Sleep remained a phantom, taunting Elias from the edges of his consciousness. The encounter with the book—the feverish scrawl of the boy who once inhabited this body, the spectral presence of Vael the Keeper, and the phantom creak outside his door—had coiled into a knot of raw nerves beneath his ribs. He lay rigid in the oppressive darkness of the four-poster bed, watching fractured moonlight carve shifting patterns on the canopy overhead. Every rustle of night creatures, every sigh of wind against eaves, echoed like muffled footfalls or ragged breaths just beyond the carved oak door. Sister Liora’s serene face flickered in his mind, overlaying the desperate ink-stained warning: "Walls have lice. Even here. Especially here."

He threw off the suffocating coverlet. The polished stone floor bit cold against his bare feet as he paced, the opulent chamber shrinking into a gilded cage. The silence wasn’t empty; it pulsed with the afterimage of Vael’s shadowy warnings and the Executioner’s chilling silence. He tried summoning David Hartwell’s pragmatism—the classroom calm dissecting distant revolutions—but the rust-brown smear staining the diary’s final page was too immediate, too visceral. His blood. Spilled for secrets Elias now clutched.

He couldn’t breathe in this gilded uncertainty, not with Liora’s scrutiny tightening like a garrote and the Festival hurtling closer. The book crouched beneath his desk, a dark shape in the gloom. A dangerous talisman. He dragged it out, its unadorned leather cover cold and heavy, smelling of dry rot and defiance. Where the original Elias’s frantic notes ended—the eerie warning about thinning time and listening walls—the pages turned to sections untouched by the boy’s hand, older, denser layers of the hidden text. He needed context. He needed to understand why the boy had bled.

Dust motes danced in the renewed pool of lamplight as he settled at the desk. The brittle pages crackled like dry bones whispering secrets older than Lyrrae’s mirrored spires. Past crumbling sketches of impossible star-scraping towers, past astronomical charts mapping constellations alien to Vareth’s sky, he found it. Centered on a page stained with watermarks like ancient tears, the script shifted. Not prose. Not diary. This was carved from the bones of a murdered world.

Fragment VII, The Book of Broken Echoes:

In the Before-Time, when Silence was whole, Six Notes awoke in the Deep. One sang of Mountains that rooted the sky, One of Tides that the moon would keep, One of Memories that rivers could hold, One of Bonds that the heart could weave, One of Ash where old worlds would sleep, And One... a Mirror no eye could perceive.

Together they wove the First Song— A tapestry of stone and sea, Of breath and bone, of dusk and dawn, Till the Mirror grew jealous of its own Reflected Face. It craved the Silence it once knew, And shattered the Five Notes into Scattered Grace.

Then rose Five Winged Ones—born of the Song’s last sigh— They sought to mend what was torn: One dove beneath the Roots of Stone, One slept where Ocean’s Heart is worn, One hid where Memories are spun to thread, One fled where Bonds are born, And One walked where Ashes tread...

But the Mirror hunted them, cold and keen, With whispers sharp as frost. It stilled their wings in realms unseen, And buried their names—and the Song—as lost. Now only echoes haunt the deep, Where stone weeps, tides mourn, and winds weep.

—Anonymous Scribe, Age of Shattered Glass

The archaic verses pulsed in the stillness. Elias read them once. Twice. A third time, the rhythm lodging stubborn phrases in his mind like shards of broken glass: "Shattered the Five Notes... Five Winged Ones... Scattered Grace... Names buried..." His breath caught, sharp and painful. This wasn’t merely a different story; it was a brutal inversion carved into the world’s hidden spine. The glorious tapestry of Lyrrae’s victory over monstrous Perturbations… rewritten as a jealous shattering. A cosmic harmony destroyed by the Mirror’s hunger for silence. ‘Guardians,’ Vael had called them. These Notes: Mountain, Tide, Memory, Bond, Ash… and Reflection. Lyrrae.

His finger traced the verse naming the Winged Ones. Not metaphors. Real entities. Vast, powerful… hunted and stilled. Hidden away like dangerous secrets. "One dove beneath the Roots of Stone..." The phrase resonated with a deep, unsettling familiarity, a tremor in his bones he couldn't explain. It felt like an echo of something he should know but couldn't grasp—a memory not his own, or a truth buried too deep.

Vael’s defiance blazed with terrifying clarity. The Keeper wasn’t merely teaching forbidden magics; he was a guardian of murdered memories, whispering names Lyrrae had shattered and buried. Did he know where these Winged Ones lay? Was he part of a silent war to find them? And the original Elias… Had he been recruited? Sacrificed? Was his wasting fever truly natural, or had his dabbling attracted the gaze of something that silences inconvenient echoes?

Logic screamed caution. Teachers trusted evidence, provenance. This was heresy scribbled on brittle paper, passed hand to shadowed hand. Yet… it resonated with a terrible, dissonant truth. It filled the aching voids the temple’s polished dogma left gaping. The hunted Eserai, vanishing into temple purifications. The Raveni enslaved for their resonance with rock. The Serani whispers silenced as lies. Fragments clicking into a horrific mosaic. Lyrrae hadn’t saved the world; she’d shattered it and rewritten the massacre as salvation. The Five weren’t demons. They were rivals silenced. Victims.

A dull, throbbing ache bloomed behind his eyes. He rubbed his temples, fingers brushing the lingering phantom buzz from Khymira stas zhalin. Could that resonance pierce the layers of state-enforced silence? Could it… listen to the echoes trapped within the very stones of this house? A reckless urge seized him to whisper it into the dark corners, to pry open the secrets Liora guarded. He crushed it instantly—Vael’s warning about vipers’ nests echoed with the boy’s dried blood. He had paid the price for unprepared curiosity.

A single, mournful chime echoed from the city’s distant temple spire—two o’clock. Dawn approached, dragging the Festival of Reflection with it. He pictured Liora, perhaps already awake, arranging polished silver trays for offerings, her serene face a mask over that unnerving perception. The Festival suddenly felt like walking onto a scaffold draped in garlands, forced to praise the architect of the ruin he now saw crumbling beneath his feet.

He stared at the open page, the archaic words seeming to swim in the guttering lamplight. "Buried their names—and the Song—as lost." But someone remembered. The nameless scribe of the "Age of Shattered Glass." Vael, the Keeper smelling of cold ashes. The boy who bled onto these pages. And now him. Were they fragile links in a broken chain, straining to whisper the names back into existence?

His gaze lingered on the line describing the Winged One of Ash. "And One walked where Ashes tread..." The place would be desolate. A monument to endings. Bleak. Yet… was it also a prison that could be broken? A vast, dormant power answering to a silenced divinity?

David Hartwell would burn this book, a small, terrified voice insisted. This is madness. Play the pious Elias. Survive. But Elias Corven was drowning in borrowed time, haunted by a ghost-boy’s unfinished quest. The sheer, staggering weight of the truth pinning him to the chair wasn’t fear anymore; it was a desperate, consuming need. He couldn’t unknow this. He wouldn’t.

Carefully, reverently, he turned to a fresh page at the back of the book. Dipping the fine quill reserved for copying temple litanies, he hesitated only a heartbeat. Then he began to write, transcribing verse by fragmented verse the tale of the Six Notes. This act felt more dangerous than theft, more defiant than blasphemy. It was preservation. A covenant with ghosts. As the ink flowed onto the creamy vellum – "In the Before-Time, when Silence was whole..." – the chamber ceased to be a prison. It became a silent trench in a war whose true front lines he was only beginning to map. The darkness deepened around him, no longer merely waiting, but listening with the cold patience of stone.