The roof tiles were slick with night dew. Elyon ran in a crouch, palms light on the ridge, breath long and even the way the Codex of Light had taught him.
Behind him, the attic door creaked. A lantern spilled a yellow square into the dark. Boots thudded. The Inquisitors were careful, but wood tells on careful men.
He kept moving.
Greyhaven spread beneath him like a sleeping beast—alleys for ribs, canals for veins, chimneys for spines. He aimed for the lower roofs, for the cloth markets where lines were strung like webs. He chose angles that would make lantern-light slide away from his coat. He did not sprint. Sprinting burns all your air at once.
Lumen Breath.
In through the nose. Out longer than in.
On the third cycle, noise separated into pieces: the clatter of a loose shutter, the scrape of a scabbard on a stair, the soft squeak of a pulley two streets over.
A voice drifted up, level and cold. "Take the roof line. He won't risk the street."
The woman from the market.
Elyon cut left over a mason's workshop and stepped across a gap only a cat would have liked. Tiles slid. His foot found the rafter beneath. He swallowed a curse and felt for the rhythm again.
The Codex warmed against his ribs. He didn't open it. Not while running. But the warmth steadied him the way a palm steadies a frightened animal.
A laundry line stretched ahead, silk scraps hung like moons. He reached for the line—then froze.
A figure stood in the shadow at the far end. Cloak the color of river moss. A stillness that wasn't fear, wasn't bravado. It was listening.
The girl from earlier.
"Your left," she said softly, as if they were standing at a window and not on a roof. "The gutter bar there is rusted through."
He adjusted his step without thinking. The bar he would have trusted snapped as he passed, an empty bite in the dark. His stomach did the drop a body does when it remembers gravity. His other foot landed on the sound beam. He slid, caught, kept going.
"Why help me?" he said, too low for the alley to keep.
"They're not after a thief," she said. "They're after a book."
She had seen it then, the edge under his coat. She hadn't shouted.
"What's your name?" Elyon asked, because the Codex had set him a task that had sat in the back of his mind like a weight: Speak truth where a lie would be easier.
The girl's mouth tilted, not quite a smile. "If I tell you, will you tell me why you run with a light under your skin?"
He wanted to say no name, no reason. He wanted to say you saw wrong. Lies are easier. Lies are always easier.
He exhaled. "Elyon Veyr."
She blinked. Not at Elyon. At Veyr. The name still did work in this city.
"And you?" he asked.
"Seliah," she said simply. "Seliah of the East Quarter. Turn down there."
Down there was a black throat between a candle-maker's and a thread-merchant's. He followed.
They dropped to a balcony, crossed another line. The shouts faded a little. Not gone. The Inquisitors were methodical; he could feel their patience like a net tightening.
At the far end, Seliah crouched to peer over. The street below was empty, but the emptiness felt rehearsed—too neat, like a trap set by a man who read books about traps.
"Where does this go?" Elyon asked.
"A dead end," she said. "Unless you know the cooper."
"I sleep above his shop," he said before he caught himself, and the Codex warmed again as if to say: There. Truth.
Seliah's eyes flicked to his coat. "Then you know the window with the broken latch."
Elyon did. He also knew the ladder that creaked and the barrel hoop that sang if you nudged it with a knee. He nodded.
"Go," she said. "And Elyon—"
He looked back.
"Keep your light dim," she said. "There are eyes that see what yours do."
Then she was gone, the way some people are—one step and the night takes them.
He didn't waste the gift. He ran the ridge, slid down a drain spout, dropped into the coopers' yard, and eased through the broken latch with the care of a man moving past sleepers. He closed the window behind him and waited until his pulse lost count of itself.
Down in the shop, wood creaked as though remembering ships. The smell of steam and oak warmed the dark. Elyon crouched by the stub of candle he had left and didn't light it.
He set the Codex on the bare floor and opened it to the first page just enough to breathe with the letters.
New writing had appeared at the bottom margin, thin as hair but legible, like frost that had chosen a pattern.
Task observed. Truth spoken where silence would shield. The path of light narrows but strengthens under weight.
Virtues:
Honesty: 2
Mercy: 2
Resolve: 2
Faith: 0
Reward unlocked: PAGE THREE — CONFESSION.
