The boy awoke in silence.
The jade platform beneath him was slick with dew, but his body was dry, untouched by cold or time.
He did not remember falling asleep. Yet… something inside him had shifted.
A faint burn pulsed at the center of his left palm—a symbol like an open eye wrapped in fractured dream-lines. It faded when he blinked. But it returned every time he didn't look.
"Who did this…?" Nocth whispered.
He could still feel the depth beneath his veins. As if each capillary in his body led not to muscle or skin—but to elsewhere. To impossible places. To contradictions that shouldn't exist.
As he stood, the sky cracked subtly with golden threads—an omen recorded only once in the forbidden logs of the old Seers.
---
Across the continent, in a sunken archive known as the Vault of Traced Blood, a robed girl was reading.
Her name was Aremien, a quiet, blind archivist raised by monks who never aged. She did not need eyes—her veins saw for her.
As she turned a glowing vellum page, her hands froze.
One of the oldest vein charts—the Map of Ten Thousand Threads—had changed.
One line shimmered red.
Line #1000.
Status: Awakening.
Title: Unwritten Crown Vein.
Nature: Anti-formed Dream Pulse.
Risk: Incomprehensible.
She stood.
"The Law of Dreaming… has found a host," she murmured. "Or has the host… remembered it?"
The chamber around her stirred. Dust that had not moved in centuries lifted into the air.
Aremien closed the chart, placed it in a satchel, and whispered toward the ceiling:
"Time to return to the Celestial Capital."
---
Meanwhile, back in the Vaelserine Domain, the heiress sat on her balcony, unable to focus.
The boy's face haunted her. Not because she knew him. But because she should have.
His silhouette…
It fit something left behind in her dreams.
She reached for the sealed journal her mother had hidden before the war.
Inside, a sketch of a child—unlabeled, sketched in hurried lines.
But the eyes—his eyes.
"Impossible," she whispered.
And yet her mother's note beneath the image chilled her:
"The child without time. The one the Crown tried to erase."
Suddenly, the painting beside her cracked—silently, diagonally—splitting her mother's face.
A sign.
A curse reawakening.
---
Back at the Academy, Nocth returned quietly to his chamber, only to find a scroll lying across his cot.
It had no seal.
Unfurling it, he saw only a single line of calligraphy in gold-dust ink:
> "A watcher from the Beyond has marked you.
Hide your veins, if you can."
No name. No signature. But the scroll smelled of moonsilver—a rare ink used only by royal blood scribes.
From the shadows, the academy's inner watchers stirred. Hidden by cloaks made of silence itself, they took note.
And one among them, high in the Imperial Observatory, frowned:
> "If the boy is truly linked to Line #1000, we cannot afford to let him become."
---
Below Selun'Thael, in the Chamber of the Eclipsed Veins, something began to unseal.
An ancient door, untouched by time, pulsed faintly as twelve locks shimmered in sequence.
A central eye, long dormant, blinked.
Inside the chamber, in stasis, a being neither alive nor dead, born before the Celestial Kingdom's founding, stirred.
It had waited for this signal.
Its first whisper:
"The Law breathes again… in a child."
"He must die before he writes the Dream."