The Codex did not always move in front of them. Sometimes it lay still for days, its weight heavy and unyielding on the pedestal in the library's heart. Then, without reason, it would stir—pages sliding with a dry whisper, glyphs unfurling in ink that gleamed like wet obsidian.
That evening, the Codex stirred.
Lyra had fallen asleep at the table, her cheek pressed to a scatter of her own notes. She woke to the faint scrape of vellum against vellum, her pulse leaping. The chamber was dim, lit only by the blue lamps set into the walls, but in that dimness the Codex moved. Its pages lifted in a breathless motion, as though stirred by wind that did not exist. Lines of ink unfurled across the open spread, shaping into glyphs she half-recognized, half-feared.
Her breath stilled.
"Rienne," she whispered.
The scientist had been awake, sitting upright with her crystalline arm resting against her knee. She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she rose and stepped closer, the glass of her prosthetic catching lamplight in a way flesh never could. Lyra noticed—again—how the arm didn't merely reflect light. It seemed to absorb it, then breathe it back in subtle pulses, like a lantern with a slow heartbeat.
Only then did Rienne speak. "It writes again."
Kael stirred in the corner. He had been sleeping restlessly on a pile of folded cloth. His hand went instinctively to the hilt of a blade that did not quite exist until he remembered it into being. He stood but did not move closer. His gaze was wary, as though the Codex were a foe waiting to draw him into another battle.
Lyra leaned forward, tracing the glyphs with her eyes. They were angular, fractured, lines slicing across one another like shards of glass suspended in air. She mouthed the words as best she could, though half slipped away as soon as she spoke them aloud.
"Glass binds, but glass also shatters."
The Codex closed with a decisive snap.
The silence that followed was thicker than the air of the chamber. Kael finally broke it, his voice low. "A threat. Or a prophecy."
"No," Rienne said, though her tone betrayed uncertainty. She lifted her crystalline hand, holding it above the place where the Codex had closed. The faint glow in the glass brightened, as if answering. "It's a warning. And perhaps…a rebuke."
Lyra frowned. "Because of your Resonator?"
Rienne's jaw tightened. She did not look at Lyra but kept her gaze fixed on her arm, watching the way the veins of pale light threaded through it. "Yes. And more than that. The Codex knows what I carry. It knows what I did."
Her words were not defensive. They were resigned, and in that resignation lay something heavier than guilt—something closer to inevitability.
Kael folded his arms. "Then speak it plain. I grow tired of half-truths. If you bear some curse that threatens us, I would know it now."
Lyra shot him a look, but Rienne did not flinch. She set her glass hand fully atop the Codex's cover. The surface quivered faintly, as if resisting her, yet did not reject her touch.
"The Veil fractures because of many things," she said softly. "But my work pushed it further. The Resonator was meant only to measure dimensional echoes—harmless, or so I believed. Yet each activation cut the Veil in ways I didn't see until too late. The arm was the price I paid when the device collapsed. The rest…" She shook her head. "The rest was paid by the city."
"You mean the lost days," Lyra said.
Rienne nodded. "And perhaps more. I suspect whole memories—whole lives—may have slipped through. Glass binds, yes. It can hold water, hold light. But it breaks easily. The Codex's words are clear enough. My inventions may serve both roles. They could mend the Veil. Or destroy it entirely."
Her voice faltered on that last sentence.
Kael's expression darkened, though not with anger alone. There was something else there—a recognition of her burden, perhaps, mirrored in his own grief. "And which role will you choose?" he asked.
"I don't know."
The words hung like ash.
The three of them did not leave the chamber for some time. The lamps hissed faintly, their light wavering with a thin, oily quality that reminded Lyra of the nights when the city itself felt unstable, as though buildings and streets might rearrange if one blinked too long.
Lyra filled the silence with the scratch of quill on parchment. She copied the Codex's words again and again, as though repetition might yield clarity.
Glass binds. Glass shatters.
The sentence held a rhythm, almost incantatory, like the fragments of old chants that sometimes echoed through her dreams. She looked at Rienne's arm and thought of its living pulse. Was the Codex speaking literally of that arm? Or metaphorically—of truths and lies, of memories both held and lost?
Her pen stilled. The more she wrote, the less certain she became.
Kael stood near the doorway, his stance restless. He did not like libraries, Lyra knew. Books gave him no anchor; they slipped through his memory like smoke. Yet he lingered because he understood the weight of oaths. And he had sworn one to them.
Finally, he said, "This warning changes little. We already knew the world unravels. We already knew we stand against it."
Rienne looked up sharply. "You think it changes little because you don't feel it carving at you." She lifted her arm, the glass veins pulsing brighter now, almost feverish. "This is not stable. The longer I carry it, the more it fuses with me. The Codex may be telling me that I am both weapon and fault-line. What happens if I shatter?"
Kael's answer was blunt. "Then we keep fighting without you."
Lyra winced, but Rienne only gave a thin smile. "Spoken like a soldier. Yet you forget—if I fall, the Veil may fall with me."
Later that night, after Kael had gone to take watch outside, Lyra remained with Rienne. The Codex was quiet again, but unease lingered in the chamber like smoke after a fire.
Rienne sat hunched, her glass arm cradled in her lap. The crystalline surface caught faint reflections from the lamp, throwing them in shards across the wall. It struck Lyra how fragile she looked then—though the arm appeared indestructible, the woman attached to it was not.
"Do you believe it?" Lyra asked quietly. "That the Codex is condemning you?"
Rienne's eyes lifted. They were bloodshot from sleeplessness, yet steady. "The Codex does not condemn. It records. Its words are less judgment than inevitability. And inevitability is the cruelest truth of all."
Lyra hesitated, then reached across the table, touching her hand—not the glass one, but the remaining flesh. "Then fight inevitability. You told us your Resonator cut the Veil. Perhaps your knowledge can stitch it too."
For a long moment Rienne said nothing. Then, almost imperceptibly, her grip tightened.
"Perhaps," she whispered.
When Kael returned at dawn, the city bells did not toll. Lyra realized, with a start of fear, that she could no longer remember the sound they once made.
But in her notebook, the words still burned like an ember:
Glass binds. Glass shatters.
And she wondered whether they, too, would someday vanish.