The library kept its own weather. Light slipped through tall panes of colored glass and fell in tempered colors across stone.
Dust drifted like faint constellations above a desk strewn with opened folios and curled notes, a clutter that seemed chaotic at first glance yet carried an order only its keeper could see.
A robed figure looked up. Cloth hid brow and cheek, leaving only two hollow white eyes — eyes that did not search the room, but found you.
You have come at last. Call me the Archivist. For thousands of years I have kept the memory of Erzilyn — what people forget and what the world remembers. I have seen kingdoms rise in glory and fall into dust. I have watched empires swell like tides and recede into silence. I have endured the passing of ages, when golden dawns turned to iron nights, when deities still walked among mortals before their long silence.
Through it all, I have held the threads of glory and ruin alike. One thread now pulls tighter than the rest. Walk with me. In it you will find truth and disguise, friendship and wonder, and the burden that every age has known as heroism.
A hand lifted. Pages turned as if they knew their place.
We begin where wounds linger, at the rim of Ardiweald, where two souls are fated to meet, though neither chose it.
⁕⁕⁕
A boy with pointed ears sat on a broad branch, legs hooked for balance, pen scratching in a journal whose leather had learned his hands. Wind moved through the grand trees and made the leaves answer with a low, steady voice. The canopy layered upon itself until the sky was rumor and green.
He wrote without hurry:
Primdon, 21st of Aeshieme: Wind's unruly tonight. Odd for a heat month. No trespassers near the border. One more lap, then rest. Lok, signing off.
He closed the journal, tapped its spine as if to seal the day inside, and slid it into his leather. He dropped through the green in tidy falls—branch to branch, bark to boot—until the mossy ground took his weight and gave it back.
The patrol ran east: through fern and old trunks, over stone humps that rose like the backs of sleeping beasts, down to the shore where roots surrendered to sea. The wind came harder there, carrying brine and a sharp tang like iodine.
A stream announced itself with a clean voice behind Lok. He checked his waterskin, coaxed out a single drop, and followed the sound through flowers and low life. At the bank he set the mouth against the current.
A nudge pressed his shoulder. He turned to a doe, calm-eyed, nose straying toward the dagger on his belt.
"Not tonight," he said, palm to brow. The doe dipped her head and retreated back into foliage, trusting and unafraid.
Clouds muscled in from the horizon, their edges ragged with lightning. The air had already thickened, sharp with the scent of wet earth and leaves waiting to drink.
Lok climbed the nearest trunk and wove broad leaves into a crude roof. He watched the canopy sway as if bracing itself, then leaned against the bark and closed his eyes, letting the forest keep the watch a while.
Morning came damp, the air still heavy with rain. Light pressed against his eyelids until he stirred. Above him, the leaf-roof sagged, swollen with a night's worth of water. Lok froze, watching the lump tremble with each breath of wind. He moved slowly, as though any motion might bring the sky down on him. Then the weight gave way in a single rush, bursting cold across his head and shoulders. He sputtered, slicked his hair back with both hands, and muttered a curse under his breath as the forest answered with quiet laughter in the leaves.
He let his eyes roam the beach, where sea met land in restless embrace. Amid the sand and scattered kelp, something unnatural lay still. A body lay on the beach.
Curiosity and caution shared the reins. He went down the tree, careful where moss lied about its grip, and crossed from green to sand.
The air thinned around him, and his outline vanished with it. Not a trick taught to every scout. Lok carried a gift of Gaia, the way of slipping from sight if breath and focus did not betray him.
The figure was a boy near his age. Pale skin, white hair salted to the scalp, clothes torn by something that did not bargain. And rounded ears.
A human.
How did he reach this far.
He stepped closer. The sea worked at the edge of the world. Gulls measured the distance with their voices. The boy did not move.
Lok knelt by the still form, searching the chest for that fragile sign of life. There — a faint rise, almost too slight to trust. His breath left him in relief, and he reached to turn the boy's face from the sand that threatened to smother it.
His violet eyes opened.
Muscles gathered all at once. The boy sprang backward, sand streaking his palms, gaze spearing the outline in the air where Lok half-existed.
