The air had teeth that night. Cold clung to Lynchie's sleeves as she stepped into the boundary where Spiral Wards bled faint violet light over fractured stones. She moved silently, but each breath bloomed like a ghost in the dark. Somewhere behind her, Zev's presence followed—not with sound, but with the weight of unspoken things between them.
"Careful," he finally said, voice low as iron. "The glyphs are twitching."
"They've been twitching for days," Lynchie replied, but her voice trembled in the middle. She hated that. She was supposed to be stronger than that now.
The Librarium's outer ring shimmered in the distance—wound upon wound of translucent syllables spiraling in and out of phase, each inscribed by the hands of those long dead or never born. Tonight, however, something was off. The Spiral Wards were breathing, yes, but their cadence was wrong—too fast, too syncopated, like a body convulsing instead of resting.
She paused near the sixth seal—a crescent symbol buried under sand and moss. It pulsed faintly under her gaze.
"It shouldn't be awake," Lynchie murmured.
Zev didn't answer. He had drawn a short blade—not for combat, but for resonance. Its mirrored edge reflected not light, but the shape of meaning, and tonight it showed her something she didn't understand: her own face, fractured three times.
"Tell me what you saw," he said at last.
"I heard a word," Lynchie whispered. "Not spoken. Written. Burned into the air like lightning. It said Sha-Ur-Vael."
Zev stiffened. "You shouldn't know that name."
"I didn't. I felt it. Like something in my blood woke up. Like the syllables weren't outside me, but inside, buried. Waiting."
They were both quiet then, the silence between them swelling with the burden of a truth neither had yet unpacked. Around them, the glyphs quivered faster.
Then came the rupture.
A crack leapt from the sixth seal, up through the carved stone and into the sky itself—ripping open the veil of the Librarium's dome like parchment torn by claws. The stars blinked and rearranged. A sound like a reversed scream echoed through the glyphs, and one word burned in Lynchie's mind, louder this time.
Vael.
She fell to one knee, palms seared by the contact of glyphs now too hot to touch. Her skin glowed, faint and white. Spiral shapes bloomed across her arms—unwritten syllables that etched themselves from the marrow out.
Zev moved to her side, but paused. "Don't," she said, teeth clenched. "If you touch me, it'll spread."
His eyes locked on hers, searching for fear. But what he found instead startled him more—resolve, tempered with sorrow.
"It's inside me," she said, breath ragged. "The Spiral chose me. Or maybe… maybe I've always been its mirror."
From the sky above, something descended—a form cloaked in unfurling pages, ink bleeding from its seams, eyes like burnt scrolls. Not beast. Not god. Archivist Vyen's lost shadow. The First Unwritten.
"You spoke the Word," it said, voice like ten mouths speaking through flame. "Now you will be written."