Page 73 of The First Scar
The question had no answer. The tunnel stretched ahead, damp and indifferent, and I kept walking because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant seeing his face again.
Maxx peeled off somewhere behind me with a quiet "Night, Flameheart" that I didn't return. My feet carried me the rest ofthe way on autopilot—past the sleeping quarters, past the cold hearth, to the one place that had never asked me to be more than I was.
Serenya was perched on her cot with prophecy scrolls spread across her lap, brow furrowed in that particular way that meant she'd forgotten to eat, sleep, and exist as a person.
She glanced up when I walked in.
"Something's happening to the texts, Amaria." She pointed at the scroll.
"The prophecy fragments in the archive," she continued, unrolling it across her lap. "The ones I've been cross-referencing with the Mirrored verses." Her voice had gone quiet. "The ink is moving, Amaria."
I dropped beside her. "Moving how?"
"Shifting. Rearranging." She pushed the parchment flat, and I leaned to see the faded glyphs by the dim torchlight. I recognized some—the angular slash of a Shadow sigil, the spiraling loop of a Luminar glyph. Standard iconography, the kind carved above temple doors and branded onto children's skin.
But between them—
"There." Serenya's finger hovered over a space on the parchment that should have been blank. Faint lines bled through, partially formed, like something pressing through the surface of the page. Not ink. Not quite. More like a bruise rising under skin. "A new symbol. It started appearing three days ago—right after the last Veil surge." Her voice faltered. "The text is rewriting itself. As if the Veil's decay is…unlockingsomething that was always underneath."
I stared at the emerging shape. It sat nestled between the Light and Shadow glyphs like a bridge between two cliffs—incomplete, butdeliberate. Not random decay, a pattern.
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know yet. The shape isn't finished. But the symbols around it—they've rearranged." She traced the line of text below the glyphs, and I watched her finger stop on a cluster of words that looked newer than the rest. As if they'd been written yesterday into parchment that was centuries old.
"This line wasn't here last week." Her voice dropped to barely a whisper. "The soul shall stitch what gods have torn."
My Shadowmark twitched. Just once. Like it recognized something my mind hadn't caught up to yet.
"That's not in any version of the prophecy I've ever found," she said. “It just…appeared. As if the Veil thinning is forcing the full truth to the surface, one piece at a time."
She looked up at me. The torchlight reflected the fear in her eyes—and with it, that fierce, starving hunger for understanding that had driven her out of her temple and into the dark with me.
"The prophecy isn't just old, Amaria. It'salive."
I looked at the parchment. At the words that had stitched themselves into ancient vellum while the world unraveled.
The soul shall stitch what gods have torn.
"Keep reading," I said. My voice came out rougher than I intended. "Whatever it's trying to say—we need to know before it finishes saying it to someone else."
Neither of us said what we were both thinking—that the wordstitchhad never sounded so much like a warning.
Serenya was already bent over the scroll again, fingers tracing glyphs, lips moving without sound. I pulled my cloak tighter and leaned back against the wall, closing my eyes. Sleep was a long shot, but my body was collecting on debts my stubbornness had been writing all day.
The scratch of her quill followed me down into the dark.
Sleep came, but it didn't stay.
I sat propped against the stone wall, knees drawn to my chest. Most of the torches had been snuffed for the night. Around me, the stronghold breathed its sleeping sounds—hushed voices, the rhythmic drip of water, the occasional shuffle of a body turning in restless sleep.
My body hadn't gotten the message that the crisis was over.
My Marks throbbed, a dull ache that pounded in time with my heartbeat. But it was more than that. My vision kept sliding in and out of focus, the edges of the cavern warping. Every few minutes, a wave of nausea rolled through me, sudden and sourceless, leaving a sour taste at the back of my throat.
The worst part was my skin. Everywhere my marks touched felt tender. Burned. Like I'd pressed myself against hot iron and the nerve endings hadn't figured out how to stop screaming.
The time-loop kept replaying behind my eyes—the lantern's flame coiling backward, the sick wrongness of reality stuttering, and thenhim. His hands on my wrists. His voice cracking through the mayhem. The black veins that crawled across his skin as he staggered away from me.