He kicked up a curtain of sand. Grains hung, clung, and traced a shape where nothing should be. Several stung Lok's eye and mouth.
His focus slipped. The gift let go. He stood fully in the morning, palms open to show the world his empty intentions.
"It is all right," Lok said, leveling his breath. "I will not harm you."
"Stay back!" The boy's hand came up with a dagger. Lok froze as recognition struck — the weight, the edge, the worn leather grip.
My dagger.
It was taken from his sheath without him feeling a thing.
"When did you—"
The boy closed the space between them in a heartbeat. Lok's off-hand knife cleared its sheath. Steel met steel with a shriek, the parry too slow. The edge kissed his cheek and left fire in its wake. Pain pulled his head aside and blurred his sight for half a heartbeat — half enough.
The boy saw the gap and drove a fist into Lok's gut. His lungs clamped, air torn out in a grunt. Lok staggered, ribs shuddering, body folding against the blow.
But muscle remembered what thought did not. His knee shot up hard, slamming into the boy's center with a thud that rattled through both of them.
The boy went slack.
Lok caught him before the sand did, eased him down, and leaned close. Breath touched his fingers—thin, but present. He set a hand to the torn shirt where his knee had landed. No bruise, no blood.
However, a faint and cold light pulsed beneath the skin, like something waking in the dark and thinking better of it.
He cut the cloth clean and folded it back.
A purple scar sprawled across the chest, thin branches leeching color from the flesh.
It did not bleed. It took.
The light within it shivered once and settled to a dim, steady wrongness.
Lok felt the small hairs rise along his arms. He had not seen a wound like this, and in Ardiweald the unheard-of usually had a name someone was afraid to say.
The boy's chest rose shallowly. Still here.
Lok thought through the forest's shelf of remedies. None would cure the root of such a thing. Yet pain could be quieted, and flesh steadied. He looked along the tree line, judging distance and time. The sky had not yet decided its temper for the day. The wind was willing.
He pressed two fingers below the boy's nose. Breath. He touched the throat lightly. Pulse, a bit lost, but stubborn. "Hold on," he said, to the boy or the morning.
He stood and went into the green, moving with the economy of someone who knows where help grows when nothing else will.
Bark yielded poultice. Leaves offered clean oils. A bitter stem would keep fever from climbing too high too fast. He gathered and bound the small cures in his scarf and returned by the same quiet path, listening for the ocean and the gulls wheeling above, their cries sharp, their judgment unreadable.
He found the boy where the sea had left him. The eyes were closed again, but the tension had run out of the hands. Lok knelt and worked without hurry. He cleaned, cooled, and dressed the wound. The cold light dulled as if the bandage had taught it manners. But it did not go away.
"Better," Lok said softly, as if saying it would give the claim a place to stand.
The boy's eyelids trembled. He did not wake.
Lok sat back on his heels and let the wind talk a while. The sea kept its rhythm. High above, a gull chose a new circle and pretended it was the first of the day.
He looked down at the bandage, then at the white hair matted with salt. Trespass is trespass, even when the tide is the guide. Protocol is a path laid for reasons that had cost the forest dearly. He would walk it. But he would walk it with his eyes open.
Behind him, Ardiweald waited with its layered leaves and old decisions. Ahead, the shore drew a pale line across the morning. Between them lay a body that should not be here, carrying a scar that should not be survivable.
The boy's breath hitched and steadied. A small sound left his throat, almost a word. The eyelids fluttered and opened to a narrow violet slit. For a heartbeat the gaze caught on the sky, the tree, the shape of a stranger, and the band of cloth across his chest.
Where am I?
The look passed like a cloud's shadow. He slipped under again.
Lok tied off the last strip of cloth, rose, and scanned the forest one more time, measuring distance to Dar'Ardi and the hours the day would allow. He lifted the boy carefully, one arm beneath the shoulders, the other under the knees, and felt the surprising lightness of someone emptied by salt and hunger.
"Come on, then," he said to the air, to the weight in his arms, to the rules that would soon ask questions he could not yet answer. "Let's get you seen."
He took the first steps toward the trees. The sea worked behind him. The wind followed, keeping its habits. The forest received them with the calm of an old house that has already decided where guests should go and how long they ought to stay.