The oil lamp guttered on Elias’s desk like a dying heartbeat. Beyond his chamber window, Vareth slept under the fractured moon, its silver light carving sharp-edged shadows across the courtyard where mirrored ornaments for the Festival of Reflection lay shrouded in canvas. Every muscle ached from hours spent rehearsing hollow devotional gestures—placing censers at precise angles, aligning silvered tiles into labyrinthine patterns that made his temples throb. His fingers still trembled with the phantom pressure of Sister Liora’s assessing gaze.

But exhaustion couldn’t still the restless itch beneath his skin. David Hartwell’s memories—classrooms smelling of chalk dust and teenage hormones, the weight of a well-worn leather briefcase—collided violently with Elias Corven’s reality: this silk-hung chamber, the devout murmur of servants in the corridors, the ever-present chill of the Goddess’ watching eyes in every polished surface.

You are Elias Corven now, he reminded himself for the hundredth time that night. Seventeen years old, son of House Corven, miraculously spared from wasting fever by Lyrrae’s grace. Forget David.

The lie curdled in his throat.

His gaze fell upon the loose floorboard near the wardrobe’s feet. Yesterday’s discovery felt unreal—like a puzzle piece from another lifetime wedged into this gilded cage. The book. Hidden beneath a layer of dust and indifference, its unadorned leather cover a stark rebellion against the Corven library’s ostentatious piety. He’d barely dared to glance at it then, Liora’s proximity tightening like a noose. But now, alone in the conspiratorial gloom of midnight...

He knelt. The wood scraped his fingernails raw before the board yielded with a reluctant sigh. He reached into the cavity’s cool darkness, his breath hitching as his hand closed around the familiar weight.

On the desk, beneath the flickering amber light, the book looked ancient. Its cover bore no title, only geometric impressions faded beyond recognition. When he opened it, brittle pages exhaled the scent of damp earth and dry rot. Architectural sketches of impossible spires. Snatches of poetry in a dialect he almost recognized. Astronomical charts mapping constellations that didn’t exist in Vareth’s sky. A heretic’s commonplace book.

Then he saw it. Starting about a third of the way through, the margins weren’t empty. Cramped, hurried script—far newer than the faded inks of the main text—snaked around faded illustrations and between lines of archaic verse. His heart hammered against his ribs. His hand. Not merely the previous Elias, but this body’s hand, claimed by fever barely a month ago. Proof the vanished boy had stood exactly here, felt this same illicit thrill bleeding from the pages.

Elias traced a fingertip over the words. The ink was dark, still slightly waxy, unlike the brittle ochre of the older passages.

Third moon of Quell.

Found him again behind the old Chandler’s kiln, wrapped in rags like windblown dust. Still won’t give a true name. Only “Vael.” Says he is the Keeper of Thresholds. Laughed when I asked if that was a temple rank.

“Temples guard doors only to lock them shut,” he rasped. He smells of cold ashes. Showed me how standing water held lies deeper than teacup prophecy. Motioned to the rain barrel, all smeared grease and shadow. A merchant passed, scowling about thieving Vadreni sirens. But the barrel’s scum? It rippled with the merchant’s fear. Not of water-spirits. Fear of debts. Fear of mounting stones closing over his head.

The script grew tighter, agitated.

Vael taught me a resonance today. Said it’s an opener of mouths stuck shut. Gave me the words: “Khymira stas zhalin.” Felt… wrong. Not evil. Like holding a wasp hidden in my palm. Skin buzzed for hours after.

Elias whispered the phrase aloud, tasting the thick vowels, the consonants like stones clicking together. “Khymira stas zhalin.” A vibration hummed briefly beneath his breastbone and faded, unnerving. To Hear the Unspoken. To listen through the walls people build around their feelings. The faint memory unfurled like poisonous vines: a resonance to unmask deceit. Why would the original Elias need such a thing? Whose lies was he trying to pry apart?

