The bundle was waiting outside his door.
Wrapped in cloth the color of dried blood, bound by a single strip of string. No note. No sigil. No sender.
Keiran stared at it for a long time before reaching down.
It was heavier than it looked.
He closed the door behind him and slid the bolt into place. The lock clicked just a little too loud.
The room was quiet.
The kind of quiet that listened.
He set the bundle on the table, undid the knot, and peeled back the cloth.
Inside: parchment. Dozens of pages. Some water-stained. Some torn. Many written in different hands. Notes. Scraps. Margins scribbled over until the ink bled through.
He didn't know what he was expecting.
But not this.
The top page had only three words, in clean, slanted script:
"You are not him."
Keiran frowned.
He kept reading.
"Vayne was a butcher. Not with knives. With minds."
"We begged the Wardens to stop him. They said his 'gifts' were untrained. That the city had use for him."
Another:
"He took her memories. Not just of him. Of her parents. Her name."
"We had to give her a new one. Called her Lys."
Another, in smaller ink, barely legible:
"The Serpent follows those born under silver and ash."
"When the moons cross, the hunger chooses."
Keiran sat back.
Moons. Plural.
His gaze shifted toward the window. The fog outside still blotted out the sky, but something inside him turned cold.
Born under silver and ash…
Vaelen and Ashrah.
He didn't know where those names came from.
But the moment he thought them, the mark on his wrist pulsed.
A rhythm that didn't match his heartbeat.
He set the pages down.
He hadn't asked for this body. Hadn't asked for the whispers or the mark or the power to rip memories like pages from a book.
But someone had left these for him.
Which meant someone still believed he was him.
There was one page that didn't look like the others.
Folded neatly. Tucked into the center.
Keiran opened it carefully.
"If you're reading this, then I lost."
"Don't trust them. Not the Wardens. Not the Forgers. Not even the ones who say they're unmarked."
"They only want what's inside your head."
The next lines were written in a shakier hand.
"There's something beneath the city. I don't know what it is."
"But it speaks in her voice. It calls me by names I've never said aloud."
"If it starts whispering again, do not go back beneath."
Keiran felt his throat tighten.
He looked at the parchment again. Turned it over.
On the back was a symbol drawn in faint red:
Two moons. One silver. One dark. Aligned over a serpent coiled in a circle, biting its own tail.
And below it, in jagged ink:
The Serpent doesn't sleep. It waits.
Keiran stood.
Suddenly, the room felt too still. Too sharp around the edges.
He moved to the bed. Lifted the mattress.
Nothing.
He ducked underneath.
Wood.
Dust.
And a mark.
Carved into the underside of the bedframe: the same sigil. Twin moons. The serpent.
But there was something else too.
A name.
Scratched faintly beside the symbol:
Keiran.
Not Vayne. Not 3C.
Keiran.
His fingers trembled.
Someone had known he would come.
Someone had carved his name before he ever knew it.
He sat back down, trying to steady his breathing.
The pages didn't lie.
Someone had tried to burn the past down.
But pieces had survived.
And they were watching him now.
That night, the fog thinned just enough to reveal the sky.
Keiran stood by the window.
Up above, two shapes hung in the heavens.
One pale. One dark.
Vaelen and Ashrah.
They weren't fully aligned. Not yet.
But they were moving closer.
And the mark on his wrist throbbed once, like a heartbeat not his own.
Somewhere deep beneath the city, something shifted.
And far away, in a ruined hall with broken glass windows and forgotten glyphs etched into every wall, a woman with no name looked up at the same sky—and began to remember.