Hina Suroka's first memory of the black spellbook was a dream where her hands didn't belong to her.
They were older. Worn. Covered in ink patterns that squirmed like living calligraphy. When she looked down at them, they were holding a page made of glass, and the symbols on it kept reordering themselves into things she'd never learned but somehow recognized.
Not language. Not art.
Code.
The dream always ended the same way: with her standing in a field of floating eyes, staring up at a sky that cracked open like paper burning from the edges inward — and something stepping through the flames, not walking, but folding into space.
She'd wake gasping. Always at 3:33 AM.
Not out of fear — but out of recognition.
In the waking world, Hina was seventeen, halfway through her last year of high school in Saitama, and mostly known as "that girl who doesn't talk to anyone but draws sigils in her notebook like it's a spellbook."
Which… was accurate.
Her room was an explosion of pinned sketches, pages taped across the ceiling, floor, walls — each one marked with spiraling glyphs she'd never seen before in any language database. She tried translating them once. Even tried feeding a few into a neural net spell-designing app.
It crashed.
Not metaphorically — it literally overloaded the input and spit out a single character:
𓂀
That night, she drew the sigil without realizing it. Same hand movement. Same exact pressure. No pencil drag.
And this time, it glowed.
The book appeared two days later.
Not in the mail. Not in her locker. Not in her house.
In her dream again.
But this time, when she woke up, it was physically there on her bedroom floor.
A solid black tome. No spine title. No cover art. Its leather surface shifted under light like oil trapped in ice. It pulsed — just once — when she touched it.
She didn't scream. She didn't even hesitate.
Hina picked it up and whispered, like she was reading from a page that didn't exist:
"This isn't from here."
She didn't remember saying it. The words just arrived in her mouth.
The room changed instantly.
Her ceiling trembled. The glyph pages she'd pinned for years fluttered like terrified birds.
Then — the first tear opened.
Not a visual distortion. Not magic sparkles. Just a ripping absence in the corner of her room, where light began folding inward like it wanted to become something else entirely.
Hina backed up, still holding the book.
The sigils on the walls began to glow in unison — pale gold, white, some bleeding red — as if reacting to the black tome. Her body began to vibrate. Not externally. Not skin or muscle.
Her perception vibrated.
Then came the sound. Not a noise, but a concept.
A forgotten word returning to language.
ZEGNA'TEL-VIHR.
It didn't echo in her ears — it echoed in her memory. A word she'd never heard before that came with the weight of prophecy.
Suddenly, space itself buckled. Her bed, desk, and shelves all folded inward and exploded in glyph-dust, disintegrating into a pulse of inverted gravity.
And from the tear in the room — something emerged.
It didn't walk in.
It unfolded, like a thought manifesting backward.
A humanoid shape made of ink and static, shadow-tethered from limbs to floor. His eyes were pure white, but not blank — they shimmered with text that wasn't meant to be read. Runes rotated in his pupils. His mouth was sealed by a glowing stitch-sigil.
He stood, tall and still. Watching her.
His presence felt like standing too close to a memory you weren't supposed to keep.
She didn't speak. She couldn't.
The book in her hands pulsed again. Harder.
"Do not chant," the voice said.
It wasn't coming from him. It was coming from inside the room. From the walls. The sigils she'd drawn over the years now vibrating in sync, forming a network of glowing pathways around the entity.
The figure stepped forward, and every footfall unmade light itself. The air bent. Her ears rang with the sound of reversed wind.
Hina backed up until her knees hit the wall behind her. The black book was hot now. Not burning, but alive. Like a heartbeat.
She opened her mouth to speak — anything — and her voice came out like code.
"Zegna'tel–"
The figure froze.
Then — the stitch-seal across his mouth broke.
Not with a snap. With a shudder.
And he spoke:
"Do not finish that word, Pattern-Reader."
His voice didn't echo.
It rearranged the space it touched.
Hina stood completely still. Every atom in her wanted to run, to scream, to vanish — but something in his tone pinned her to the moment like a sigil locks a thought into place.
"I…" she started, then paused. "Who… are you?"
He tilted his head. The white in his eyes flared.
"That is not the right question."
He stepped forward again. The air rippled behind him like glass under pressure.
"The right question is: who broke the law of kings by summoning me?"
She blinked. "I didn't summon you. I dreamed."
"Yes." His voice softened. "That was the summoning."
"What are you, then?"
"I am the glitch."
The tear behind him widened. Symbols poured through — not spells, not light. Memories.
She saw a battlefield for a second. Flames. Children. Floating books. Glyphs flying like artillery shells.
Then it vanished.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"I don't have one."
"I had one once, but the elders burned it out of the tree."
"The tree?"
"The Sigil Tree."
"The structure that tracks all Momodo born into the war."
Her stomach flipped. "You're… a Momodo?"
His body glitched slightly at the word. He didn't nod.
"I was meant to be. Before the recursion cycle."
"The… what?"
He ignored the question. Instead, he stepped closer. His shadow stretched farther than it should, wrapping gently around the edge of her bedframe — what remained of it.
Then he looked down at the black book in her hands.
"You touched the Codex."
"Codex?"
"The Unwritten Book. The one that holds no system language. No chant. No kingship index."
"I just…" She looked at it. It didn't glow. Didn't pulse. But somehow, she knew he was right.
"You're not a candidate," he said. "You're a receiver."
"Of what?"
He leaned forward.
"The forgotten spell."
Outside, a pulse rang through the sky like a bell made of thunder.
Somewhere — distant, but not far enough — the spell matrix was reacting. Other Momodo had felt the breach. The Elders would send enforcers.
And Hina… she was holding the book that didn't exist.
(If y'all play Roblox checkcout VIKofSyren, or SyrenEcho Studios! I'm making stand-alone games to teach these stories!)