Ink flowed in smooth arcs as the young mage moved her quill, transcribing forgotten runes with a practiced grace. Her desk was a pool of light amidst a sea of shadow—candles burning low, the scent of melting wax mingling with dry parchment and dust older than kings.
She worked alone, as she preferred, surrounded by tomes bound in dragonhide and stitched with spells too dangerous for daylight. The deeper she went into the archives, the quieter the world became. She liked it that way—quiet made things clearer.
The world outside thought her cold. Distant. Brilliant, perhaps—but unreachable. What they didn't see was the fire under the ice, the way her fingers sometimes trembled over the parchment, not from fatigue, but from fear.
Because something was wrong with her magic.
It came too easily.
It obeyed too quickly.
It bent when it should not bend.
She had spent years studying the Eight Sigils—the ancient schools that formed the Pillars of Order: Pyra, Aere, Terran, Virel, Lumen, Umbra, Vitae, and Spiralis. Every mage bore the mark of one, sometimes two. It was how magic knew its shape, how it obeyed.
But her mark did not match any of them.
And now, on the eve of her graduation from the Collegium Arcanum, she still bore a sigil no Master could read.
She didn't sleep anymore. Not fully. She studied, researched, searched through restricted tomes by candlelight, always hoping for a whisper of familiarity.
Tonight, she found it.
A gust of air twisted through the hall—cold, sharp, and wrong. Her candle flickered, though the archive doors were sealed behind layers of glyphs and protective sigils. She looked up, stiffening, and saw it.
A book now lay in front of her.
She hadn't heard it fall. Hadn't seen it arrive. It simply… was.
Bound in ashen leather, worn but unmarked, it bore no title, no sigil, no Crest of Authorization.
Her fingers hovered above it.
The air around the book buzzed faintly, like static clinging to silk. She touched the cover, and the leather flexed—alive, somehow—and shifted.
A symbol surfaced.
Twisted lines, like a chained eye at the center of a broken circle.
She recoiled in her seat.
Eight sigils existed. She had studied them all.
This was none of them.
And yet it matched the mark she bore.
A tremor ran through her. She pulled open the collar of her robe, baring her collarbone. The skin glowed faintly, lines rising like molten iron. The very same twisted eye.
The same—
"Ninth…" she whispered, voice catching on the word like a knife on bone.
The book's pages flared open, as if exhaling. They flipped on their own until they stopped midway through. Blood-red ink glowed in the candlelight, forming a single line of text across the yellowed paper:
"She who bears the Ninth is the key and the curse."
She was shaking now. Not from cold.
From recognition.
Her name was Eris Thorne.
And tonight, the Ninth Sigil had answered her.
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High above the Vaulted City, atop the obsidian Spire of Council, a figure in silver robes turned from his star-bound telescope.
He pressed a hand to his chest. The air had changed. He felt it in his bones.
"She's awakened," he murmured.
Behind him, cloaked shadows shifted. "The sigil was locked away. Buried beneath silence and threat. It cannot be rising again."
The man—Archmaster Ilron Vael—closed his eyes.
"It never stopped rising," he said. "It only waited."
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In the dark below, the Archive groaned.
A wind like a scream coiled through its ancient halls, extinguishing flame after flame until only Eris's remained. Shadows slithered from the book's pages, congealing into a figure draped in smoke and whispers. No eyes. No face. Only the faint shape of a man long dead.
"You were not meant to see this," the thing said, voice like cracking stone.
"But it saw you."
Eris summoned flame to her palm—her magic surged, then sputtered. It recoiled from the presence.
"You cannot fight what sleeps in you, child. The Circle will come for you now. But you are not the first."
The figure began to fade, unraveling like cloth in fire.
"You are the last," it whispered.
And then it was gone.