Before the road takes the shape of a tale, it must first be walked. Elyon had thought about that as he left Greyhaven—the idea that stories were paths and paths were promises, and promises could be broken as easily as a roof tile. He had thought, too, about how a book that calls itself light might have more ways of unwanted attention than a single village could answer.
The Low Hills smelled of sheep and wet stone. Lantern glow from scattered hamlets wavered like distant moths. Elyon walked with the Codex close, the rain-gray cloak Mara had given hiding the dim film of his light. He kept his steps low and his breath measured, practicing Lumen Breath until each inhale felt like taking a small truth into the chest and each exhale felt like offering it away.
The Vow-Thread at his wrist had cooled with the coming night. The promise to Rand would keep him from returning to that attic; it would not keep the world from remembering. He had not expected to sleep the night through. He had expected to move until the city blurred into fields and then to find Jonah—if Jonah indeed existed—at a place Mara had described as a waystation that "sells sour beer and better news."
The road to such places was rarely straight.
Elyon passed a shepherd and a boy who chased geese with more enthusiasm than success. He skirted an orchard where wind had torn fruit from trees and left them bruised and sweet. At the low ridge where the Low Hills opened to a line of stone and a squat building, a wooden sign hung crooked: THE SOUR GATE — WINE, LODGING, AND TRUTH, read one half. The other half showed a stylized keg spilling stars.
He pushed the door and entered what Greyhaven would have called a den and what the Low Hills called shelter. The Sour Gate was more smell than place—warm barley, old jokes, and the low murmur of life that had decided not to be afraid today. Men with callused knuckles argued politics with a cheerfulness that hid its fear; women mended nets; a group of travelers laughed like a rope being pulled taut and then eased.
A man behind the counter looked up as Elyon entered. He had eyes like a tired dog and a face weathered by travel; his coat had a dull sun-fade, and his satchel hung heavy at his hip.
"Name?" the man said, not as a question but as an offer.
"Elyon Veyr," Elyon said, the syllables careful. He felt the Codex pulse against his heart like a small bird. The man's eyes slid over his shoulder, and a smile—soft and nearly invisible—unfurled.
"You carry the wrong sort of light to a place like this and I'd call it the right sort if I drank less," the man said. He wiped a glass and set it down. "Jonah's at the back. He's been waiting for someone who looks like trouble and smells like ash."
Relief thinned the tension in Elyon's shoulders. "You know him?"
"I know the face," the barkeep said. "Jonah's the sort who listens to a book's hum and will trade you a room for the sound of the first page. You buy ale?"
Elyon declined. He had no coin that mattered. Instead he found the back door Jonah had no doubt left open and pushed into a room lit by a single candle. Jonah sat with one knee up and one boot off, tying the laces with a care that suggested he'd tied them a thousand times.
He looked up when Elyon stepped in.
"Elyon Veyr," he said as if reading a name he had known in a different life. His beard had gone silver not in speckles but like a river of light. He had a satchel full of folded paper and a stick with many notches. His eyes were tired without being dull; there was a patience in them that did not pretend the world would be gentle.
"You found what the city left burning," Jonah said.
Elyon nodded. The Codex throbbed and warmed, almost proud at the recognition. "It spoke first page," Elyon said. "It… gives with a cost."
Jonah's mouth shifted. "You mean it measures virtues." He rubbed the jaw of an invisible chart. "Most codices are trinket books or men's excuse for power. The Lumen Codex is older. It is a scripture that acts like a ladder. The books I knew used to weigh sins like coins. This one measures breath."
"How dangerous is it?" Elyon asked.
Jonah's face grew quiet. "Danger lives where men need answers. The Covenant will come with dogs if they smell the answers. The Codex chooses those whose bones are the right shape for bearing. But note: it never chose a man whose hands were not willing to work."
Jonah left the sentence hanging between them like a plank.
They spoke long—about little things at first: where the waystation bought its barley, which roadkeepers accepted coin, which inns would sleep a man for a bread crust and a story. Between those small maps Jonah sketched a broader one: a chain of keepers who'd hidden books from covetous hands; a history of codices that did not teach just techniques but truths—practices you could live into. He spoke of vows, of confession that mended the soul's gnarled knots, of service that was not show but weight shifted to shoulders that needed it.
Elyon listened, cataloging consonant phrases like prayers learned in the old temple. When Jonah spoke of the Covenant's reach as "longer than belief," Elyon found the knot in his chest tighten. Jonah's mouth softened when Elyon said his brother's name.
"Godren," Jonah murmured. "Tell me the ledger."
Elyon told him—with as much truth as the Codex demanded and no more. He told Jonah about the Hall of Covenant burning, the ledger that had to record names somewhere, and the ledger's neat word: lost during transport. He left nothing unadorned. The Codex had required truth of him; perhaps the world did too.
