They left me for dead at dawn.
Not because I had failed them, not because I was weak. They left me because the world needed a scapegoat, and the quickest path to peace for the powerful is a burning pyre with a familiar name on it.
My name is Elior Vane. Once, Vane marked a family of keepers - men who read old things and kept the lines between what lived and what devoured. Now it marks an orphan, a rumor, a word children use to scare each other at night.
The alley still smells like smoke and iron. Embers drift in lazy, useless spirals. The sky over Greyhaven is a bruised blue, the kind of color that tastes like old vows and colder things. Behind me the Hall of Covenant stands half-collapsed, its banners torn, the sigil of the Covenant - a balanced scale crowned by a sword - sagging like a wounded bird.
They called it cleansing.
I call it the day my hands found a book.
I shouldn't have been in the hall. I had orders: do not interfere, do not take the relics, do not speak. Obedience used to be a luxury for those who had nothing left to lose. I had nothing left, and thus I had curiosity, which is worse.
The southern archive had taken the worst of the flames. Shelves lay in skeletons of ash, scrolls boiled to brittle curls, and the mosaic floor was a map of shattered promises. I picked my way through the ruin like a man stepping across glass, searching for a single thing: the ledger that recorded names of the exiled - proof that my brother, Godren, did not die at the hands of thieves but was taken by those who wore the Covenant's badge.
Instead I found a shelf bent inward, as if something had sat against it of its own volition. And on that shelf, half buried under a ruin of singed vellum, lay a book that did not look like anything else in the hall.
It was small. The cover was not leather but something like cooled light - matte, grey with veins that shivered when I ran my thumb across them. On the face of it were letters that were not letters at all, not properly, at least not at first glance. They were instead little fractures of meaning, like frost on a window that tried to spell a name if you let your eyes melt around it.
When I touched it, the air curved. Not in the way of heat or wind, but like the hush that comes when a bell is stopped mid-note. I felt a presence, not outside but inside - a small, careful voice waiting for permission.
Do not take foolish chances, Elior, I thought. Even to myself I sounded like a man lecturing a younger brother.
I did the foolish thing anyway.
I stripped the book of the cloth that bound it - a cloth that looked like a map of constellations. The pages sighed. The first page had no ink, only a single phrase stamped into the paper itself. When I read it aloud, the sound surprised me: it was not my voice, exactly, and yet it carried my name with it, as if the book already knew me.
> For the forsaken who hold the light, the Lumen will speak. Read honestly. Act faithfully. Pay what is asked.
It is dangerous to find a promise in the ruins of a religion. Promises there are usually bargains dressed in golden thread. But as I read, warmth settled behind my eyes. It was not like the heat from the pyres; it was an inner warmth, a small hearth-light like the first ember beneath kindling. It set my teeth on edge with longing.
The Lumen Codex. The name came to me the way a whispered memory comes to a throat after long silence. I had heard of codices in old teaching - books of light, it was said, that translated living prayer into something a man could measure. The Covenant kept such things under lock for their own. For a commoner to hold one was impossible, for an exile it was madness.
Still, I opened the next page.
There are many things about sacred texts that the faithful do not speak of in taverns. They are not merely books; they are covenants in paper and ink. They ask of you not only time but truth. A Codex will not teach a liar. It will not let a man digest its words and spit out power for selfish ends. The Lumen asked first for honesty.
The first exercise was simple. I read.
1. The Lumen is not a tool. It is a mirror. When you read, answer: who are you when no one watches? Speak that name aloud and leave it unadorned.
The instruction sounded like a child's riddle. I laughed - a short, bitter sound. Who am I when no one watches? The answer was the ash in my mouth, the ache in my chest, the name of the brother who had saved my life once and paid with silence for it later.
"Godren," I said before I could stop myself. The syllables felt like contraband and confession at once. They sounded smaller in my ears than they had the night we were boys, rolling in the attic with stolen figs. The Codex hummed.
A line bloomed across the page, faint at first, then brightening. The letters rearranged themselves until new words appeared in the margins, a translation that seemed to fit the beat of my pulse.
> Faith begins as memory. Memory becomes covenant. Covenant becomes law when the world attempts to bury it. Speak names. Keep them.
There was a price attached. The page asked for nothing violent - yet. It required a small thing that burned like honesty: recall what you owe, and give it back in whatever way you can.
What could I give? I had two copper coins and a knife with a nicked handle, and a throat that refused to swallow the name of my mother who had wept at dawn for a boy who would not come home.
I thought of the child in the alley behind the baker's - a child with a cough that rattled like wind through a barrel. The boy's mother bartered bread for medicine, and medicine had become a coin I did not have.
