---
The dream began again.
Not as sound, not even as vision. It started with the texture of ash — not burning, but settled. And beneath that, silence.
Then, ink dripping. One drop. Then another.
Narein opened his eyes in the dark.
His cot creaked beneath him as he sat upright in the apprentice dormitory, cold sweat sticking the linen of his robe to his skin. He didn't remember falling asleep. He didn't remember dreaming. Yet the sensation lingered.
His fingers tingled.
He pulled the covers aside and noticed ink-stains on his palms.
Not from training. He hadn't copied today.
Still disoriented, Narein glanced toward the far wall. The glyph-dampening lamps had all gone cold — unusual. They were supposed to pulse faintly all night.
Across the dormitory, four other apprentices lay still, breathing shallowly. Yurel's cot was empty. Again.
He rose quietly. His footsteps were barely a whisper as he crossed the floor and opened the dormitory door into the under-hall.
The silence outside was too deep. Not comforting, but carved — as if something had taken a blade to the normal texture of noise and scraped it clean.
Narein walked.
His Veilband throbbed once, a dull copper pulse. It shouldn't have. He hadn't done anything disobedient.
Unless the ink-stains counted.
---
The map had only appeared once before — sketched in moonlight, a reflection on an unmarked page in his copybook. He hadn't meant to notice it. But now, as he descended the next corridor, his fingers twitched again. They knew where to go.
Down a second hallway. Past the prayer alcove. Left, not right. The seventh wall.
It was supposed to be flat stone.
It wasn't.
Under the pale spill of the moon through the high, iron-latticed window, a faint outline gleamed in dust — a rectangular seam in the wall.
Narein pressed his palm to it.
The glyph flared. Not one he'd ever been taught — a warped spiral of lines that shimmered with shadow.
The wall slid aside without sound.
---
The Suppressed Script Room had no recorded designation.
No lamps. No sigils of permission.
But the moment Narein stepped inside, he remembered being here.
Though his memories told him otherwise.
The chamber was circular, its walls layered with sealed scrolls and broken tablets — each bound with black-threaded glyph-strips. The scent of old ink and faint ozone clung to the air.
In the center: a low pedestal, cracked and stained.
And a mural.
It stretched from floor to ceiling on the curved far wall, painted not in color but in shades of ink. It depicted twenty-seven scribes, all faceless. Hooded. Kneeling before a central figure whose robes melted into the darkness behind them. No eyes, no hands — just a floating quill and a halo of open books.
Narein's breath caught. His legs nearly failed.
One of the kneeling scribes bore his face.
He moved closer. Closer.
The Veilband on his wrist sparked — then fizzled. The glyphs along its surface turned inward, like eyes closing.
He reached out.
As his fingertips grazed the figure's face, the ink shimmered. The scribe turned — in the painting — just slightly. The angle of the hood shifted.
A whisper brushed Narein's ears, as though it had bypassed air entirely:
> "You knelt once. You will again."
He stumbled back.
And the whisper did not stop. It slid into his thoughts like oil into water.
---
He sat against the wall for what felt like hours, trying to regulate his breathing, focus, suppress the tremor in his limbs.
He was being drawn into something. A script he hadn't written. A play that already remembered its ending.
His skin itched. No — burned.
He looked down.
A glyph was searing itself into his forearm.
Not carved. Written — by invisible ink. The lines formed backward, as if remembering themselves onto his body.
He pressed a sleeve over it and stood. He had to leave. Before someone found him. Before something else found him first.
But as he turned, he realized he was not alone.
A woman stood at the doorway.
---
Sister Elith Varn.
Her robes bore the sigil of the Red Archive. Her gaze was calm, her lips tight. She held no lamp, and yet she navigated the room without hesitation.
"Apprentice Narein," she said, voice low and melodic. "You walk too far for your Veil."
"I didn't—"
"You did."
She stepped toward the mural. "Do you recognize this?"
He opened his mouth, but no answer came.
"Good," she said. "Don't say it aloud."
She walked along the edge of the room, trailing a gloved hand along the ancient scrolls. "This chamber is not forbidden. It is forgotten. There's a difference. The Synod erases what it cannot bind. But not everything stays erased."
Narein tried to still the storm inside his chest. "Why do I remember this place?"
She tilted her head. "Perhaps because part of you was written here."
---
Elith led him out without scolding, without warning — only a single statement:
"If it writes again, don't resist. Ink that flows once will seek its conclusion."
---
Back in the dormitory, Yurel had returned. She said nothing when he entered. Only watched him.
Later that night, when all others were asleep, she whispered:
"You touched it, didn't you?"
He froze.
"I see the glyph on your arm. Don't hide it."
Slowly, he pulled back his sleeve. The mark had solidified into something spiraled, interlocked — like an eye. Half open. Half asleep.
Yurel didn't flinch. "You're waking it up. Whatever it is. It'll remember you next."
Then she rolled over and said nothing else.
---
That night, the dream came again.
Not ash this time.
Ink. Boiling. Screaming. Wanting to be written.
And the mural scribe — himself — opened his eyes.
> "You knelt once. You will again."
This time, he whispered back:
> "Then let me remember why."
---