PAGE THREE — CONFESSION
A wound untended will fester. A truth unsaid will rot. Speak cleanly to the one your path endangers. Bind your steps with a vow and walk straighter.
Technique unlocked: Vow-Thread (Novice).
Effect: Bind intention to action for a span; strengthens will against fear and deceit; reveals hidden snares when used with Light-Sight. Cost: Breath + Courage. Note: False vows fray and burn the bearer.
Elyon dragged a hand down his face. Speak cleanly to the one your path endangers. He pictured the cooper—old Rand, with hands like roots and eyes that measured boards and boys the same way. If the Inquisitors came and found him here, it would be Rand who paid first.
Lies would keep Rand safe for a night. Truth might keep him safe longer—or hurt him faster. The Codex didn't deal in easy arithmetic.
Footsteps creaked on the stair.
Elyon stood.
The attic door pushed open. Old Rand peered in with a lantern held low to cut glare. The light drew deep lines in his face and made the wood planes of the room look like a ship's keel.
"You move like a man with a cat on his back," Rand said. "And you left the sash warm. I thought I taught you better."
"They were on the roof," Elyon said. He swallowed. His mouth had gone dry. "Rand… there's something I need to tell you."
Rand set the lantern on a crate and shut the door with his heel. He didn't ask questions, not yet. He had known Elyon since he was a thin-legged runner who fetched pegs and swept shavings. He waited the way a good barrel waits for wine—open, not empty.
"I took a book from the old temple," Elyon said. "Not for coin. Not for spite. It found me. It's… different."
Rand's eyebrows ticked up. The candlelight caught the silver in his beard. "Different how?"
"It speaks," Elyon said softly. "Not with noise. With… sense. It shows things. It tells me to do things that make me a better man, and then it gives me ways to stand up straighter when the world pushes."
Rand's gaze went to Elyon's hands. The faint film of light there was near invisible in the lantern glow, but men who work with wood learn to see grain others call air.
"And the hunters?" Rand asked.
"The Covenant," Elyon said. "An Inquisitor. They know something woke. They think I have it."
"And do you?"
Elyon could say no. Easy. Protect the old man by shutting his mouth around a lie.
He exhaled. "Yes."
Silence pooled. Below, the shop creaked the way old houses talk to themselves.
Rand nodded once. "Then you'll not sleep here tonight."
"It's safer if I—"
"It's safer if you don't bring knives to my door," Rand said, but his voice stayed even. He wasn't angry. He was adjusting angles. "Child, I am old and stubborn, but I am not brave for sport. I will not host a war. But I will do a small thing right now and sleep well later."
He set the lantern down and reached into the collar of his shirt. From under it he drew a little disk of wood with a burned mark: a simple cross of two strokes, like the symbol on the Codex.
Elyon's breath caught.
"You think you are the first boy to bring light into this room?" Rand asked, mouth twitching. "My mother called them Keepers in her day. My hands are not for fighting, but I can roll a barrel and pass a message."
"You knew," Elyon whispered.
"I guessed," Rand said. "When you came home with ash lungs and kindness in your pockets. When you started breathing like a priest before a storm. When the city began watching you without knowing why."
He lifted the lantern and looked Elyon in the face. "Make your vow, boy."
"My—?"
"Your book wants one," Rand said as if remarking on a knot in a stave. "I can smell it. The old books always ask for the mouth to join the hands. Vow that you won't bring soldiers to my door again. Vow that you'll do what you must to draw them away. I'll open the back and you'll leave with the dawn rats."
Elyon swallowed. He opened the Codex. The script on PAGE THREE glowed faintly, easier to read now that the decision had a shape.
He set his fingertips to the margin. He breathed. He spoke.
"I vow," he said, and the room leaned in. "By the light I hold, that I will not bring Covenant blades to this door again. If danger comes near, I will be the road that leads it away."
A strand of warmth slipped from the page and wrapped his wrist—the gentlest shackle. It didn't bind skin. It bound choice.
Vow-Thread (Novice) — active.
Duration: until next sunrise.
Effect: Strengthened will; snares revealed within five paces; truth clings to tongue.