Jonah tapped his satchel and drew out a thin strip of leather with letters burned into it. "Keep this," he said, handing it to Elyon. "It's a trail-mark of the Old Keepers. It will not stop Covenant lawmen, but it may let an old friend find you when the world forgets to be kind for a day."
Elyon accepted it, feeling the rough skin against his palm as if he had taken something heavier.
"Why help me?" Elyon asked later, when Jonah had spoken of training and of paths and of names.
Jonah's eyes grew distant like a window into a room he'd once lived in. "Once, before I learned to listen to books, I was loud. I thought power lived in lifting stones. I broke a shrine to test my strength. A child walked into that ruin. I lifted him out by reflex and watched him breathe. There is a distance between breaking and fixing. No book can teach a man that; he must find it by chance. I teach because I saw the moment where my fist could have taken and instead chose to hold."
He smiled with no vanity, a small, patient thing. "Your Codex will not make you soft. It will make you responsible. That is a weapon as sharp as any blade."
Night had sunk deep. Conversation waned. A doer of pots would ask for more ale, a merchant would compare routes, and Jonah would teach by pausing and letting the world speak.
When Elyon slept that night in a small cot behind the inn—watched by Jonah's quiet breath as if a man were breathing blessing—he dreamed of pages that opened like wings and a ledger with his brother's name faintly written between lines of law. He woke with his hands tingling and the Codex warm as if from a shared hearth.
They left the Sour Gate at dawn. Jonah walked with him a while, but the man's pace was that of someone who had chosen the road as work and not as punishment. The first stage of travel was the sense of being observed: small birds watching, a dog that refused to bark, a cloud with a wrong shape. When Elyon felt that tightness, Jonah taught him to breathe, to ground, to practice the Lumen Breath until the world became less a hazard than a set of tasks.
"Light-Sight is not only about seeing the glow of a chest or the band of a lie," Jonah said as they walked. "It's about learning the angles where life curls itself in shells. A man's need hides as a pebble—once you stoop, you can carry it. The Codex gives power by teaching usefulness. That's the sacrament of passage."
About mid-morning the road dipped to a ford that crossed a lazy river. They met a small caravan there: three carts, a woman carrying a child, and two men whose faces were not kind. One cart's wheel sat crooked; someone had tried to repair it with rope instead of full pin. Jonah's face changed when he saw the men.
"Covenant marks," he murmured. "Not the Inquisitors' clean gray, but the men who take on contract—collectors, trackers. They ride for pay and keep no ceremony."
Elyon's steps slowed. His Codex pulsed like a second heart.
"You should pass them," Jonah said softly. "Let them be."
Elyon remembered his vow, the mark at Rand's wrist, the words that had bound him. But the Codex had also embedded Page Four—WATCH, and Jonah had taught him that its lessons demanded watching the small lines. He squinted with Light-Sight. The trackers moved like men who carved a straight line through the world, but one of them limped and held his coat oddly; the other had a trade-mark ring. Their eyes flicked—not quite to him, but to the woman's child.
The Lumen Breath steadied him. He felt the Veil of Plainness rise like a curtain he could pull over himself but not over the child. The child's carriage rocked with a cough that made Elyon remember Tiran in the baker's alley. He did not know why his chest clenched so; perhaps because the Codex liked kindness, perhaps because his bones still remembered Godren's hands.
"Go ahead," Jonah said, nudging him. "Do what the book told you: help one who cannot repay."
Elyon stepped forward. The trackers watched him like hounds scenting a trail. He smiled in a way that was small and harmless and went to the cart. He knelt and tested the wheel. The old trick with a peg and a cut from the cloak worked if you had the patience to do it. He breathed Lumen Breath and let Jonah's words—service before strength—suffuse his action.
While he worked, the limping tracker moved closer, curious. The other, with the ring, sauntered away but kept his hand close to his boot.
"Boy," the limper said as Elyon hammered a peg. "You work fast for a traveler's cloak."
Elyon did not let the Veil of Plainness slip. "I learn in the wind," he said. "Everyone teaches differently."
The limper's eyes grazed the dark hood and the little silver cross stitched along its edge. He spat. "Covenant tatters."
The tracker with the ring came back with a grin that had too many teeth. He reached out to touch Elyon's sleeve and then stopped. His hand hovered over Elyon's shoulder as if wondering whether warmth there was coin or curse.
There was a pause, a space where a man's choice sits like an egg waiting to hatch. Elyon breathed, felt the Vow-Thread's ghost in memory now, and thought of Rand's attic, of the baker's boy, of Seliah's flat voice telling him to keep the light dim.
He finished the wheel, stood, and pushed the cart free. The woman grabbed the child and hugged him close as if she had been given back a piece of herself. The trackers watched her move away. The ringed man spat again and said a sentence in a low voice.
