The summons arrived in silence.
No courier. No footsteps. Just a sealed envelope on Ien's desk where moments before, there had been nothing.
The wax bore the sigil of the Archive Overseer—a three-eyed owl circled by thirteen stars. Ien stared at it for a moment, then broke the seal. Inside, a single sentence written in a sharp, hurried hand:
"Report to the Cartographium. Sub-wing D. Immediately."
The Cartographium wasn't on any floor map. He'd never been there, nor met anyone who had. It was the kind of place that existed only in whispers, if at all.
He descended through levels he'd never walked before, past forgotten shelves, dead language vaults, and stairwells with doors that had been sealed shut with melted bronze. The torches on the walls here didn't flicker—they hummed, trapped in a glow that felt artificial, like someone had convinced the darkness to leave temporarily.
At the end of a hallway that bent just slightly wrong, he found a faded archway with a cracked plaque:
Cartographium – Epochal Map Records & Discrepant Realities
No door. Just a thin layer of mist beyond the arch.
He stepped through.
The air inside was still and dry, like parchment sealed for centuries. The room stretched wider than the Archive should physically allow. Endless rows of standing mapcases, crystal globes, and blackboards filled with shifting constellations surrounded him.
At the center stood a stained-glass dome—broken, as if something had burst through it from within. The shattered panes lay untouched on the floor, glowing faintly in the dim light.
Ien moved closer.
The glass depicted saints—each framed in radiant halos, robes flowing, faces serene. But they didn't match any religion he knew. Their names were etched in glyphs that resisted being read, shifting subtly whenever he tried to focus.
One of the saints held a spiral in one hand and a blank book in the other.
Ien's heart skipped.
The face… was his.
Not just similar—his. Down to the scar on his chin, the curve of his brow, the mark of the Spiral now burned into his palm.
He stumbled back, breath caught.
Behind the glass lay a massive map, pinned across the far wall like a tapestry. But it was moving.
A living map.
Rivers shifted. Mountains rose and sank. Cities blinked in and out like dying embers. Names wrote themselves, erased, and rewrote in different tongues.
One route pulsed faintly in silver.
A thin, winding line labeled:
The Spiral Vein.
And below it, in ink that shimmered like oil:
Epoch Unaligned. Origin Unknown.
Ien stepped closer.
As he did, the ink rippled—and the name changed.
Ien Solmir's Path
He reached out.
The moment his finger touched the map, pain lanced through his skull—sharp and absolute. Images poured into his mind, too fast to hold, too vivid to ignore. He saw a tower built from broken watches, each one ticking in reverse, their hands grinding against time itself. He glimpsed a choir—faces veiled, mouths stitched shut—humming a single note that shook the sky. A man writhed, nailed to a mirror that reflected only futures that never came to pass. There was a spiral staircase, twisting downward through layers of memory, and at the end of it, a hand—his hand—reached into a world that screamed the moment it was touched.
He fell to one knee.
A soft voice echoed behind him.
"You weren't meant to see that yet."
He turned.
A woman in gray stood at the dome's edge, her eyes covered in silk.
She smiled, gently, like someone watching a flame behave for the first time.
"My name is Tessaline," she said. "And you're bleeding into places you shouldn't."