Rand nodded, satisfied, as if a barrel had finally sealed with the right note. He moved to the corner, lifted two slats, and opened a crawl space that smelled like dust and old winter apples.
"Go," he said. "And Elyon—"
"Yes?"
"Come back when you've made enough friends to be worth the trouble."
Elyon laughed once, low. The sound eased something tight between his shoulders. "I will."
He dropped into the crawl space and slid along planks to the outer wall. A loose board gave to his hand. He slipped into the alley's mouth, eased the board back, and stood in the dark.
The Codex pulsed against his ribs. He felt the Vow-Thread at his wrist like a second pulse.
He turned toward the canal. The dawn rats—the men who pull waste from the water before the fishmongers wake—would be there soon. They would make noise and give him a moving shadow to hide inside.
A shape detached from the dark ahead and became Seliah.
"You keep your promises," she said, as if she had been standing there all her life. "Good. It will make the road less crooked."
"You heard?" Elyon asked.
"I listened," she said. "There's a difference."
Her eyes flicked to the alley mouth. Then to his wrist. She could not see the Vow-Thread, not unless—
No. She could see a hint of it, the way his own Light-Sight showed frayed places in men. Her gaze tracked the faint glow and then returned to his. She didn't ask what it was.
"Why help me?" Elyon said. "Truly."
"Because light calls to light," she said, and the simple answer felt heavier than any riddle. "And because I owe a debt I can't repay with coin."
"To me?"
"To someone like you," she said, and the way she said it told him that story lived in a room she didn't let strangers enter.
She tilted her head, listening to a far sound. "Walk," she said. "Not fast. The Inquisitor split her men. They will sweep the East Quarter by the canals. If you go to the water now, you will meet them."
"Where then?"
"Up," Seliah said, and smiled as if the city were a problem she liked. "Greyhaven looks the other way when people are above its eye line."
They climbed stacks of crates, caught a ladder, crossed a narrow stone bridge between two roofs like a held breath. The sky at the east edge of the city had begun to pale—the kind of thin silver that promises morning and keeps it.
On a rooftop garden with dead vines and an empty rain barrel, Seliah stopped. She drew a circle in dust with the toe of her boot and looked at Elyon as if he were a word she was trying to pronounce correctly.
"You carry something the Covenant hates," she said. "They will say it's because of heresy. That's a word they give to fear so it can wear a badge."
Elyon listened. He could feel the Vow-Thread tugging him away from the cooper's door and toward the open city, the road, the trouble that was his to own now.
"What do you want from me?" he asked. She had guided him twice. No one does anything in Greyhaven for nothing—unless the Codex has brushed them too.
Seliah shook her head. "Not want. Know. I know you'll leave the city soon. I know you'll need a map that can't be drawn on paper. I know a place where the light like yours isn't new."
"You speak like a seer," he said, half teasing, half wary.
"I speak like someone who listens," she said again, then softened it with a shrug. "And someone who owes. There's a woman in the North Ward, by the broken bell tower. She keeps candles burning in a shop that never sells wax. Tell her you're a reader in a city that forgot its letters."
"Her name?"
"Old Mara," Seliah said. "She knew my mother. She knows how to hide a lamp."
Wind worried the dead vines. Elyon felt something shift in him, not like fear, not like hunger. More like the step a man takes when the path under his feet becomes a road.
"Seliah," he said, testing the name. It sat easily in his mouth. "I owe you."
"Then pay it forward," she said. "Bring your light back alive."
She turned to go.
"Will I see you again?" The question left before he could teach it patience.
Seliah looked over her shoulder. The dawn put a thin edge on her hair. "If your road is honest," she said. "And if mine is brave."
She was gone, a ripple in the city's fabric.
Elyon stood a moment longer. He touched the Codex through his coat as if checking a wound that had chosen to heal.
He opened it to the edge of PAGE THREE and breathed.
Confession fulfilled. Vow bound. Path widened.
Virtues:
Honesty: 3
Mercy: 2
Resolve: 3
Faith: 0
Synergy unlocked: Light-Sight + Vow-Thread → Snaresight (Faint).
Effect: Reveals lines of pursuit and hidden traps within ten steps when vow is active.
