It began with paper.
Not the crumpled scraps I usually salvaged from crates or the fragile strips that wrapped bundles of dried fish. This was something older. Thicker. Each page whispered when turned, like dry leaves speaking secrets to the wind.
Elna found it in the back of a tanner's stall, buried beneath a broken saddle and a sack of moldy wheat.
"I thought it was useless," she said, handing it to me that night by the fire. "But you'll find something in it. You always do."
I ran my fingers over the cracked leather cover. No title. No mark. Just age.
And something else.
Warmth.
Faint, like a stone touched by morning sun.
It shouldn't have been warm.
The book had no words.
At first, I thought I was missing them—like they were too faint to see, or had faded away. But the pages were clean. No ink. No stain. Not even the hint of lines or scratches.
Just blank.
And yet I couldn't stop turning them.
Each page hummed, ever so softly, beneath my fingers. Like a harp string plucked in a distant room.
I listened.
Turned.
Listened again.
Nothing changed.
But something waited.
On the third night, it spoke.
Not with words, but with image.
I had left it open beside the fire before drifting into sleep. When I woke, the flames were nearly out and the house smelled of ash and smoke—but the book was glowing.
Faint, pale. A shimmer like moonlight on still water.
And in the center of the page… a symbol.
One I recognized.
The same shape carved into the stone pedestal beneath the woods.
The same one that had pulsed when I touched it.
I reached out.
The moment my skin brushed the page, the light vanished.
The symbol remained.
I tried copying it with charcoal. Elna watched me from the corner, arms wrapped around her knees.
"What is it?" she asked.
"I think it's a letter."
"From who?"
I shook my head.
"Not a letter like we write. A letter like… the first sound of a thought."
She raised an eyebrow. "That's not an answer."
"I know."
She didn't press further.
She never did, not when I spoke in riddles like that.
Sometimes, I think she understood better than I did.
The next night, the book showed a second symbol.
Then a third.
No order. No pattern I could name. But each one etched itself into my memory, deep and sure.
I began to dream of them.
Not as shapes—but as places.
A gate beneath the ocean.
A tower made of mirrors.
A hand reaching from a wound in the sky.
And always… the same voice. The one I had heard since the day of my birth.
It no longer whispered.
It sang.
Dustwall remained unchanged on the surface.
Children played in the mud streets. Farmers bartered in the early morning sun. Traders came and went, leaving behind stories of war in the north and famine in the hills.
But beneath the skin of things, I felt a shift.
A tension.
Even the walls—those great stone slabs that separated the city's rings—seemed to hum when I passed them now. Like they, too, remembered something they couldn't explain.
Like they were waiting for someone to ask the right question.
Fenn followed me everywhere now.
He had just turned five. Bright-eyed, small for his age, and quiet as a shadow.
He rarely spoke, but he listened.
That morning, as I traced symbols into the dirt outside our home, he sat beside me and said softly, "You write with ghost letters."
I paused.
"Ghost letters?"
He nodded. "They shine when you sleep."
I didn't ask how he knew.
Some truths didn't need explaining.
That evening, a traveler came to Dustwall.
Not a merchant, not a priest, not a thief.
He wore no sigil. No color.
Just a long, gray cloak and boots caked with red clay from far roads. His eyes were pale, almost silver, and he carried a satchel that never seemed to weigh him down.
He stayed with old Harven, the bonesetter, and spoke little.
But on the second day, he passed by as I sat beneath the vine-wrapped arch near the square.
He paused.
Looked at me.
And said, in a voice like smoke:
"The veil grows thin, boy. Keep your eyes to the inkless page."
Then he walked on.
I never saw him again.
That night, the book opened itself.
The pages turned on their own—slowly, deliberately—until it reached the center.
There, for the first time, were words.
Just three.
Scrawled in dark ink that pulsed like embers:
"Ash remembers all."
I traced the letters over and over until the fire died.
Each time I touched the ink, a warmth spread through my fingers. Not heat—memory.
I saw a hallway of thorns.
A woman with eyes of smoke, standing before a crumbling statue.
A door made of nothing.
And then… my own face.
Older. Hardened.
Standing before a crowd, holding the book in one hand.
And behind me, the world burning.
I didn't sleep after that.
Instead, I sat by the window and watched the sky.
The stars were unusually clear that night. A long ribbon of silver stretched across the heavens like a wound stitched with light.
I whispered the phrase aloud.
"Ash remembers all."
Somewhere far below, I heard the voice respond—soft, amused, and echoing from the bones of the city itself:
"And you, child of ash—will teach it to forget."