his eyes.
He saw the tower again.
This time it opened.
He stepped forward—no, was pulled forward—into it. The stone beneath his feet pulsed like living tissue. A narrow spiral staircase led upward, vanishing into darkness. Along the walls: glyphs that whispered to each other, that remembered when they'd last been read.
He saw someone descending the stairs. Or not someone. Not quite.
A figure, featureless, cloaked in the sound of turning pages. It carried a lantern made from a human skull, and its eyes burned with script.
> "You looked," it said.
The sound was not sound.
> "You remembered."
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Scene 5: Exit Veiled
When he woke, he was lying on the cold stone of the archive.
Yurel stood over him, a scent of salt and burning candles in the air.
"You copied too fast," she said.
He wanted to ask who the figure was. What he'd seen. What had burned.
But his throat was dry. His thoughts drifted like broken leaves.
She handed him a flask of bitterroot tonic.
"You'll feel hollow for a day or two," she said. "Don't dwell."
He nodded and left.
As he climbed the stairs, he noticed the walls now bore a new glyph.
A mirrored eye. Watching.
Just like the one on his slate.
Just like the one in the tower.
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Scene 6: Fragment
That night, Narein returned to his cot and found a slip of paper under his pillow.
No signature. No seal.
> "The Name of Your Shadow is not a question."
> "It is a warning."
He turned it over. On the back, a glyph began to write itself. Not with ink, but with condensation.
> "A shadow remembered becomes a door."
> "A door remembered becomes a voice."
> "A voice forgotten becomes you."
The paper crumbled into salt in his hands.
He didn't sleep.
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