Page 120 of The First Scar
Around us, the crowd caught the cadence. Voices joined, layering over each other, building into a chant that vibrated through the stone.
It was time.
I found Dreadscale's eyes across the chamber, fierce and steady.
I gave him the signal.
And stepped into the Veil-fire.
The heat hit me first—a searing, skin-tightening burn of something that wanted to unmake me. The roar cut out the instant I crossed the threshold. From outside, the flames had been a shriek. From inside they were a heavy, rhythmic drone. Vibrating throughout my entire body.
Both marks stirred. At the center of the ring, half-swallowed by shadow, sat a stone sarcophagus. Because of course the thing we needed was inside a coffin. This quest had a sick sense of humor.
Age-worn glyphs crawled across its surface—symbols that shifted when I looked at them too long. The lid was sealed with bands of void-iron, fused to the stone like they'd grown there.
That's where the Codex waited. Locked in a tomb meant to keep the dead quiet and the living out.
I shut my eyes.
I reached inward—and both marks answered at once. Silver-white and ink-black bloomed up through my collarbone. They danced together like two notes bending toward harmony—and when they met, the tension I'd been carrying in every locked joint quietly unwound.
My breath steadied. My heartbeat slowed.
The fusion caught.
The crowd began to count.
"One."
“Two.”
The Veil-fire responded. The flames closest to me shifted. A deep, resonant note that I felt in my marrow.
"Ten. Eleven."
My lungs constricted. The pressure behind my eyes built like a storm trying to crack my skull open from the inside. But I didn't let go. Didn't pull back.
"Fifteen. Sixteen."
The flames had drawn closer. I could hear them now—individual tongues of fire licking the boundary of the ring, testing it, tasting the edges of my fusion like a curious predator. The stone beneath me had gone from hot to scorching. My boot soles were softening. I could feel every crack in the floor through them.
The Griefweaver stirred—sensing my desperation, the fear bleeding off the crowd—and fed it back to me in a bitter, intoxicating rush.
I used it. Channeled it into the fusion, coaxing the two currents to spiral closer.
"Twenty-five. Twenty-six."
Almost there.
My marks overlapped—woven so intricately the seam between them vanished. Their power thrummed in time with my pulse.
"Twenty-nine."
The Veil-fire shuddered. The flames turned to steam and began to evaporate, no longer howling but singing—a high, clear note that made the air shimmer.
"Thirty!"
The sarcophagus lid lurched once, twice—and slowly began to slide open, ancient stone grinding against ancient stone.
