The ruins of the eastern quarter lay silent, their walls charred, their stones still holding the heat of fires long extinguished. Amidst the rubble stood Shinomiya Reiji, cloak torn, his blade dulled not by rust but by the weight of countless clashes. Every step he took was heavy with the burden of exile.
He was no longer the Court's executioner.
He was the ghost of their betrayal.
And yet, in that exile, whispers of something older reached him. A word spoken in fragments, passed from trembling lips of dying informants: the Codex.
Not the Court's decrees, not the whispered contracts written in blood and ash, but something buried—something the shadows themselves had tried to erase.
---
The trail began with an old merchant, his body broken and his eyes clouded, who clutched at Reiji's arm before his last breath.
"The Codex… is not lost," he rasped. "It waits… where silence breathes deepest."
And with that, the man was gone, leaving Reiji with nothing but riddles.
---
The next piece of the puzzle lay in the hands of a child, one who scavenged in the skeleton of the city. She carried scraps of parchment, ink faded and words fractured. When Reiji knelt to ask, she only said:
"They call it the Forgotten. My mother said the shadows fear it more than they fear the blade."
She pressed the parchment into his hand before fleeing, vanishing into the mist.
Reiji unfolded it slowly. The words were incomplete, written in a tongue that felt half-familiar, half-foreign. But there was one line he understood without question:
"When the Codex awakens, the shadows shall bleed truth."
---
For nights, Reiji searched, moving through broken temples, hollow libraries, and hidden sanctums. Each place yielded nothing but more fragments, more whispers, more silence.
It was in the abandoned archive beneath the shattered Glass Spire that he finally found it. A vault of dust and rot, guarded not by blades but by the weight of memory itself.
The Codex of the Forgotten lay upon a pedestal of cracked stone, its cover of blackened leather bound by chains of tarnished silver. The air itself recoiled from it, as though the book was not an artifact but a wound in the fabric of the world.
When Reiji touched the chains, the air shuddered. The walls whispered in voices not his own—voices of assassins long dead, of traitors long executed, of kings who had begged for mercy and received none.
The Codex pulsed like a heart. And when Reiji opened it, he realized it was not merely a record.
It was a mirror.
---
The pages revealed histories the Court had buried: oaths broken, truths twisted, betrayals sanctified. The first assassinations. The silent wars waged beneath the veneer of peace. The names of those who had been erased not because they were enemies, but because they had learned too much.
And in the center of it all was a symbol—the mark of the Court itself, etched not as an emblem of order, but as a brand of corruption.
Reiji staggered back, the weight of revelation crashing into him.
"All this time…" he whispered. "We were not guardians of silence. We were prisoners of it."
The chains clattered as the Codex seemed to breathe, its voice threading into his thoughts.
You are not the first to find me. You will not be the last. The shadows betray all who serve them. But you, Shinomiya Reiji, may yet choose what betrayal means.
---
The silence of the chamber was broken by footsteps. Slow, deliberate, echoing against the stone.
From the darkened stairwell emerged a figure draped in crimson silk, mask gleaming with a faint silver hue. His presence was suffocating, a shadow heavier than any Reiji had yet faced.
"I see the Codex has found its reader," the figure said, his tone calm, almost reverent. "And now the question becomes—will you wield its truth, or will you let it consume you as it did the others?"
Reiji gripped his blade, though his hands trembled. "Who are you?"
The figure inclined his head. "A remnant of those you once called allies. The one who watched as you killed Renji. The one who will watch as the Codex devours you. Call me what you wish—betrayer, witness, executioner. It matters not. The Codex chooses, and it has chosen you."
The chains of the Codex rattled, the air thick with the weight of unspoken truths.
Reiji's voice hardened. "If it has chosen me, then it will be by my hand—not yours—that the shadows are rewritten."
The crimson figure smiled beneath his mask. "Then prove it. Prove that betrayal is not the end of you, but your beginning."
And with that, the chamber ignited in battle—steel ringing, shadows screaming, the Codex watching silently as dawn broke once more over a city blind to the truths buried beneath its streets.