Elias woke to the scent of cinnamon and ashes.
He had no idea how he got into bed or how he made it to the dormitories. Everything was a blur from the night he. . .well he didn't know what happened. The dormitory around him was still, everyone had either left or was sleeping quietly. He laid motionless in his cot, the lullaby still curling through his ears. A woman's voice – low, broken, full of mourning.
He did not know her and yet he felt he spent his nineteen years with her. Her name bloomed in his mouth before he could stop it.
"Mireya."
He whispered it like something forbidden. Elias knew he should get to work. The Red Watchmen do not accept tardiness no matter the reason. But his limbs felt unusually heavy like he's getting pulled slowly down into oblivion.
Deeper and deeper he thought about it, the more he felt as though he was not him. He pushes himself up with a dull ache rippling through his ribs as he does. Ignoring the pain he swings his legs off the bed and stands.
***
Elias on his break went to "Tomb". It is where all the memories are stored from scribes long before him and probably after him. Elias pulled the registry from its shelf – a great tome bound in cracked leather, breathing faintly under his fingers. He turned the pages until they blurred, searching. There was no Mireya. No entry, no mention, no trace. It was as if the name had been devoured.
Frustrated, he trudged back to his desk to write, the ink resided with him. The quill hovered over the page – then moved. Slowly. Elegantly. Without his command.
Crimson lines curled across the parchment like vines in bloom, delicate and deliberate.
You were loved. You were not forgotten.
His breath hitched.
The words were not his, but they knew him. They sank into the paper with reverence, like eulogies at a grave that had no stone.
Gone were the gloves. His bare hands glowed with a quiet red sheen, ink soaking through the grooves of his skin like blood that refused to clot. He scrapped at it. Rubbed until his palms stung. But the ink would not leave.
Elias panicking looks up – and sees them watching.
Scribes at nearby desks, frozen mid-sentence. One recalled. Another whispered prayers under his breath. An elder scribe took a trembling step back, her old gravel voice hoarse with fear.
"He's been marked. . ."
The air thinned. Time thickened.
In the silent atrium, beneath the Watchmen's gaze, Elias felt it: a sentence had begun writing itself into him – and he had no idea how to stop it.