Vaela liked silence.
The real kind. not awkward pauses or tension-drenched stillness, but the quiet where nothing expected to be heard. It was the only sound that didn't lie. She crouched on a rooftop above the Guild's east wing, eyes scanning the alley below. Ashen had left his window open again. Stupid. Or trusting. Possibly both.
She watched him flick a candle out with his fingers and vanish into sleep.Except he wasn't sleeping.
He was listening to the book.
Vaela didn't need to see it to know.
Her scarf twitched, exhaling a soft rustle her breath, not hers. The memory threads woven into it were uneasy. They pulsed with flickers from moments not hers to own. But she carried them anyway.
"...He's changing," she muttered.
A shadow behind her shifted.
"Everyone does," a voice said from nowhere. "But not everyone breaks."
Vaela didn't flinch. She drew her knife.
"I told you not to follow me."
The shadow coalesced slowly, unwillingly, as if the night didn't want to let it go. A man in his thirties stepped forward, clean coat, mismatched gloves. His eyes were seared shut, literally burned, yet he walked like he could see everything.
Ryn Velos, former Inquisitor of the Church of Glass.
"Orders are orders," he said, as if it explained anything. "You're observing the boy. Good. He's about to unlock the second sigil."
Vaela gritted her teeth. "He's barely survived the first. You want him broken before he's ready?"
"I want him predictable."
"He's not."
"Then control him."
The scarf on her face flared. The air around her rippled.
"I was told to monitor. Not manipulate."
Ryn's smile was slow. Dry. He leaned closer.
"Then consider this… updated theology. The next morning, Ashen dreamt of a sky made of glass—and woke with the taste of ink in his mouth. He bolted upright. The book was gone.
The sigil on his wrist had split. It looked like a second eye was forming beneath the first.
Someone had moved it forward.
He rushed to the door, yanking it open only to find Vaela leaning against the wall.
"Nice of you to knock," he said flatly.
She tossed something at him.
It landed in his palm a coin, etched with a seven-spoked wheel.
"Pack light," she said.
"Why?"
"Because the second sigil's waking up. And if you're not there when it does, it'll choose someone else."
Ashen hesitated. "What happens if it chooses someone else?"
Vaela pulled her scarf down just enough to reveal a small scar across her lips.
"Last time, an entire town forgot they existed. Including themselves.
They traveled through Whithollow, a city built into a cliffside where every citizen wore mirrored masks and spoke in riddles. No one used names.
Ashen quickly learned to stop asking direct questions. You only got answers if the Veil wanted you to.
"What is this place?" he muttered once, exasperated.
A passerby paused mid-stride, tilted their head, and whispered:
"A scar where silence bled too loudly."
He gave up after that
They reached the shrine by dusk.
It wasn't a shrine in the traditional sense. It was a dead tree, roots carved with symbols that had no symmetry. They pulsed in the corner of the eye, but disappeared when stared at directly.
The second sigil was somewhere here. \
Waiting.
Vaela stood guard while Ashen knelt near the base, his breath hitching. He didn't know what to do. What to say. What to be. He touched the tree.
Nothing. He tried again. And this time, something touched back. He wasn't standing anymore.
He was falling.
Not physically, he knew that much. This was internal. He was dropping through layers of self, memory, truth. Past thought. Past language.
"Second sigil..." a voice whispered.
"...The Witness."And then-
he was in his childhood room, age ten, watching his mother burn a book in the fireplace.
"It shouldn't be remembered," she whispered.
"Why?" he had asked.
She looked at him, tears in her eyes."Because the world doesn't survive people who remember too well
Ashen gasped.
Back at the shrine, the sigil burned into his shoulder a second mark, overlapping the first. The lines tangled, forming a crescent spiral.
Vaela rushed forward, grabbing his collar before he collapsed.
"You saw something?"
He nodded slowly.
"What did you remember?"
His voice came out cracked.
"Something I didn't know I'd forgotten."
Up in the hills, where no one looked, the mirrored-masked people gathered.
Their reflections whispered to each other. The shrine had awakened.And so had the eye in the sky.