"Keep your lanterns small," he said. "People with books get louder before they burn."
They left.
Jonah placed a hand on Elyon's shoulder. "You chose the small thing," he said. "Small things have a way of being remembered in large ways."
Elyon felt the Codex thrum with quiet approval. Page Four would wait until another night; the next unlocked thing hovered like an unopened door.
They would reach the hill-side glade Jonah called a keeper's crossroads by noon. There, beneath an old ash that had been carved with names in a careless century, Jonah unrolled a small mat and gestured for Elyon to sit.
"Teach me," Elyon said. He had a dozen questions, the first and largest being the one about Godren. Jonah had so far listened rather than answer.
Jonah uncapped a small jar and offered Elyon a taste of something sharp and bitter that made the inside of his nose flare. "Patience tastes like vinegar when you begin," Jonah said. "But it keeps your steps honest."
Elyon wanted instruction that would make him strong enough to come back to Greyhaven and put his brother's name back in a ledger as proof. He wanted to climb the ladder quickly, to leap rungs and take the summit by force. The Codex refused impatient leaps. It asked for a series of small rites: breathe, give, confess, work.
Jonah taught him how to read a page differently. The Lumen Codex did not merely give numbers; it mirrored choices into small tasks. When the Codex said Honesty: 3, it meant "speak truth where a lie would be easier." When it said Mercy: 3, it meant "give what you do not own to someone who cannot repay." The verses were like commandments, yes, but they were also practices—habits that built muscle in the soul.
They practiced for an hour. Jonah taught Elyon to focus the breath on the sternum, imagine a small coal of light there, and then offer that coal to the hands: to touch, to mend, to wash, to hold. When Elyon focused in that way, his hands warmed and a faint trickle of light ran along his fingers. He tried Hands of Ember, the novice technique the Codex had promised, and found he could lay warmth on a bruised sapling until the sap stopped trembling. The cost was small—breath and intention—but the effect was real.
"You won't become a god by warming trees," Jonah said dryly. "But you become necessary. Necessity makes you noticed and sometimes hunted. The trick is to be needed in places where predators do not expect prey."
They trained until the sun made a small burn-holed coin in the sky. As they packed, Jonah's eyes narrowed. He had read the land like a book for years. "We move tonight," he announced. "I'll walk with you farther than into the hills. There are keepers who will help you when your name ripples like a stone. But listen: so long as you carry the Codex, others who heard its whisper will come."
Elyon thought of the ledger again and felt a coldness like a draft. "Others?"
"Not all who hear that call walk toward serving," Jonah replied. "Some hear opportunity. Some hear a chance to be crowned for dark reasons. The Codex is a mirror; it shows men truth but not who they must be. People choose."
He folded his satchel. "Tonight we find a safe house. Tomorrow we leave the road for skill."
On the path, a raven watched them, too black and too deliberate. Jonah did not look up, but Elyon would later swear that the bird's eye shone like a coin with a crack in it. It sat as if waiting for the city's news to arrive.
They reached the safe house as night bled into a hush. It was a building mended many times over, walls of stone stitched with new mortar. A woman opened the door and let them slip inside without question. Her face was two lines of map and caution. On the lintel above the door, a faded mark had once been painted: two intersecting strokes, simple and clean.
The Codex thumped eagerly.
Jonah lit the hearth and placed the satchel on the table. He leaned in close and tapped a finger on Elyon's shoulder. "One more thing," he said. "When you sleep, be ready to wake. Not all enemies barged with swords into inns. Some send silence to steal flame. Keep the Codex by your heart and dream only the breaths you mean to spend."
Elyon nodded and lay on a small pallet, the cloak heavy and familiar over him. He placed the Codex where he could feel its faint warmth. Jonah's silhouette moved in the doorway, a dark page with a line of light, and then the hearth gave him back to sleep.
He thought of Seliah—her hint of a smile, the way she guided roofs as if she'd been taught to move over them like someone crossing the backs of old books. He thought of Rand's attic and the baker's boy. He thought of Godren's ledger and how a single name could become a map.
Outside, under the ash-bent sky, something moved.
A soft scrape at the window, a breath that was not wind. Elyon felt it the way a man feels a spice on his tongue before he knows its name. He sat up, hand closing around the Codex.
In the dark, a shadow swallowed the hearthlight and the door breathed closed.
A whisper passed the room—low and confident. "The Lumen keeps waking," it said. "Time to see what sort of light this one carries."
Elyon's eyes widened. The safe house was not as safe as it had seemed. The road he had started to walk had already drawn a map around him, and the first line had been crossed.
He did not yet know whether the next footsteps would be friend or predator. He only knew the Codex hummed, and that the book's thrum felt like a drumbeat before a march.
Outside the house, there came an answering sound: the soft, measured steps of someone who had learned how to listen.