Next page condition: Offer help to one who cannot repay you. Reward: PAGE FOUR — WATCH.
A small note at the bottom, in that thinner hand:
Bride-price of light: Courage, Patience, Service. Pay in daily coins, not grand gestures.
The words hit him in an odd place—behind the ribs, near a space he had not let anyone touch since the world took his brother. Bride-price of light. He thought of Seliah's calm, of the way she navigated roofs as if born there. He thought of vows.
"Not yet," he said under his breath. "One step."
He moved as the city woke.
He did not go to the canal. He took the spine streets where smoke woke and men pulled shutters. He walked like a man with somewhere to be and nothing to hide. When a patrol turned at a corner, Snaresight drew a pale line across the cobbles in his eyes so he chose the other way. When a fishwife looked too long, he smiled like a neighbor and kept walking.
He reached the North Ward when the bell tower's broken crown cut the sky like a missing tooth. The shop that sold no wax stood with its door cracked and its window clean. Candles burned in the back, small steady towers.
Old Mara sat on a stool like a queen sits on a throne she didn't ask for. Her hair was white and tight as a rope. Her hands were big-knuckled. Her eyes were brown and busy. She looked up as Elyon entered, took him in, and snorted.
"You took your time," she said. "Close the door. Mind the mat. That mat is older than your city."
Elyon closed the door and minded the mat. He stood with his hands in sight. Old habits.
"I'm a reader," he said carefully, "in a city that forgot its letters."
Mara's eyebrows made a quick roof. She nodded at the phrase as if patting a dog that had come when called. "Who gave you that tongue?"
"A girl," Elyon said. He didn't say Seliah. He didn't have to. Something in Mara's face softened for a breath as if the name had passed through without sound.
"Well then," Mara said, pushing herself up with a grunt. "Show me your page, boy."
Elyon set the Codex on the counter and opened it. He expected her to gasp or cross herself or spit. She did none of those things. She bowed, the small deep tilt old people save for births and graves.
"Lumen," she murmured. "You wake again."
She ran a finger near the margin—not touching, reverent without worship—and nodded to herself as if checking an inventory. "Lamp lit. Hands warm. Tongue brave enough to do harm and not do it. Good."
"You speak like a keeper," Elyon said.
"I speak like a woman who watched men burn libraries because they were cold," Mara said. She reached under the counter, pulled a wrapped bundle, and set it beside the book. "This is yours now. A mantle. Not a sect robe," she added dryly, "unless your sect is one."
He unwrapped the cloth. Inside lay a short cloak the color of rain just before it falls. The stitching along the edge made an unbroken line of tiny crosses.
"It hides light better than most," Mara said. "Not from those who know where to look. But it keeps the curious from thinking you're a lantern."
Footsteps passed outside. A child's laugh. The city slid around the shop like a river around a rock.
Mara leaned in. "You want to live? You want your book to keep speaking? Then listen to an old woman. The Covenant hates what it cannot control. They will not debate you. They will erase you. Do not waste breath proving you are good. Spend it doing good."
Elyon nodded. The words fit easily with the Codex. They were of a piece.
"You'll need to leave the city before the week ends," Mara went on, businesslike now. "They'll have your shape in their teeth by then."
"Where?"
"East," she said. "Into the Low Hills. There's a waystation there that sells sour beer and better news. Ask for a man named Jonah."
The name chimed in Elyon's head like a bell he'd heard once in a dream. He didn't know why.
"Can you get me out?" he asked.
Mara smiled without showing teeth. "Can you stop breathing? The city will open for you if you use the right key." She tapped the Codex. "But for now—pay your rent."
"My—?"
"Your book's next page," she said, pointing at the margin he hadn't read yet. "Help one who cannot repay. That's rent in this house."
As if the Codex had waited for her scolding, new script crawled up the page.
Task: Offer help to one who cannot repay you. Reward: PAGE FOUR — WATCH.
The bell tower coughed a weak hour. Mara jerked her chin at the door. "Go to the square. You'll see who needs a hand. Come back when you've done what you're told."
Elyon wrapped the cloak around his shoulders. It fell well, light and warm. He slipped the Codex inside where it lay like a heartbeat.
He stepped into the street with the sense that the city had grown a second, quieter map under the one he'd known all his life.
