Someone knocked on the door before the doorway carvers had started their morning work, the sound carrying through Scribe Joy's house while the Turquoise Moon's last light pressed through the workroom window, casting its faint turquoise wash across the stone walls as it faded toward dawn.
Alucent had been sitting in the living room chair with the ebony cane across his knees, watching the moonlight thin as the first grey of morning crept beneath it. He heard Scribe Joy's footsteps cross the workroom, heard her fingers trace the doorframe glyphs, heard the soft click before cold air pushed into the house alongside a voice he did not recognize.
"For Alucent Luci. Routed through the Scribe postal network from Eryndral. Flagged with the Scribe Tower's courier seal."
Scribe Joy thanked the courier before closing the door against the cold, then brought the letter to Alucent in the living room. The wax seal on the fold bore the Scribe Tower's mark, pressed into dark red wax with institutional precision, though the handwriting on the front carried no precision at all. Uneven pressure across the letters, each word starting neat before compressing as the sentence continued, urgency overriding whatever careful penmanship Sir Vorn had been trying to instill.
*Tavin.*
"Who is it from?" Raya asked from the workroom doorway, her chestnut hair still loose from sleep while her hazel eyes sharpened as she spotted the letter.
"Tavin," Alucent said, breaking the seal.
Raya crossed into the living room immediately, leaning against the chair beside his while Gryan appeared behind her in the doorway, his mechanical arm humming beneath his dark blue sleeve. Scribe Joy stood near the reading lamp with her hands folded in front of her.
"The kid from the Tower?" Raya asked.
"The kid from the Tower," Alucent confirmed, unfolding the letter.
The handwriting inside matched the front, each line starting with careful spacing before the letters crowded toward the right margin as Tavin's urgency outpaced his hand. Alucent read it aloud, since the contents belonged to all of them.
"The threads are louder. He is moving. Not toward you yet. Toward Runepeaks. The shadow has a direction now. I don't know when. The whispers don't say when. They say 'soon' and 'before the cold month.' It's Shadebloom now. Emberwane comes next. Sir Vorn says I shouldn't write this but I'm writing it."
The room shifted as the words settled.
"Eloha," Raya said, her voice going flat. "Moving toward us."
"Tavin hears things through the Weave," Alucent said, looking at Scribe Joy since she had not met the boy. "He's twelve, an orphan under Sir Vorn's care at the Tower in Eryndral. His perception catches resonances that trained practitioners miss entirely."
"Twelve years old," Scribe Joy said softly, her blue eyes on the letter. "Writing against his supervisor's instruction through official courier channels."
"He's stubborn," Alucent said. "In the best possible way."
Raya had already moved past the source to the content, her hazel eyes narrowing as she worked through the timeline. "He wrote this during Shadebloom. We're in Emberwane now. 'Before the cold month' means before Wintertide." She looked at Alucent. "That gives us Emberwane along with Gloamreach before the deadline. Two months, roughly."
"If the deadline is what matters," Gryan said from the doorway, his rough voice cutting through the calculation with a single sentence.
Raya turned to him. "What do you mean?"
"'Before the cold month' is the deadline. 'Soon' is the warning." Gryan's dark eyes stayed level. "The whispers gave both. Two months before Wintertide is time. 'Soon' during Shadebloom, a month ago, with a week of postal relay on top of it... that's different."
The distinction landed across the room. Scribe Joy's fingers pressed together in her lap while Raya's jaw tightened as the two timelines sat side by side, one offering breathing room while the other compressed it.
"So we have two months by the calendar," Raya said slowly, "but 'soon' could mean something is already happening that we can't see from here."
"How long does the postal network take between Eryndral along with Highforge?" Alucent asked, looking at Scribe Joy.
"The Scribe postal network routes through at least two relay stations between Vales," she replied. "Each station verifies the sender's courier seal before forwarding. Four to seven days depending on conditions along with relay traffic."
"So Tavin heard this at least a week ago," Alucent said. "Maybe longer, if he hesitated before sending it."
"He didn't hesitate," Raya said. "Read the handwriting again. That kid grabbed the paper the moment the whispers stopped."
She's probably right.
"'Soon' a week ago," Gryan said. "With a direction toward Runepeaks."
Nobody spoke for a moment as the weight of that settled.
"Two months by the calendar," Alucent said. "But we treat 'soon' as the operative word. The calendar gives us a boundary. The whispers give us urgency. We plan for two months while working as though we have days."
Raya looked at him, then at the letter, then at the group. "So what changes?"
"The timeline," Alucent said, setting the letter on the table beside his chair. "We go back to the Archive today. Same thoroughness, adjusted for the fact that something might be moving toward us while we work."
Scribe Joy nodded once. "I will focus on the restricted collection indicators along with the classification patterns that might reveal the deeper layers. We have found everything the misfiled materials can offer. The next step requires navigating the Archive's deliberate structure rather than searching its accidental one."
"I'll keep reading," Raya said, her hazel eyes carrying the sharp focus she brought to everything once a deadline pressed against it. "Misfiled or otherwise. If there are more documents hiding in ordinary collections, sitting between geological surveys or medical charts, they're mine."
Gryan looked at the letter on the table, at the broken wax seal along with the compressed handwriting, then at Alucent. "The boy took a risk. We should make it count."
---
Before they left for the Archive, Alucent sat at the worktable in Scribe Joy's workroom with a blank sheet of paper, the reading lamp casting steady light across the surface while the last traces of the Turquoise Moon's glow faded from the window above the drying herbs.
He picked up a stylus, thought for a moment about what a twelve-year-old in a tower in Eryndral needed to hear, then began writing.
"Tavin. We are together. We are working, making real progress, the kind that changes what we understand about how the world is built."
He paused, letting the next words form before committing them.
"You were right to trust what you hear. The whispers carry things that trained practitioners overlook, since trained practitioners sometimes trust their methods more than their senses. You hear the Weave directly. That matters more than anyone has told you."
The handwriting loosened as the letter shifted from operational to personal.
"Runepeaks is extraordinary. The Archive holds enough knowledge to keep you reading for years. The city is carved into the mountain itself, every surface inscribed with glyphs that actually do something, along with there are birds with metallic beaks that hold grudges for weeks. Scribe Joy can tell you about the time she negotiated a peace treaty with four of them using herbs."
He paused at that line, imagining Tavin's face reading it, imagining the boy's uneven handwriting speeding up as he tried to write a response asking for the full story.
"When this is done, I will ask Scribe Joy if you can visit. I think you would like it here."
He wrote one more line, slower than the rest.
"You are not alone in the Tower. Sir Vorn knows what matters."
He signed it, folded it, then sealed it with the wax Scribe Joy kept at the worktable, pressing the Valerius Signet into the soft red surface until the carved pattern set.
He held the sealed letter for a moment, weighing whether to reopen it, whether to soften the line about the whispers, whether to remove the part about asking Scribe Joy regarding Tavin visiting.
Then he set it on the table for Scribe Joy to route through the Highforge receiving station, picked up his ebony cane, then followed the group toward the door as the morning light replaced the last of the Turquoise Moon's glow across the craftsperson quarter's carved walls.