Some believe this room is tainted, marked by the information it holds.They think even stepping across the threshold invites the darkness in; it’s why the door was reinforced years ago.
Clicks echo in the silence as the hidden locks spring to life.The scent of old parchment envelops me as I push open the heavy, iron-clad door.My shoulders sag under the familiar comfort of the enclosure, finally releasing the day's tension.
Hundreds of volumes line the shelves—histories, banned treatises, fragments of pre-Luminary scripture.I use my power to light the nearest lamp; its wax is as crooked as Riven’s intentions.
The flame throws long, thin shadows that climb the walls, pushing the corners of the room into inky blackness.
On the desk, my notebooks lie open, ink dried in half-finished lines.Books are scattered haphazardly, leaving no surface exposed.The worn leather chair squeaks as I sit, its firm seat cradling the curve of my spine and loosens the strain I’ve carried all day.I’ve lost count of the hours I’ve spent staring into these texts—nights where the words became a river, carrying me deeper into my own mind.
Seren and her drawings resurface.Squeezing my eyes shut, I begin the search within my internal index—the vast archive of findings I’ve stored over the years.
Her images remind me of something whose memory has begun to wither with the age of time.A story that changes as the years pass by.Our reasoning for why we do what we do, along with it.But what was the image?
Think, Kael.
In my mind’s eye—clear as day—I see the page I wrote years ago; an excerpt of a prophecy found in a forbidden text.Power burns fiercely within me, the memory of those shadows fuelling the flame.
My eyes snap open.My fingers frantically comb through the parchment littering my desk.There, buried under a stack of histories on Auria, lies my old notebook.
A single swipe of my hand sends a plume of dust rising into the candlelight, shimmering like a thousand flakes of golden glitter.I pull off my gloves and thumb through the pages; the cured paper catches my nail like dry leaves skittering on stone.
A calloused finger runs over the ink, as if touching it could summon the hand who wrote it.
Victory of light over dark.The Cleansing.
Whole chapters were missing.Incomplete.I recall that day—I was deep in the trenches, studying the prophecy after the last Shadow-marked succumbed to Riven’s testing.An unease buried in my subconscious had pushed me to look further into the history of the war, but every record ended the same way; abrupt.Incomplete.
A prickle runs down my neck, shivers dancing across my spine.My eyes turn to the volumes lining the shelves, especially the hidden tome I was given in the Hollow the night I received my scar.
Tucked in the darkest reaches of the library, I reach for the worn leather.Its weathered cover seems to sigh with the weight of decades.
Silver-flecked engraving on the front, stares up at me:On the Nature of Night.
Something stirs at the back of my mind—a fleeting sensation that vanishes quickly as it arrived.I shake it off, the spine cracking in protest as I force the book open, its pages heavy with forgotten knowledge.
My fingers turn the parchment instinctively until I land on the image I remember from an age ago.A crescent stares up at me alongside an open eye, watching my every move.Stars dot the ink like flies.
Then I see her.The woman on Seren’s walls.
The text beneath the image reads:Nyx, Goddess of Night.
The same goddess slain a century ago in the War of Sun and Shadow—the era when the Luminaries conquered the darkness and were reborn from her ashes.All shadow-marked we have ever seen shared no true connection to her, leaving her memory scattered like smoke from the pyres.Fractured.Intangible.
Until Seren.
Beneath her image, a single quote is inscribed:
“When light conquers, it forgets its own darkness,”the author wrote.“Yet the shadows remember.”
Slowly the pages close, as my mind opens further, trying to make sense of all I have seen.
She remembers—what they buried, not what they wrote.Those drawings are neither prophecy nor madness.They are memory—hers, or something living inside her.
Black lines peak through my grey tunic, the scar pushing past the cuff of my sleeve.The angry mark shimmers like a raven’s wing; absorbing all light, yet under the candle flames, its iridescent blues and purples glimmer.Heat prickles the flesh beneath, sensing my gaze.
Ever since the briefing on Seren’s shadows, the mark has been changing—reaching further up my arm, warming when I am near her.It grates on my nerves, a constant, low-frequency hum I can’t tune out.
I flex my fingers and dip the quill into the ink, the motion familiar and soothing.Notes scatter across fresh parchment: the markings from Seren’s wall, the symbols from the tome, the crimson liquid that pooled at the altar—not staining the ancient stone but consuming it.
