The silence within the Spiral Library had weight—a hush layered with centuries of unread whispers and dreams pressed into the fibers of ancient scrolls. Dust motes drifted through pale shafts of starlight pouring from the celestial dome above, slow as forgotten thoughts.
Lynchie sat alone now, her hand still hovering over the last self-writing page, its golden glyphs gently faded, but not gone. Something inside her had shifted. She didn't know the shape of it yet, but it thrummed in her chest like a second heartbeat.
"What is written, remembers. What remembers, wakes."
She could still hear the whisper.
A motion behind her. Not sudden, but precise. Archivist Vyen stood at the foot of the curved staircase that led deeper into the Librarium's sealed wings. He held no torch, no staff, no symbol of rank—only a leather-bound codex with a spine cracked by time.
"It is no longer safe for you to be here alone," he said quietly.
"You mean because of the Spiral Wards?" Lynchie stood, voice firm despite the tremor in her limbs. "Or because I read what I shouldn't have?"
He met her gaze. There was a flicker of something in his eyes—not fear, but resignation.
"Because they're watching now," he said. "And not just them."
Them.
The Synod. The Tribunal. The veiled things that moved behind the halls of the Academy, beneath the celestial domes, and within the unspoken pacts binding heaven to silence.
Vyen stepped closer, opening the codex. Inside, scrawled across the first page, was a diagram Lynchie had never seen before. It pulsed faintly with an inner glow, as if traced from living memory—twelve sigils, arranged in a spiral.
Each mark shimmered differently, like constellations inked with breath. One glowed faintly green, as if stirred by her presence.
"The Circle of Echoes," Vyen said. "Or what remains of it."
"And that one?" she asked, nodding to the green-lit sigil.
"That," he said, "is yours."
A tremor ran down her spine.
"Each who bears a fragment of the Spiral Glyph leaves behind a resonance," Vyen continued. "A sound only the Codex can hear. That sigil has not glowed in four hundred years."
"What does it mean?"
"It means the Circle is waking."
Before she could respond, a sudden pulse shuddered through the air. Not a sound—a pressure. As if the very glyphs across the Codex had drawn breath.
The library shook.
Somewhere far above, bells began to toll.
Not in alarm.
In recognition.
Vyen snapped the codex shut.
"Come with me," he said. "You'll want to see this."
As they turned toward the sealed spiral stair, Lynchie looked back once. The page she'd touched earlier still hovered, faintly alight. A new glyph now burned at its bottom edge—a sigil she did not recognize.
Not yet.
But it watched her.
And it remembered.