They told him it would hurt — and that he must not cry. They told him pain was a price, and noble blood would not tremble beneath the veil.
So, Lyric Velastra, Age seven, knelt in silence while the priesthood of Lunavere etched the first glyph into his chest.
The temple was vast. Pale marble laced with night-bloom ivy. Moonlight dripped down from a glass-dome ceiling, and along the far walls, the names of the blessed shimmered on scrolls that never yellowed. Here, no one spoke above a whisper, silence was reverence and memory obeyed the gods.
The ink was called Veilspore — distilled from sacred nightbloom petals and forgotten prayers. It shimmered lavender and gold, thin as breath and thrice as cold.
The high scribe dipped the needle.
Lyric bit down on his tongue.
The first mark bloomed slowly over his skin — a spiraling sigil of protective lineage, proof of House Velastra's divine sanction. The clerics hummed their approval. The mark shimmered obediently. All was as it should be.
Until it wasn't.
The ink should have cooled. Instead, the pain grew sharper — a sting that dug behind his sternum and up through his spine like claws of broken glass. Lyric gasped. No one noticed. The ritual demanded focus, and the priesthood believed what they expected to believe.
But something inside him shifted.
The second mark came uninvited.
It unfurled beneath his skin like old script rediscovered — black spiral upon spiral, silent and vast. Not ink, not paint. A wound in the world's memory. It did not glow. It did not bleed. But the air around him turned brittle.
One acolyte flinched, dropping her ink bowl. "The light... flickered."
Another fainted. A hush rippled through the gallery. The lead cleric, face stone-pale, stepped back from the altar.
"This—this is not part of the Rite," someone murmured.
Lyric stared down at his hands. His breathing slowed. The pain receded. But in its place, a deep unease. Something had opened — not in the room, but inside him. And it was whispering.
"You were meant to forget. But you did not."
A third voice — low, calm, endless — echoed from somewhere behind his thoughts.
"We are not two. We are what was left behind."
They didn't strip him of his robes, they didn't cast him out. Not yet.
The clerics called the anomaly a flare of emotional overcharge — nothing more.
But three days later, the walls of the boy's chamber began to remember things he hadn't said.
His ink would spill into patterns he hadn't drawn.
And when he dreamed, the world was older than the gods