Aren did not remove the card from his pocket for the rest of the day.
It wasn't fear that stopped him. Fear demanded reaction—inspection, testing, explanation. What he felt instead was restraint, a quiet certainty that touching the card again without purpose would be… impolite.
As if it were watching.
He returned home through streets that felt subtly unfamiliar. Not changed—Averon City was the same tangle of stone, smoke, and industry it had always been—but the way it existed around him had shifted. Sounds reached him a fraction of a second earlier than expected. Faces lingered in his awareness after he passed them. Even the rhythm of his steps felt slightly out of sync with the world's response.
Like walking a half-beat ahead of reality.
His apartment was on the third floor of a narrow building wedged between a tailor's shop and a shuttered print house. The stairwell smelled of old ink and boiled cabbage. Nothing out of the ordinary.
The door unlocked on the first try.
Aren stepped inside and closed it carefully behind him.
He stood still for several seconds, listening.
No movement. No pressure. No sense of attention pressing at the edges of his mind.
Only then did he exhale.
The room was small and sparsely furnished—a desk near the window, a narrow bed, shelves lined with books and loose papers. Records he'd brought home over the years, copies of municipal regulations, half-finished personal indexes that had never quite become anything useful.
Order had always comforted him.
Tonight, it felt insufficient.
Aren removed his coat and set it on the back of the chair. The card remained in the inner pocket, its presence unmistakable now that he wasn't moving. Not heavy. Not warm.
Certain.
He sat at the desk and lit the lamp.
The flame steadied immediately, brighter than usual. Aren frowned, adjusted the wick, then let it be. He reached for a blank sheet of paper and placed it in front of him.
He didn't write.
Instead, he rested his hands flat on the desk and tried to think.
The woman in the chapel. The pressure. The word she'd used.
Marked.
If the Church had a system for identifying irregularities, then the fact that he hadn't triggered it mattered. Either he hadn't crossed whatever threshold they monitored…
Or he had crossed it in the wrong direction.
Aren's gaze drifted to the coat.
After a long moment, he reached inside and withdrew the card.
Up close, it was even stranger. Its edges were smooth but not sharp, as if they refused to define where they ended. The surface was matte, absorbing light instead of reflecting it. No symbols. No markings.
Nothing to indicate what it was meant to be.
Aren placed it gently on the desk.
The air shifted.
Not dramatically. Not enough to raise the hair on his arms. But the room felt… attentive, the way the archive sometimes did late at night, when too many unresolved records were gathered in one place.
Aren swallowed.
"Alright," he said softly, feeling foolish for speaking aloud. "What are you?"
The card did not respond.
He expected that. Still, the silence that followed felt deliberate.
He reached for his pen.
The moment the nib touched paper, a dull ache bloomed behind his eyes. Not pain—pressure. A reminder.
Do not draw conclusions yet.
The woman's warning echoed in his mind.
Aren set the pen down.
Instead, he closed his eyes.
He didn't pray. He didn't chant. He didn't recite any of the half-remembered formulas he'd seen in confiscated ritual transcripts.
He simply focused.
On the card.On its presence.On the fact that it existed without explanation.
The ache intensified.
Images surfaced—fragmented, unanchored.
A table with too many chairs.A ledger whose pages turned themselves.A name written, crossed out, then written again.
Aren's breath quickened.
This is a mistake, a rational part of him insisted. You don't know what you're doing.
That was true.
But something else was also true, and it felt heavier.
Neither does it.
Aren opened his eyes.
The card had changed.
Not visibly. Not in a way he could point to. But the sense of blankness had shifted. It was no longer empty in the way an unused page was empty.
It was empty in the way a space waited to be filled.
Aren's pulse hammered in his ears.
"This isn't divination," he murmured.
The realization settled with unsettling clarity.
Divination sought answers.
This—
This was something else.
He wasn't asking the card to tell him the truth.
He was waiting to see what truth would dare to remain once it was noticed.
The pressure receded slightly, as if approving of the distinction.
Aren leaned back in his chair, heart still racing.
He had not activated the card.
He had not drawn it.
But something fundamental had shifted between them.
A relationship.
Outside, a bell rang in the distance—one of the Church towers marking the hour. The sound carried through the open window, clear and sharp.
Aren looked down at the card again.
For just a moment—so brief he might have imagined it—a faint line appeared on its surface. Not a symbol. Not a word.
A divider.
As if the card were waiting to be turned.
Aren did not touch it.
Not yet.
Aren kept his hands on the edge of the desk.
He did not move them closer to the card.
The faint divider line remained—subtle, almost apologetic, as if it were unsure it was allowed to exist. The room felt tighter now, not smaller, but more defined. Like a sketch that had reached the point where erasing lines would leave marks.
Aren swallowed.
If I touch it, he thought, something will be decided.
That was the danger.
Not harm.Not death.
Decision.
He leaned back in his chair instead, forcing distance between himself and the desk. The pressure behind his eyes dulled, as if disappointed but willing to wait.
"Later," he said quietly.
The card did not disagree.
Sleep did not come easily.
When it did, it brought no dreams—only fragments of awareness drifting in and out, like pages turned without reading. Aren woke before dawn with the sensation that time had moved forward without consulting him.
The card was still on the desk.
Exactly where he had left it.
He washed, dressed, and prepared for work with mechanical precision. Bread, tea, coat. Every familiar action felt rehearsed, as if he were following instructions written long ago.
Before leaving, he hesitated.
Slowly, carefully, he slid the card back into his inner pocket.
The moment it settled there, the pressure returned—not painful, but present. Accompanying him.
So this is how it will be, Aren thought.
The archive greeted him with its usual restraint.
Clerks nodded in passing. Someone complained softly about ink shortages. The gas lamps hummed. To anyone watching, it was an ordinary morning.
To Aren, it felt staged.
He took his seat at Desk Seventeen and began sorting the day's intake. Routine reports. Minor disputes. Inventory adjustments.
Then he saw the seal.
Black wax. Unmarked. No departmental insignia.
Aren's fingers stilled.
There were only three reasons a document arrived like this. High Church matters. Internal audits. Or—
Containment.
He did not break the seal immediately.
Instead, he checked the intake ledger.
The entry was already logged.
Recipient: A. Vale
Department: Records
Origin: Unspecified
Time: Before opening
Before opening meant before anyone should have been able to access the building.
Aren exhaled slowly and broke the seal.
Inside was a single sheet of heavy parchment.
No letterhead. No signature.
Just a short block of text.
Notice of Review
An inconsistency has been recorded within your assigned jurisdiction.
Your presence is requested for clarification.
Attendance is mandatory.
Beneath it was an address.
Not a church.
Not a courthouse.
A reading room.
Aren stared at the page.
The pressure behind his eyes flared briefly, then settled, as if recognizing the shape of what was coming.
He folded the notice and placed it in his drawer.
Around him, the archive continued to breathe.
No one looked at him.
No one spoke his name.
Yet he felt it clearly now—the subtle resistance whenever his attention lingered on something. The way records seemed to pause before settling. The way the world waited a fraction longer when he noticed it.
Aren closed his eyes for a moment.
He thought of the alley.Of the addendum.Of the blank card that had waited patiently on his desk.
This is how it starts, he realized.
Not with power.
With review.
He opened his eyes and resumed his work, pen moving steadily across the page. To anyone watching, he was still just a records clerk.
But somewhere between one line and the next, something had already shifted.
When Aren Vale was finished for the day, the archive would remember him.
And that, he understood now, was far more dangerous than being noticed by a god.