The oil lamp guttered on Elias's desk like a dying heartbeat. Beyond his chamber window, Vareth slept under the fractured moon, its silver light carving sharp-edged shadows across the courtyard where mirrored ornaments for the Festival of Reflection lay shrouded in canvas. Every muscle ached from hours spent rehearsing hollow devotional gestures—placing censers at precise angles, aligning silvered tiles into labyrinthine patterns that made his temples throb. His fingers still trembled with the phantom pressure of Sister Liora's assessing gaze.[1]
But exhaustion couldn't still the restless itch beneath his skin. David Hartwell's memories—classrooms smelling of chalk dust and teenage hormones, the weight of a well-worn leather briefcase—collided violently with Elias Corven's reality: this silk-hung chamber, the devout murmur of servants in the corridors, the ever-present chill of the Goddess' watching eyes in every polished surface.
You are Elias Corven now, he reminded himself for the hundredth time that night. Seventeen years old, son of House Corven, miraculously spared from wasting fever by Lyrrae's grace. Forget David.
The lie curdled in his throat.
His gaze fell upon the loose floorboard near the wardrobe's feet. Yesterday's discovery felt unreal—like a puzzle piece from another lifetime wedged into this gilded cage. The book. Hidden beneath a layer of dust and indifference, its unadorned leather cover a stark rebellion against the Corven library's ostentatious piety. He'd barely dared to glance at it then, Liora's proximity tightening like a noose. But now, alone in the conspiratorial gloom of midnight...
He knelt. The wood scraped his fingernails raw before the board yielded with a reluctant sigh. He reached into the cavity's cool darkness, his breath hitching as his hand closed around the familiar weight.
On the desk, beneath the flickering amber light, the book looked ancient. Its cover bore no title, only geometric impressions faded beyond recognition. When he opened it, brittle pages exhaled the scent of damp earth and dry rot. Architectural sketches of impossible spires. Snatches of poetry in a dialect he almost recognized. Astronomical charts mapping constellations that didn't exist in Vareth's sky. A heretic's commonplace book.
Then he saw it. Starting about a third of the way through, the margins weren't empty. Cramped, hurried script—far newer than the faded inks of the main text—snaked around faded illustrations and between lines of archaic verse. His heart hammered against his ribs. His hand. Not merely the previous Elias, but this body's hand, claimed by fever barely a month ago. Proof the vanished boy had stood exactly here, felt this same illicit thrill bleeding from the pages.
Elias traced a fingertip over the words. The ink was dark, still slightly waxy, unlike the brittle ochre of the older passages.
Third moon of Quell.
Found him again behind the old Chandler's kiln, wrapped in rags like windblown dust. Still won't give a true name. Only "Vael." Says he is the Keeper of Thresholds. Laughed when I asked if that was a temple rank.
"Temples guard doors only to lock them shut," he rasped. He smells of cold ashes. Showed me how standing water held lies deeper than teacup prophecy. Motioned to the rain barrel, all smeared grease and shadow. A merchant passed, scowling about thieving Vadreni sirens. But the barrel's scum? It rippled with the merchant's fear. Not of water-spirits. Fear of debts. Fear of mounting stones closing over his head.
The script grew tighter, agitated.
Vael taught me a resonance today. Said it's an opener of mouths stuck shut. Gave me the words: "Khymira stas zhalin." Felt… wrong. Not evil. Like holding a wasp hidden in my palm. Skin buzzed for hours after.
Elias whispered the phrase aloud, tasting the thick vowels, the consonants like stones clicking together. "Khymira stas zhalin." A vibration hummed briefly beneath his breastbone and faded, unnerving. To Hear the Unspoken. To listen through the walls people build around their feelings. The faint memory unfurled like poisonous vines: a resonance to unmask deceit. Why would the original Elias need such a thing? Whose lies was he trying to pry apart?
He turned the page. A charcoal sketch of the Keeper dominated the margin – a faceless figure drawn in smudged charcoal, wrapped in ragged layers that billowed around his shape as if stirred by an unfelt wind. Hooded. Anonymous. Only the suggestion of a hand extended, fingers not touching the crude depiction of a young man – Elias – standing rigid nearby.
