The cobbled streets of Ovrun were alive again. Morning chatter rose between the narrow lanes as merchants called out prices and the scent of baked bread mingled with the sharp tang of coal smoke. Between them all walked Ryneth, his steps slow, deliberate, as if relearning the rhythm of walking itself.
The light was soft and golden, brushing against his pale skin. He raised a hand to his face, squinting slightly—each ray felt warmer than he remembered, almost realer than it should have been. His eyes drifted across the people passing by, their faces blurred, voices distant, every sound slightly delayed—as though the world was a fraction of a heartbeat out of sync.
He tried not to think about last night.
But the memories lingered, faint and distorted.
> "A black space that swallowed everything,"
"shimmering auroras overcoming that darkness,"
"an eternity of wandering there…"
Fragments, nothing whole. He could recall no pain, no time—only the endless silence and the way the light had touched him, like a pulse beneath his skin.
Ryneth adjusted the strap slung across his shoulder, tightening his grip on the satchel at his side. The old leather creaked faintly; the weight of the parchments inside felt heavier than it should. They were the same documents he had taken from Leslie's office—inked diagrams, incomprehensible notes, lines written in a hand that seemed to waver between clarity and madness.
He told himself he should've turned them in. That walking toward the Arcanum with them still in his possession was foolish.
But something in him resisted.
Maybe curiosity. Maybe something else—something that now stirred whenever he tried to let go.
"It's only been a few hours," he thought, looking toward the tall spires in the distance, where the morning haze curled around the upper bridges.
A few hours—yet whatever he had experienced felt like an eternity carved into his mind.
For a moment, he thought he heard something.
A faint hum, low and resonant, echoing beneath the street's noise—like a note only he could perceive.
Ryneth froze. The sound faded just as quickly, leaving only the sound of footsteps and the murmur of life around him. He exhaled, forcing the unease down, and continued walking toward the Arcanum's towering gates.
Ryneth thought back to the moment he woke up.
No reflections. No flickers. No whispers crawling beneath his skin. Just stillness. Blessed, fragile stillness.
> "It's over,"
he had murmured to himself that morning, staring at the ceiling.
"My mind's mine again."
And for the first time in what felt like years, he believed it.
He'd reread the parchments soon after. The vellum wasn't ordinary—woven with faint inscriptions, the kind reserved for the Arcanum's restricted archives. Still, they weren't dangerous artifacts. Not curses. Just... notes. At least, that's what he had thought.
He'd read them countless times before, each attempt leading him nowhere. He could understand Vesric, he could read it as easily as he breathed—yet the words refused to take shape in his mind. Meaning slipped away just when he thought he grasped it.
> "I can read it," he whispered, staring at the neat lines of script, "but I can't see it."
The realization came slow, like a blade pressed against his thoughts.
These weren't formulas or diagrams for ascension—they were perception itself, carved into language. Fragments of knowledge not meant to be processed by a human mind.
Leslie hadn't fallen because she misused the texts.
She had fallen because she understood them.
Ryneth's hand trembled slightly as he rolled one parchment back up.
> "No... it's not the words," he muttered, "it's the way I looked at them."
The parchments didn't teach or reveal—they altered. They bent the lens through which reality was seen.
And for an Echoed Resonant, whose power was rooted in perception itself, that was fatal.
A single distortion could collapse the mind's structure, tearing apart the Veil that bound will and essence together.
Perhaps that was what happened to Leslie.
Perhaps it had already begun for him.
His heart skipped a beat at the thought.
> "No... I'm fine," he told himself quietly, almost pleading.
"I came back. I remember who I am."
But as he walked on, the world seemed to ripple faintly—just for a moment.
The sunlight bent slightly at the edge of his vision, and he wasn't sure if it was his imagination… or the world reminding him that the veil between perception and madness was still paper thin.
He thought back again.
Since waking up, something had changed — not in the world itself, but in the way he saw it.
When he had risen that morning, his body had felt heavy, every limb trembling from exhaustion, yet his mind was strangely quiet. Too quiet.
The room around him — the scattered notes, the faint light slipping through the half-open window — looked unchanged. Familiar. And yet, something in that familiarity felt foreign, as though it were being reflected back to him from another mind entirely.
He remembered standing before the desk, watching the parchments he had studied last night. The faint breeze from the window brushed across his face, soft and harmless. But then, he saw it happen — or rather, he knew it would. The gust of wind, the way the papers would scatter, the precise sound they would make as they fluttered to the ground.
He blinked, startled, and nothing happened.
> "I'm… not okay," he muttered under his breath.
And then, as though reality had followed his thought, the gust came.
The papers lifted, twisted, and fell exactly as he had foreseen — not a single difference, not a single hesitation.
The same speed.
The same sound.
Even the same parchments that he had imagined would fall — fell.
He stood there for a long moment, unable to breathe.
It wasn't foresight, not exactly.
It was something quieter, like the world had already whispered its next move into his ear.
A faint pulse began to rise behind his temples — a soft hum, like the echo of a thought that wasn't his.
He tried to brush it off.
Told himself it was exhaustion, an aftereffect of what happened the night before — of the void, the pain, the bleeding eyes, the agony that felt like his mind was being torn in two. But the feeling didn't fade.
As he walked now through the crowded streets of the morning, that whisper persisted.
People brushed past him — merchants calling out, carriages rumbling by — and yet, in the back of his mind, something began to speak before the world did.
He knew the hawker was about to shout.
He knew the child by the fountain would laugh, trip, and fall.
He knew the woman across the road would drop her basket.
And when it all happened, precisely as he had felt it, a chill ran down his spine.
> "It's not foresight," he muttered softly, "it's… timing."
He wasn't seeing the future — he was ahead of it.
A few seconds, a breath, maybe even less.
But enough to make him feel like the world was chasing him instead of the other way around.
And every time it happened, the feeling grew stronger — the whisper clearer. It wasn't a voice, not even a sound. It was understanding. The same way one might understand that fire burns or that the sun will rise. Inevitable. Absolute.
He glanced up at the sky — pale and golden now, the clouds painted faintly pink by the morning light. For a brief moment, he felt something shift again — as if the horizon had breathed.
> "Whatever changed in me last night…" he whispered, "…it's still here."
He gripped the strap of his satchel tighter. The parchment within rustled faintly, almost as if listening.
Whatever power lingered inside him wasn't asleep.
It was watching.
And as he continued toward the Arcanum's distant spires, Ryneth felt an unease settle deep in his chest — not fear, but anticipation.
Because if his mind had truly changed…
then the world might never look the same again.
---
As he continued his walk, the world hummed faintly around him.
The whispers in his mind shifted again — quiet, scattered tones that didn't belong to anyone nearby.
Then, one of them grew clearer.
A sound he heard before it reached his ears.
> "Ryneth Calder."
The voice was familiar — distant but unmistakable. He frowned, turning his head slightly as the whisper resolved into reality.
> "Ryneth Calder!"
The same words, the same tone — just as he had felt them a heartbeat earlier.
He turned around.
A man approached through the morning crowd, uniform half-hidden beneath a dark coat, a badge glinting faintly against his chest.
> "I'm from the Crown's Investigative Directorate," the man said, his voice steady but careful. "We've met before… just yesterday."
The name surfaced in Ryneth's mind before it was even spoken.
Callen.
> "Callen Dray," he murmured under his breath — not as a question, but as a certainty.