The ink didn't appear under light.It appeared under heat.
I found the message scrawled across the margin of my personal spellbook, invisible until my palm—warmed by spellwork—brushed over the parchment.
Four words emerged like breath on glass:
"Ash marks what fire tried to erase."
I stared at them for a long moment before calling Serena.
She arrived with her usual calm, but her gaze sharpened the instant she saw the page.
"Not a code," she said. "A breadcrumb."
"Leading where?"
"To something someone burned."
We traced the phrase back to one place in the academy that had once flirted with fire more than any other—the old alchemy wing, repurposed after the explosion fifteen years ago. Officially, it was just storage now. No one went there.
So we did.
By moonlight, we picked the rusted lock and stepped into the dust-choked corridor. Old scent of brimstone still lingered in the cracks of the stone.
At the back, behind a toppled shelf, we found it—a burnt ledger, too charred to be preserved, but not enough to hide the faded initials: D-17.
Serena pulled a shard of glass from beneath the ash pile.
Etched into it: the same rune we saw at the tribunal. The same mark on the mirror.
"This wasn't just destroyed," I murmured. "It was erased."
"And buried," Serena added, voice low.
I opened the ledger's last page. A torn entry:
"They will pin it on me. But I wasn't the one who altered the fire glyph. I only rewrote what I was ordered to—"
The rest was gone.
A sound behind us.
We froze.
Footsteps—slow, deliberate—approaching from the corridor. Not student shoes. Not guards.
Someone who shouldn't know this room exists.
We extinguished our light.
Breath held. Muscles tense.
Serena leaned in, voice barely a breath:
"They shouldn't know this room exists."
My hand tightened on the journal.