Wouldn't tell me the Keeper of Thresholds serves, only gates. What gates? The barred ones leading to the Temple archives? Or… others? Asked him about the Five. He grew still as sun-baked clay. Temples name them Demons. Perturbations. Bringers of Chaos. He laughed at that. Said names were the first thing a conqueror stole, then twisted.
Said the Five had been guardians, not destroyers. Shapers given titles we've been scrubbed clean of remembering. What titles? Whose tongue spoke them? My head aches.
Guardians. The word struck Elias like a physical blow. It resonated with a dissonant chord in the core of him, jarring against the constant temple litany of monstrous Perturbations. What if Vael wasn't merely feeding a rich, bored boy dangerous fantasies? What if there were guardians before the Goddess?
He pored over the next pages. The notes became fragmented, anxious, the script jagged like the scratches of a trapped animal.
Saw the Executioner in Market Square today. The one clad in shadows. He carries the Silver Key. Felt Vael's presence then, sharp as flint-strike behind the empty flour shop. Gone when I turned. Ghost? Madness?
Dreamed of steep place somewhere deep. Stone groaning. Couldn't breathe. Shared dust. Vael says such dreams are whispers from where the barriers thin. Barriers against WHAT?
"Khymira stas zhalin" almost burned me when Father boasted of his new tithes to the Mirror Court. His reflection in the window… I saw his eyes writhe. Real fear. Not of the Goddess. Fear of exposure. Fraud? Debts? Worse? Shut the resonance down fast. Vael warned only fools sniff vipers' nests unprepared.
A chill deeper than the night air seeped into Elias's bones. So Vael wasn't just a shadowy teacher. He was a guide into treacherous waters, an architect of radical doubt. And the original Elias hadn't succumbed to fever from weakness. He'd been drowning in revelations, testing forbidden powers against the looming suspicion of his household.
Why? The unspoken question hung heavy. Why risk everything for whispers about vanished guardians? Why learn a resonance that could lure the Executioner's gaze? Elias knew the desperate hunger for truth, the suffocation of sanctioned ignorance. Had the original boy, beneath his obedient facade, felt its claws too? Had he also known he didn't belong?
He flipped to another entry, dated mere days before the wasting fever took hold. The script was shaky, faint.
The Keeper says time grows thin. Truth seeps through cracks they cannot seal forever. Something is shifting in the ash-stone foundations. Says I must learn to see without mirrors. Hear without ears. Where? When? Won't say. Only "soon." Warned me… walls have lice. Even here. Especially here.
The ink trail stopped, as abruptly as the life that had written it. Beneath the final entry, staining the edge of the page, was a single, unmistakable dark smear – the rusty brown ghost of dried blood.
Outside Elias's door, a floorboard creaked softly in the corridor. Faint. Almost imagined. He froze, blood turning to ice. How long had someone been standing there? Liora's quiet vigilance? Matthias's simmering suspicion? He snapped the forbidden book shut, its cover muffled against the desk. His heart hammered a frantic tattoo against his ribs.
Suddenly, the room felt crowded. Not just with his doubled soul and the ghost of the boy who wrote those desperate notes. But with the unseen, spectral presence of a man clad in forgotten dust: Vael, the Keeper. A gatekeeper to dangerous lands of memory and whispered names Elias was only just beginning to glimpse. And perhaps others more perilous, creatures with eyes like polished obsidian and keys made of silencing silver. Elias felt the gaze of unseen reflections slide over his skin. Listening. Hungry. He reached out and snuffed the lamp, plunging the room into deep, moon-washed shadows.
Sleep remained a phantom, taunting Elias from the edges of his consciousness. The encounter with the book—the feverish scrawl of the boy who once inhabited this body, the spectral presence of Vael the Keeper, and the phantom creak outside his door—had coiled into a knot of raw nerves beneath his ribs. He lay rigid in the oppressive darkness of the four-poster bed, watching fractured moonlight carve shifting patterns on the canopy overhead. Every rustle of night creatures, every sigh of wind against eaves, echoed like muffled footfalls or ragged breaths just beyond the carved oak door. Sister Liora's serene face flickered in his mind, overlaying the desperate ink-stained warning: "Walls have lice. Even here. Especially here."
He threw off the suffocating coverlet. The polished stone floor bit cold against his bare feet as he paced, the opulent chamber shrinking into a gilded cage. The silence wasn't empty; it pulsed with the afterimage of Vael's shadowy warnings and the Executioner's chilling silence. He tried summoning David Hartwell's pragmatism—the classroom calm dissecting distant revolutions—but the rust-brown smear staining the diary's final page was too immediate, too visceral. His blood. Spilled for secrets Elias now clutched.