He turned the page. A charcoal sketch of the Keeper dominated the margin – a faceless figure drawn in smudged charcoal, wrapped in ragged layers that billowed around his shape as if stirred by an unfelt wind. Hooded. Anonymous. Only the suggestion of a hand extended, fingers not touching the crude depiction of a young man – Elias – standing rigid nearby.

Wouldn’t tell me the Keeper of Thresholds serves, only gates. What gates? The barred ones leading to the Temple archives? Or… others? Asked him about the Five. He grew still as sun-baked clay. Temples name them Demons. Perturbations. Bringers of Chaos. He laughed at that. Said names were the first thing a conqueror stole, then twisted.

Said the Five had been guardians, not destroyers. Shapers given titles we’ve been scrubbed clean of remembering. What titles? Whose tongue spoke them? My head aches.

Guardians. The word struck Elias like a physical blow. It resonated with a dissonant chord in the core of him, jarring against the constant temple litany of monstrous Perturbations. What if Vael wasn’t merely feeding a rich, bored boy dangerous fantasies? What if there were guardians before the Goddess?

He pored over the next pages. The notes became fragmented, anxious, the script jagged like the scratches of a trapped animal.

Saw the Executioner in Market Square today. The one clad in shadows. He carries the Silver Key. Felt Vael’s presence then, sharp as flint-strike behind the empty flour shop. Gone when I turned. Ghost? Madness?

Dreamed of steep place somewhere deep. Stone groaning. Couldn’t breathe. Shared dust. Vael says such dreams are whispers from where the barriers thin. Barriers against WHAT?

“Khymira stas zhalin” almost burned me when Father boasted of his new tithes to the Mirror Court. His reflection in the window… I saw his eyes writhe. Real fear. Not of the Goddess. Fear of exposure. Fraud? Debts? Worse? Shut the resonance down fast. Vael warned only fools sniff vipers’ nests unprepared.

A chill deeper than the night air seeped into Elias’s bones. So Vael wasn’t just a shadowy teacher. He was a guide into treacherous waters, an architect of radical doubt. And the original Elias hadn’t succumbed to fever from weakness. He’d been drowning in revelations, testing forbidden powers against the looming suspicion of his household.

Why? The unspoken question hung heavy. Why risk everything for whispers about vanished guardians? Why learn a resonance that could lure the Executioner’s gaze? Elias knew the desperate hunger for truth, the suffocation of sanctioned ignorance. Had the original boy, beneath his obedient facade, felt its claws too? Had he also known he didn’t belong?

He flipped to another entry, dated mere days before the wasting fever took hold. The script was shaky, faint.

The Keeper says time grows thin. Truth seeps through cracks they cannot seal forever. Something is shifting in the ash-stone foundations. Says I must learn to see without mirrors. Hear without ears. Where? When? Won’t say. Only “soon.” Warned me… walls have lice. Even here. Especially here.

The ink trail stopped, as abruptly as the life that had written it. Beneath the final entry, staining the edge of the page, was a single, unmistakable dark smear – the rusty brown ghost of dried blood.

Outside Elias’s door, a floorboard creaked softly in the corridor. Faint. Almost imagined. He froze, blood turning to ice. How long had someone been standing there? Liora’s quiet vigilance? Matthias’s simmering suspicion? He snapped the forbidden book shut, its cover muffled against the desk. His heart hammered a frantic tattoo against his ribs.

Suddenly, the room felt crowded. Not just with his doubled soul and the ghost of the boy who wrote those desperate notes. But with the unseen, spectral presence of a man clad in forgotten dust: Vael, the Keeper. A gatekeeper to dangerous lands of memory and whispered names Elias was only just beginning to glimpse. And perhaps others more perilous, creatures with eyes like polished obsidian and keys made of silencing silver. Elias felt the gaze of unseen reflections slide over his skin. Listening. Hungry. He reached out and snuffed the lamp, plunging the room into deep, moon-washed shadows.