Page 5
The words were faint but unmistakable.
“…the guardians will falter…”
Her quill hovered.
“…the vow shall…”
As she tried to read, she felt the temperature in the Archive shift subtly, as though something had displaced the air itself. A draught stirred the lantern flames as Maia stilled, the hairs on her neck standing on end.
She tried to concentrate but the ink seemed to shift. It glimmered like something moved below its surface. She blinked hard, telling herself it was just exhaustion, as she bent closer to look more intently. Another chill brushed the back of her neck.
Slowly, she lifted her head. At the far end of the hall, between two columns, someone stood.
The lanternlight caught along dark, heavy armour in oil-slick ripples. Pale skin drank the light rather than reflecting it. Black hair framed a face too finely carved to be wholly human.
As if sensing her, a pair of eyes lifted, and found hers.
The world narrowed. An instinctive fear struck first - the urge to look back down - but beneath it, something brighter sparked.
He didn’t move. He didn’t even blink.
She had expected, if she ever saw one, to feel afraid. Instead, what struck her was almost like the feeling she got when she stood before a text she hadn’t yet read but knew, with absolute certainty, held something worth understanding.
No one else seemed to notice. Or no one dared to.
His head tilted, barely.
She was on her feet before she decided to be. Her chair scraped back loudly against the stone as she took one step forward, her lips already parting on a question she didn’t know she was going to ask.
But he was gone.
The space between the columns stood empty. Maia stood by her desk with her quill still in her hand, ink slipping from its tip and spreading across the parchment like a living shadow.
Someone touched her arm lightly - an older scribe at the next desk. He had ink worked permanently into the creases of his knuckles.
“Best not to notice,” he murmured without looking up at her.
Outside, the bells tolled in three deep notes. The sound trembled through stone and bone alike as Maia did as she was told and looked slowly back to the fragment.
“…when the glass shall bleed again…”
Then somewhere beyond the cliffs, stone cracked. She felt it before she heard it; a low shudder that passed through the Archive floor and up through the soles of her boots, settling somewhere behind her ribs. It lasted no more than a breath, but the silence that followed was different from the silence before.
And inside her, something answered. Not fear, exactly, and not the scholar’s thrill she had felt when the fragment first shimmered in front of her. It was the quiet knowledge that she had been noticed by something she did not yet understand, and the hope that it would not forget her face.
3
Ink
She couldn’t sleep that evening. Not the evening after that.
Each night before bed, Maia drew a wooden comb through her hair the way she had every night for as long as she could recall, the worn teeth catching as it went past her shoulders, and tried to think of nothing. It had never failed her in the village. But it failed her now.
The words from the fragments she’d been studying clawed at her thoughts: and the glass shall bleed again. And the pale figure who had vanished into shadow… had he truly seen her, or had she imagined him entirely? The shape between two columns, gone before she could be sure of it, meant nothing at all. By the third day she almost believed it.
On the fourth day, the Archive closed at noon for Remembrance, and Maia, who had no one to remember in Eryssan, went looking for oak galls.
She couldn’t afford the Sanctum’s ink. She’d seen the price in a window on her first evening and walked on, and she’d been making her own since she was eight years old anyway: oak galls, vitriol, gum arabic and patience. Her father would stand over the pot and tell her that anyone could buy a colour, but only a scribe could make one that would outlast them.