He couldn't breathe in this gilded uncertainty, not with Liora's scrutiny tightening like a garrote and the Festival hurtling closer. The book crouched beneath his desk, a dark shape in the gloom. A dangerous talisman. He dragged it out, its unadorned leather cover cold and heavy, smelling of dry rot and defiance. Where the original Elias's frantic notes ended—the eerie warning about thinning time and listening walls—the pages turned to sections untouched by the boy's hand, older, denser layers of the hidden text. He needed context. He needed to understand why the boy had bled.
Dust motes danced in the renewed pool of lamplight as he settled at the desk. The brittle pages crackled like dry bones whispering secrets older than Lyrrae's mirrored spires. Past crumbling sketches of impossible star-scraping towers, past astronomical charts mapping constellations alien to Vareth's sky, he found it. Centered on a page stained with watermarks like ancient tears, the script shifted. Not prose. Not diary. This was carved from the bones of a murdered world.
Fragment VII, The Book of Broken Echoes:
In the Before-Time, when Silence was whole, Six Notes awoke in the Deep. One sang of Mountains that rooted the sky, One of Tides that the moon would keep, One of Memories that rivers could hold, One of Bonds that the heart could weave, One of Ash where old worlds would sleep, And One... a Mirror no eye could perceive.
Together they wove the First Song— A tapestry of stone and sea, Of breath and bone, of dusk and dawn, Till the Mirror grew jealous of its own Reflected Face. It craved the Silence it once knew, And shattered the Five Notes into Scattered Grace.
Then rose Five Winged Ones—born of the Song's last sigh— They sought to mend what was torn: One dove beneath the Roots of Stone, One slept where Ocean's Heart is worn, One hid where Memories are spun to thread, One fled where Bonds are born, And One walked where Ashes tread...
But the Mirror hunted them, cold and keen, With whispers sharp as frost. It stilled their wings in realms unseen, And buried their names—and the Song—as lost. Now only echoes haunt the deep, Where stone weeps, tides mourn, and winds weep.
—Anonymous Scribe, Age of Shattered Glass
The archaic verses pulsed in the stillness. Elias read them once. Twice. A third time, the rhythm lodging stubborn phrases in his mind like shards of broken glass: "Shattered the Five Notes... Five Winged Ones... Scattered Grace... Names buried..." His breath caught, sharp and painful. This wasn't merely a different story; it was a brutal inversion carved into the world's hidden spine. The glorious tapestry of Lyrrae's victory over monstrous Perturbations… rewritten as a jealous shattering. A cosmic harmony destroyed by the Mirror's hunger for silence. 'Guardians,' Vael had called them. These Notes: Mountain, Tide, Memory, Bond, Ash… and Reflection. Lyrrae.
His finger traced the verse naming the Winged Ones. Not metaphors. Real entities. Vast, powerful… hunted and stilled. Hidden away like dangerous secrets. "One dove beneath the Roots of Stone..." The phrase resonated with a deep, unsettling familiarity, a tremor in his bones he couldn't explain. It felt like an echo of something he should know but couldn't grasp—a memory not his own, or a truth buried too deep.
Vael's defiance blazed with terrifying clarity. The Keeper wasn't merely teaching forbidden magics; he was a guardian of murdered memories, whispering names Lyrrae had shattered and buried. Did he know where these Winged Ones lay? Was he part of a silent war to find them? And the original Elias… Had he been recruited? Sacrificed? Was his wasting fever truly natural, or had his dabbling attracted the gaze of something that silences inconvenient echoes?
Logic screamed caution. Teachers trusted evidence, provenance. This was heresy scribbled on brittle paper, passed hand to shadowed hand. Yet… it resonated with a terrible, dissonant truth. It filled the aching voids the temple's polished dogma left gaping. The hunted Eserai, vanishing into temple purifications. The Raveni enslaved for their resonance with rock. The Serani whispers silenced as lies. Fragments clicking into a horrific mosaic. Lyrrae hadn't saved the world; she'd shattered it and rewritten the massacre as salvation. The Five weren't demons. They were rivals silenced. Victims.
