Quenya watched him think, her voice hesitant. "I know we talked about it before, but let ask again. Do you really think we should keep digging into this? You saw what happened in Coriel. That wasn’t human."
He turned to her. "That’s exactly why I can’t stop."
Quenya’s gaze dropped. "You should know better what would have happened if I hadn’t appeared when that demigod had you on your knees. You got so clues from him. Maybe that’s all you were ant to find."
Vencian shook his head. "Those weren’t answers. They were fragnts. The dead demigod said enough to prove there’s more. If not him, then soone else knows what it ant."
"Soone else?"
"The man with the sash. And Jerenir. They acted like they recognized sothing about ."
Quenya frowned slightly. "Both of them wanted the chalice."
"Which ans both had reason to understand it." He looked back at the wall. "If I can find who they worked for, I might learn what the demigod was talking about—’Fallen of the Fateful,’ ’Genesis,’ ’Espara,’ all of it."
Quenya hovered a little nearer, still cautious. "You think the cult is the place to start?"
"It’s the only path left," he said. "Every thread leads there. I don’t need to catch all of them—just one. From there, everything else unravels."
She stayed quiet for a mont. "Then promise you’ll rember why you’re doing this. Curiosity and purpose aren’t the sa thing."
He t her eyes. "I’m aware. Purpose keeps alive. Curiosity tells where to look."
Quenya gave a slow nod, accepting it. "Then this is that sowhere."
Vencian’s expression settled. "Yes. It starts here."
She glanced at his hand. "And what about that?"
He lifted his palm. The tattooed teeth marks spread apart as if the skin had drawn a breath, and the sword rose from within, its surface a muted gray under the lamplight.
The mark was not a simple engraving. It had taken him weeks to learn that. What looked like black ink was a passage—a gate, or sothing close to it. When he first discovered it, he had thought it a trick of their pact, a side effect of the bond with Quenya. But after testing it again and again, he understood it led sowhere else.
He couldn’t see that place, but Quenya could. When she entered through the mark, she found only a void filled with drifting red fog, endless and without sound. She called it empty, though not dead.
Through it, he could push or pull anything he wished, so long as it belonged to him. For now, he kept only the sword there. Carrying it at his waist had beco irritating, and this was easier.
He turned the blade once in his grip. It dissolved back into the mark, leaving the faint dark teeth across his palm. The skin closed as if nothing had happened.
Quenya hovered beside him. "Have you started to think you’re so chosen one yet?"
He looked at his palm. "Should I?"
The curtain swayed behind them. The board waited, full of half-finished lines.
Vencian turned away. "Guess we’ll have another busy day tomorrow."
— — —
That night passed without any dream.
By morning, the mansion was quiet again. Vencian sat in the lecture hall at the academy.
Professor Thalverin’s lecture hall was silent except for the scrape of chalk against slate. Rows of students filled the benches, heads angled toward the professor as he spoke of preservation ratios in ancient capitals.
Vencian sat near the middle. His notes were precise, but his attention drifted between the carved ridges of the model and Thalverin’s voice. The topic was restoration of post-Imperial cathedrals. It cut too close to mory. How many of those ruins still bore nas erased by the sa sort of cleansing that buried ours?
Thalverin gestured to the model’s cracked foundation. "Observe how later builders reinforced faith through repetition. Each arch mirrors another, creating the illusion of permanence where history kept failing."
The professor’s tone carried faint irony. Vencian recognized it. So did Roselys, standing beside the desk with her ledger and quill. She wrote quickly, expression calm, though her eyes lifted once, eting his for an instant before returning to the page.
The lecture ended soon after. Students rose in a rush of parchnt and conversation. Thalverin dismissed them with a brief nod and left through the side door.
Vencian gathered his notes. Elias fell into step beside him, half-smiling. "You look like you’ve been through confession."
"Thalverin likes sermons in disguise."
Elias chuckled. "Let’s get sothing to eat before next—"
Roselys’s voice carried from the front. "I need assistance moving the reference models to the archive. Anyone available?"
Several hands went up.
Vencian turned to Elias. "I’ll join them. Won’t take long."
Elias gave him a puzzled look. "Since when do you volunteer for heavy lifting?"
"Since today."
Elias studied him, then shrugged. "Fine. Try not to disappear this ti."
Vencian ignored the remark and moved toward the front. Roselys’s brows lifted when he volunteered, though she said nothing. She distributed the smaller pieces among the students, then led the group through the back corridor lined with plaster busts.
Halfway down the stairs, she stopped and turned slightly toward him. "These go to a different section. You can handle those alone, yes?"
He took the heavier crate from her without reply. The others continued down another passage, their footsteps fading.
The air grew cooler near the archive wing. Dust softened the sll of stone and varnish. They worked in silence, setting models onto marked shelves and stacking old survey scrolls.
Each sound—the scrape of wood, the rustle of paper—seed to test the space between them.
If she ant to talk, she’d have done it already.
Vencian placed another box aside. Roselys adjusted a fra on the next shelf.
"You’ve been avoiding ," she said finally.
He kept his gaze on the crate. "Observant."
Her hands paused as Vencian continued. "You’ve been watching avoid you, which ans you wanted to talk but didn’t approach. Interesting choice."
"I assud you’d prefer distance after Coriel."
He straightened and faced her. "You assud wrong. Distance implies fear. I’m not afraid of you."
Her eyes t his. "Then what are you?"
He stopped at the stairwell landing, crate still in hand. "Curious why I haven’t tried to leverage what happened?"
The words hung between them. Her expression shifted, faint but clear; both understood what that ant.
They resud sorting. The quiet that followed was different. It was no longer a simple absence of speech but the presence of calculation.
Neither raised their voice. He could feel her watching him, asuring whether his composure was armor or ease. She’s waiting to see if I’ll draw first.
They worked again in silence, rearranging the heavier bound volus onto higher racks. The quiet felt different, strategic. A field test.
Roselys set the folio aside, eyes drifting to a cracked bust near the wall. "This reminds of a short story I heard a long ti ago," she said, tracing the dust along its base. "Wanna hear it?"
Vencian stacked another ledger before replying. "You may have a thing for short stories. You told one during our first eting."
Her mouth curved faintly. "Then here’s another."
She rested against the table, hands loosely crossed. "During the first generations of Arkspren, there lived a king nad Iseren Calithar."
Her voice was calm, instructional, but with a hint of curiosity beneath it—like she was studying how he’d respond more than the tale itself.
"He wasn’t cruel by birth," she went on, "only curious. He was bonded to the Arche of the Black Lotus, the dream-bound Archean that ruled sleep, death, and the space between both. It taught him to walk through other people’s minds. At first, he used it to heal. He cured nightmares and eased soldiers before death."
She paused to shift a stack of parchnt. "But kindness isn’t an anchor. His Archean told him he could do more, that if he aligned his dreams with others, the world could be peaceful."
Vencian leaned slightly on the crate, silent.
"So he began his reign of sleep. Each night, he entered his subjects’ dreams. He gave them visions of harmony and devotion. When they woke, they believed he was righteous. Priests dread of his approval and called it revelation."
Roselys looked at the ceiling as if reading invisible lines there. "In ti, all of Calithar dread as one. His dream."
She shifted tone slightly. "But the Black Lotus fed on contradiction. The more he synchronized them, the more he lost himself. Until one night, he t sothing that wasn’t his creation—a Banshee. It spoke through a blind girl’s mouth. It said, ’You sought certainty, Dreamwright, but trust born from control is rot in disguise.’"
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