Spandrex's Point of View
He stood in a room lit only by violet fire.
Books. Stacks of them. Everywhere.
They towered in crooked piles across the stone floor—some so ancient their pages fell apart at the whisper of air. The windows were sealed with runes. The shadows moved even when nothing else did.
He didn't remember walking in.
He just was here.
A child's drawing sat on the table. He recognized it—his drawing. A clumsy sketch of his family: a boy with wild hair, a tall father with one eye glowing, and a mother bent over a scroll.
He turned—and they were there.
His mother, sitting cross-legged on the ground, black ink staining her fingertips, her robes covered in scrawled glyphs. His father, pacing behind her, muttering lines from a book he wasn't holding. Their faces looked younger. Calmer. But tired. So tired.
"Don't let him see the Vehrash pages," his mother whispered. "Not yet. He's too—"
"He's already looking," his father interrupted, glancing directly at him. "He was born looking."
Spandrex's heart pounded. "I… this already happened…"
But the walls didn't listen.
Instead, the room shifted. The stone floor turned to black wood. Now he was standing in the basement chamber beneath their old house. Candles hovered mid-air, casting sharp shadows across an open tome on the ground. He remembered this place.
He remembered the first time he heard the name Vehrash.
He was eight. Hiding behind a curtain. Listening.
"…what if it's not a demon, Tareen?" his mother was saying. "What if it's a language? A living spell? What if the glyphs don't summon Vehrash… what if they are Vehrash?"
"You're chasing myth," his father muttered, though his voice lacked conviction. "And it's chasing us back."
They turned to look at the curtain.
At him.
He gasped—and the scene shattered like glass.
Now he was in the library of the old estate, watching his younger self scrawl notes on loose pages. He remembered the words. Shadow exists where meaning dies.
The book he was copying from had no title. Its cover was made of stitched skin.
His father stood behind him again.
"You don't write a Vehrash glyph," he said coldly. "You bleed it."
"Why didn't you stop me?" Spandrex asked aloud. "Why didn't you hide it better?"
No answer.
Only silence.
Then the scene shifted again.
He was older. Back at the academy. Standing in the dorm hallway, rune in hand, heart pounding. But it wasn't the real academy. The torches flickered the wrong way. The ceiling was too low. And behind each door… was a piece of the past.
A memory.
A moment.
A warning.
Spandrex turned to open one—and saw himself watching Kael. Watching the boy walk with confidence, but also pain. He remembered this day. He remembered the jealousy. The curiosity. The whisper in his ear that said you were born for more than this.
Then the voice returned. The one from the book. Low and wide like a cavern.
"You see now… they were preparing you."
"Even before they knew your name."
Spandrex clenched his fists.
He looked at his hands—and saw black glyphs etched into his skin.
Not drawn.
Branded.
He blinked.
The glyphs on his skin throbbed. They moved—not just with his pulse, but like they were breathing. Reading him back.
He stumbled away from the hallway and into another memory, though he hadn't chosen to go there.
This time, he was smaller again, curled beneath a staircase while his parents argued in hushed, urgent tones above him.
"It has to stop, Tareen," his father hissed. "We're not just risking ourselves anymore."
"I'm close," she insisted. "The ink responded last night. It flared black. Not dead black—living. It means he's awakening. It means the text is aware."
"No child should be the vessel for this."
"You didn't stop me when I marked him."
Spandrex's blood ran cold. Marked? He tried to push himself into the memory, scream at them, ask what they meant—but the moment slipped through his fingers like mist.
He turned—and the staircase dissolved into shadows.
Now, he stood in a room lined with mirrors. Hundreds of them.
Each one showed a version of him—younger, older, crueler, broken, laughing, twisted, hollow-eyed, powerful. One mirror showed him sitting on the throne of the academy, cloaked in ink and fire. Another showed him chained in a cell, eyes burning but lifeless. Another… was empty.
He stepped toward that one, and suddenly—it grabbed him.
The mirror shattered, and he fell through the frame, landing hard in—
—his childhood bedroom.
Or something pretending to be.
Books were stacked around his bed in perfect towers, and on the walls, his childhood drawings had been rewritten, glyphs over the crayon marks. The stars he'd drawn had been blackened. The moons had been eclipsed. The faces of his parents had been replaced by a blank circle, ink dripping from its edge.
"You were not made for light," said the voice again, closer now.
The air turned cold.
"You are the echo of something that died screaming."
Spandrex backed up, hands shaking. "No… this isn't real. This isn't real!"
A mirror appeared in front of him again—just one. And in it… he saw his body.
Back in the real world.
His physical form stood, blank-faced, in the center of his destroyed dorm. His eyes were pure black. The glyphs on his arms now ran up his neck. The black smoke circled him like a cloak.
And then… his reflection turned and looked at him.
From inside the mirror.
"Get out," Spandrex whispered.
The figure smiled.
"I'm already in."