A dull, throbbing ache bloomed behind his eyes. He rubbed his temples, fingers brushing the lingering phantom buzz from Khymira stas zhalin. Could that resonance pierce the layers of state-enforced silence? Could it… listen to the echoes trapped within the very stones of this house? A reckless urge seized him to whisper it into the dark corners, to pry open the secrets Liora guarded. He crushed it instantly—Vael's warning about vipers' nests echoed with the boy's dried blood. He had paid the price for unprepared curiosity.
A single, mournful chime echoed from the city's distant temple spire—two o'clock. Dawn approached, dragging the Festival of Reflection with it. He pictured Liora, perhaps already awake, arranging polished silver trays for offerings, her serene face a mask over that unnerving perception. The Festival suddenly felt like walking onto a scaffold draped in garlands, forced to praise the architect of the ruin he now saw crumbling beneath his feet.
He stared at the open page, the archaic words seeming to swim in the guttering lamplight. "Buried their names—and the Song—as lost." But someone remembered. The nameless scribe of the "Age of Shattered Glass." Vael, the Keeper smelling of cold ashes. The boy who bled onto these pages. And now him. Were they fragile links in a broken chain, straining to whisper the names back into existence?
His gaze lingered on the line describing the Winged One of Ash. "And One walked where Ashes tread..." The place would be desolate. A monument to endings. Bleak. Yet… was it also a prison that could be broken? A vast, dormant power answering to a silenced divinity?
David Hartwell would burn this book, a small, terrified voice insisted. This is madness. Play the pious Elias. Survive. But Elias Corven was drowning in borrowed time, haunted by a ghost-boy's unfinished quest. The sheer, staggering weight of the truth pinning him to the chair wasn't fear anymore; it was a desperate, consuming need. He couldn't unknow this. He wouldn't.
Carefully, reverently, he turned to a fresh page at the back of the book. Dipping the fine quill reserved for copying temple litanies, he hesitated only a heartbeat. Then he began to write, transcribing verse by fragmented verse the tale of the Six Notes. This act felt more dangerous than theft, more defiant than blasphemy. It was preservation. A covenant with ghosts. As the ink flowed onto the creamy vellum – "In the Before-Time, when Silence was whole..." – the chamber ceased to be a prison. It became a silent trench in a war whose true front lines he was only beginning to map. The darkness deepened around him, no longer merely waiting, but listening with the cold patience of stone.
The quill grew leaden in Elias's fingers. The rhythmic scrape of ink across vellum, the hypnotic flow of forbidden verses spilling from his hand, was the only anchor in the suffocating silence. "But the Mirror hunted them, cold and keen, With whispers sharp as frost..." The words blurred, the lamp flame shrinking to a fragile amber teardrop swimming in a sea of ink and shadow. Exhaustion, deeper than the roots of mountains, dragged at his mind. His head dipped, forehead brushing the cool surface of the desk beside the open book. The brittle scent of old paper filled his nostrils, mingling with the tang of ink. Just a moment's rest. Just to close his eyes against the weight pressing down from the fractured moon and upwards from the silenced earth. The silence wasn't listening anymore. It enveloped him. Pulled him under.
He plummeted.
Not through air, but through layers of cold, crushing density. Stone swallowed him, pressing in from all sides, stealing his breath. He wasn't falling; he was sinking into the living earth. Silence reigned here, absolute and ancient, yet beneath it pulsed a slow, monstrous rhythm. Thu-doom. Thu-doom. Like the heartbeat of the world slowed to a glacial crawl, felt rather than heard, vibrating through the marrow of his bones.
The oppressive darkness relented, replaced by the dim, spectral glow of a vast cavern. Immense pillars of obsidian-black basalt soared upwards, vanishing into an unseen ceiling lost in fathomless shadow. They weren't natural formations. They felt... placed. Deliberate. Like the ribs of some colossal, petrified beast. Etched into their slick surfaces, thin veins of a cold, blue-white light pulsed with the same sluggish rhythm that permeated the air. It cast writhing, ghostly reflections on the cavern floor, slick with mineral-laden moisture.
The air was thick, tasting of damp rock and millennia of stillness. It pressed on Elias's lungs, making each inhalation a struggle. The sheer weight of the place, the impossible antiquity of it, filled him with a primordial dread. This wasn't a place men could tread. This was the realm of deep time and deeper secrets.
