Location: Deep Archive Level VII, IskarraAccess Code: Restricted / Eyes-Only / Arcane-Red
There are shelves in Iskarra's archives that do not exist on maps.Corridors that bend around time.Sections sealed so long even the wards hum in confusion.
The scholar — no one calls them anything else — worked in one such place. Deep beneath the floating city, beneath the charted leylines, even beneath the oldest root-locks carved into the stone.
A lantern of blue flame swayed above their desk.On it, three unmarked journals, their bindings warped by heat. The kind of heat that leaves no ashes.
Thaleon's final writings.Smuggled out of the Tomb before it was sealed.Stored in "permanent containment," never to be decoded.
Until now.
The Scholar's Work
They wore no nameplate, no crest. Just gloves — ink-stained, reinforced with rune-thread.
Their eyes glowed faintly. One blue, one green. Not natural.Not anymore.
They moved like someone who had forgotten their own heartbeat a long time ago.
And they were finally making progress.
"He didn't write in Common," they murmured, flipping a page."Not even Arcanum. He wrote in cross-bound leyweave glyph. Madness."
They traced a fragment with a fingertip. The page resisted — for a heartbeat, the paper hissed like flesh. But then it yielded.
And there it was:
"…if the Crown is a wound, then every mage is a scar.""…I sealed the seventh fragment in the mouth of the world. The place where the leyline stops moving — where it listens."
"I buried it beneath the silence."
The scholar stilled.
That line — "where the leyline stops moving" — was theoretical. A myth even among ley-cartographers. But if true…
"Then the last fragment isn't lost," they whispered.
"It's waiting."
The Unseen Listener
They looked up.The chamber was still.The flame swayed — but not from any draft.
And yet…They felt it.
A shift. A ripple of attention.As if the act of reading Thaleon's words had turned something toward them.
They set the journal down.
Carefully. Reverently.
They stood.
And reached for the seal they'd never intended to use — the one etched on the underside of the table, hidden from all sight.
They spoke aloud for the first time in hours:
"I need an audience. With the Accord."
"Immediately."
Cutaway – Eyes in the Stacks
Far above, a scribe wandered through the central stacks, humming quietly.
She paused, frowned, and tilted her head — just for a moment.
She thought she heard something… far below.A voice, too distant to place.
Just one word, repeated like a buried echo:
"Silence. Silence. Silence…"
Then it was gone.
And the ink in her vial turned black.