In the square, a cart had lost a wheel. A man yelled at a boy as if volume could grow fingers. People flowed around the stuck cart like water around a stump. No one stopped. No one likes to become part of someone else's noon.
Elyon did. He crouched by the broken wheel. The pin had sheared. The boy's hands shook with effort he hid as anger. The man—father, probably—kept swatting at the air as if beating back failure.
"Hold it," Elyon said to the boy, and set his own shoulder under the cart bed. He breathed the Lumen Breath and pressed. Not a hero's push. Just enough. The cart rose a finger's width higher. The boy's eyes went wide, then narrow with concentration. Elyon slid the wheel on. He cut a strip from his cloak's fringe—Mara would scold him later—and bound the pin with the strip and a peg whittled from a slat.
"Don't take hills fast," he told the man. "And oil this when you can."
The man didn't thank him. Pride often eats thanks before the mouth can find them. But as he clucked the mule forward, he did not shout at the boy. That counted.
The Codex warmed.
Task fulfilled. Rent paid.
Mercy: 2 → 3.
Faith: 0 → 1.
Reward unlocked: PAGE FOUR — WATCH.
PAGE FOUR — WATCH
Eyes that look only outward grow blind to the snares beneath their own feet. Watch the small lines. Guard what is placed in your hand.
Technique unlocked: Veil of Plainness (Novice).
Effect: Dims the visible light on the bearer, blending presence into crowds; reduces notice from casual observers and weak senses. Cost: Breath + Stillness.
A shadow fell across the page. Elyon looked up.
The Inquisitor stood at the edge of the square.
Not ten paces away. Not drawing a sword. Just… there. Cloak perfect, hair neat, face calm. Watching him watch the world.
Her gaze flicked to the cart he had aided, to the cloak at his shoulders, to his hands. People parted around her without knowing why. She did not yet see the Codex under his cloak. But her light—if he let Light-Sight show him—ran cold and exact, a compass needle locked on its north.
Veil of Plainness. He breathed once, twice, and let his own light sink like a coin in deep water. He did not vanish. He became what he had always looked like: a young man in a common cloak with work in his hands.
The Inquisitor's gaze slid past him, then snagged for a hair's width—not enough to catch, just enough to say: You are not no one.
Her lips moved. "Next time," she murmured, so softly he knew she spoke for herself and perhaps for the god she served. "You won't have a crowd."
She turned away. Two gray-cloaked men followed her. The square released its breath.
Elyon stood very still. The Vow-Thread at his wrist had cooled. The Codex lay warm over his heart. He let the Veil of Plainness linger until his shoulders loosened, then let it go.
He went back to Old Mara.
She looked up as he entered and nodded before he spoke, as if the square had whispered to her. "Good," she said. "You didn't make a speech. You did a thing."
"Will the Inquisitor stop?" he asked.
"Does winter stop because we say our hands are cold?" Mara snorted. "No. But winter ends if you keep the fire and wait. Go east. Take the low road at dusk. There's a man with a limp who sells pears from a cart with a broken spoke. He'll ask if you like sour fruit. Say you like it less than being caught. He'll show you the gate."
"Seliah said you knew how to hide a lamp," Elyon said.
Mara's eyes warmed without softening. "Seliah says many things worth hearing. If you live long enough to hear more of them, you may yet do something remarkable, boy."
Elyon eased the cloak closer. "If I do," he said, considering each word like a stone in a hand, "it will be because other hands steadied me."
"Keep that," Mara said. "It will make you hard to break."
He stepped back into the day.
By dusk, he would leave Greyhaven. The Low Hills would smell like wet stone and sheep. Somewhere past them waited a man named Jonah and a string of days that could turn into a road.
Seliah's name rode his breath once, quiet. He didn't try to catch it. He let it be a promise the future would collect or forgive.
The bell in the broken tower coughed again. Elyon pulled the cloak's hood low, set the Codex against his heart, and turned his face to the east.
Behind him, in alleys and on rooftops, the city rearranged its eyes. Ahead, the path thinned to a line only he could see, etched in faint light the color of dawn.
He walked it.
And somewhere, not far, the Inquisitor smiled without joy and began to close her hand.