His gaze, drawn unwillingly, snagged on the far end of the cavern. It wasn't empty. Shrouded in the profound gloom, barely delineated by the faintest pulses of the mineral light, lay a colossal form. It was more suggestion than substance: a titanic, segmented shape, layered and folded like stone plates piled upon one another, disappearing into the darkness. It radiated an aura of profound dormancy, yet the very structure of the cavern seemed shaped around it, defined by its presence. The source of the Thu-doom. Thu-doom. An anchor pinning the world deep within itself. It felt... important. Terribly, irrevocably important. The heart of everything hidden.
Instinctively, seeking reassurance, Elias turned towards the nearest polished basalt pillar. He expected to see the pale, strained face of the Elias Corven he had become. Instead, the cold stone showed him David Hartwell.
It was him. His own face from another life, older than the Elias body, etched with the familiar lines brought by late nights grading papers and the quiet anxieties of a mundane existence. Hazel eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses looked back, filled not with the fear Elias felt now, but with a profound weariness – the fatigue of a life abruptly cut short, of a history abandoned. His own mouth moved in the reflection, forming words. But no sound came out. Just silent shapes that Elias, with a jolt of agonizing recognition, knew were names. Marcus Rodriguez... Grandma Ellie... Names from a life Lyrrae could never touch.
A searing bolt of grief, sharper and more desolate than any physical pain he'd known as Elias, ripped through him. It wasn't just the loss of his life; it was the utter severing. The faces, the places, the simple weight of his own identity, washed away on a tide of divine theft. He reached out, a desperate sob catching in his throat, his hand straining towards the reflection, towards the ghost of himself he could never reclaim. His fingers touched the frigid, wet stone.
The image fractured. Shattered into a thousand shimmering shards that dissolved like smoke. The cavern, the oppressive heartbeat, the immense shadowy form – everything collapsed inwards with a sudden, silent roar.
Elias jolted upright in his chair, a strangled gasp tearing from his lungs. Sweat plastered his nightshirt to his chilled skin, his heart hammering against his ribs like a frantic prisoner. The lamp on the desk had guttered out. Weak predawn light painted the room in shades of cold grey. The book. Panic sliced through the dream's haze. The open Book of Broken Echoes lay exposed before him, pages askew, his freshly transcribed heresy gleaming wet on vellum. The phrase "names—and the Song—as lost" seemed to pulse in the gloom. In one jerky motion, he slammed the cover shut, scattering dust motes. He wheeled toward the loose floorboard, shoved the book into its dark cradle, and jammed the plank back into place with trembling fingers. Only then did the phantom sensation of David's face, weary and fading, frost his soul again. That desperate, soundless call...
There is no going back. The thought wasn't new, but the dream had carved it onto his bones. David was ash. Only Elias Corven remained. The boy who bled into the margins. The vessel for secrets heavy enough to crush mountains.
He pushed back from the desk, the chair scraping harshly on the stone floor. The dream's chill clung to him. He needed to wash away the sweat, the phantom touch of deep earth, the lingering ghost of his own face. He crossed to the washstand to wash the ink from his hands. A familliar sight, he thought. The cold water in the porcelain basin biting as he plunged his hands in, splashing it over his face. It didn't cleanse the feeling of displacement, the raw ache of stolen identity, but it grounded him in the physical. He dressed hastily in clean but simple attire, the fabric rough against his sensitized skin.
The corridor outside was silent, thick with the hush before dawn's obligations. He took a deep, steadying breath, trying to force David's face from his mind, to bury the echoes of that subterranean heartbeat. He needed to be Elias Corven, the dutiful son, the devout recovered boy. For now. He grasped the cool bronze handle of his chamber door and pulled it open.
Sister Liora stood in the corridor, her hand raised, fingers poised to knock. Her serene face showed no surprise at his abrupt appearance, only that unnerving stillness. Her grey eyes, sharp as flint in the dim light, met his directly. He saw the faint, tell-tale tightening around her lids, the slight dilation of her pupils as she scanned his face – still damp, pale, undoubtedly shadowed by a sleepless night haunted by unspeakable things.
Her question cut through the tense silence, precise and utterly devastating.
"Who's David?"
[1] Hey guys, this chapter is a bit longer than the previous ones, but I just couldn't bring myself to squishing it further. It was even longer before I did my best to shorten it. Hope you enjoy the read <3