Page 152 of House Ignis

My blood turned to ice. Every muscle in my body locked tight as the implications clawed at my throat.

"No," I breathed, the word coming out as a fractured ghost of a sound. "No, no, no—this can't be right."

"What?" Jules asked, blinking rapidly behind her fogged glasses.

"This language," I whispered, pointing to the glowing sigils. "It's not just old magic, Jules. It's theirs. The Veyari."

Her eyes widened behind her lenses, the color draining from her face.

A heavy silence followed as Jules looked from the pedestal back to me. "And your brother was writing in their tongue."

The truth slammed into me like a wall of falling stone. Jax wasn't just investigating a disappearance or looking for a lost relic.

He was chasing something older. Something divine.

And we had just stepped right through its front door.

We settled on the floor of the alcove, robes discarded and ancient books sprawled around us like the wreckage of a forgotten library.

Blue fae-light flickered across the chamber walls, dancing like restless fireflies over the skulls watching from the shadows.

Jules had her scholar's runes spinning in the air, her lips moving in quiet concentration, while I kept my eyes fixed on Jax's journal.

His frantic handwriting was finally starting to breathe into meaning.

Hours bled past in the cold silence. At some point, Jules let out a sharp gasp, her quill stilling mid-stroke.

"Can you translate it?" My voice cracked.

"Slowly," she murmured, already flipping back to the first page. "Just give me time."

She worked relentlessly, cross-referencing runes and tracing meanings, scrawling frantic notes.

Finally, Jules lifted her head, her orange hair falling loose around her flushed face. She slid a translated sheet toward me.

It wasn't a chronicle of war. It was a record of Scott Eldrin, Jax's old roommate from the year above.

The entry trembled with desperation, the words jagged as if carved in a panic.

Jax wrote about how Scott had slipped into the grip of Eclipsa, and how the drug didn't just numb him, it warped him.

It twisted his very essence. His veins had blackened, his mind fogged. Then, one night, he disappeared.

Days later, he was found stumbling across the southern fields—confused, trembling, and almost hollow.

Just like Ryven. Only worse.

Jax had been terrified that the drug was a corruption—a slow rewriting of the body.

He described watching Scott lose himself piece by piece, and then, recklessly and brilliantly, Jax began developing an antidote. He wrote that it had worked once.

Barely. Scott had survived, but the process was harrowing.

“It was terrible,” Jules said, her voice unsteady. “Painful. It nearly killed him.”

She flipped the page, her eyes darting faster. "He says it only works if it's caught early—before the blackened veins spread too far. Once it's rooted in the bloodstream... there's no reversing it."

The parchment quivered in my hands. My throat felt like it was filled with ash. "Where did he find the ingredients?"