On impulse, I set the Codex in my lap and spoke aloud the pledge the page asked for. It was not a formal prayer. It was an intention, small and fragile as breath:
"I do not have coin. I have my hands. I give them. Help the child with the cough if I commit to the care with my own hands tomorrow."
The page warmed. The veins of light in the cover flared, and a single symbol - a simple cross of light, not of any church I recognized - imprinted itself for a breath on the inside of my palm. It throbbed like a pulse.
I left the hall with the Codex beneath my arm. Embers followed me like watchful eyes. People said nothing when they saw a Vane leave a place of Covenant kin. They had learned the lessons of silence well. But silence is a thin curtain; it is easy to peek through.
The boy lived two alleys down. He coughed like a bell being rubbed by sand, and when I offered what little balm I could make from boiled herbs and honey someone once gave me, his eyes sharpened as if at a torch's first light.
It was a small thing. He slept mainly. I stayed through the night, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest, murmuring fragments from the Codex that at first wanted only to be tasted: words in old rhythm that asked nothing of my belief and everything of my will. Remember. Serve. Forgive. Each word felt like an instruction and a blade - the kind that cuts away what is false until something honest remains.
At sunrise the boy's cough eased. His breath was quieter. The mother stared at me as if I had moved a mountain with my bare hands. She was crying and smiling at once, the two expressions folded together like weather. "God's mercy," she breathed.
If there was a god present, it was not the one they invoked with banners and judges. The warmth in my palm had faded but not vanished. It had left a mark - a faint luminescence visible only to me, like a coal beneath skin. The Codex sat in my pack and pulsed once, slow and steady, as if pleased.
Word travels like tinder. By noon a curious thing happened: a man in plain clothes who smelled of old parchment and quiet power found me at the market. He wore no Covenant sigils, only a battered satchel and a cropped beard frosted with grey.
"Elior Vane." The beard-man said my name like a struck bell. "You hold the Lumen."
My breath snagged. I had not told a soul. The market sounds folded away. Even the gulls seemed to have stopped to listen.
"Who are you?" I asked. There are honest men who ask the same, and there are men who pretend to be honest to get inside your pocket.
"A friend," he said. "Perhaps. I teach in the old ways that the Covenant wanted to burn. We call ourselves keepers in some places, if that helps your memory. I came because the Codex called - it always calls to itself when found. And because, child, you lit a small light for a dying thing this morning."
There was no accusation in his voice. He did not demand the book. He inclined his head like a man toward a flame.
"You should have left it," I said. The words were brittle. "The Covenant will -"
"We are older than the Covenant, and we remember why books are kept," the man replied. He leaned close, and in the line of his jaw I saw something I had seen only in old woodcuts: exhaustion honed into patience. "The Codex chooses. It chose you today. That means something. It means it will be hunted."
So the world tightened. The book I had thought a coincidence was a summons. The man in the market called himself Jonah, and he gave me a look that made beaches come to mind: endless, patient, eroding.
"Teach me," I said before I had thought better of it. My palms sweat at the memory. "I will learn."
Jonah smiled, and for a second his face showed a boy who had once wanted to be a sailor. "You will learn much," he said. "But know this, Elior Vane: the Codex grants no power for vanity. It grows strength from service and truth. It is a ladder built from verses, and every rung asks for a price. You do not climb it to become godlike. You climb it to become necessary."
As he spoke those words, the shadow at the corner of the market shifted. A woman in a Covenant-grey cloak observed us, her eyes hard as shuttered windows. She touched the chain at her throat where a small scale hung like a seed.
The man called Jonah did not see her. I did.
We had not yet earned the right to be hunted, but the Covenant had someone with ears in the market - and ears grow teeth when fed reasons.
I tucked the Codex deeper into my pack and felt the warmth in my palm curl like an answering fist. The first step had been taken. The second would be harder.
"Teach me," I repeated, and the market around us resumed its music as if nothing had happened.
The boy in the alley would wake hungry and alive. The mother would believe for now. But the Lumen did not pretend to grant easy things. It promised a path and shadowed it with cost.
Already, on the inside of my hand, a tiny line of script was forming - a line that I could not read yet, but that shimmered with a promise and a warning in equal measure.
Pay what is asked.
The book had spoken; the world had answered. The teeth of the Covenant had tasted a new thing.
I was not yet sure whether I would be a savior, a scapegoat, or something in between. But ash makes fertile soil for a kind of seed. I would tend it. I would read. I would learn to pray not only with words, but with my hands. And if the world desired a story about a forsaken man finding light, I would begin by choosing the words I lived by.
The Codex hummed against the ribs of my pack, as though agreeing.
A bell tolled in the far distance - the Covenant's warning, thin and precise. Footsteps followed it, soft as falling paper.
I looked up.
The path had begun.