Kaelin finally finished her weapon maintenance and moved closer, sitting opposite him. Elias, still deep in his mental struggle, was barely aware of her presence.
"You're too loud," Kaelin said, her voice low and even, interrupting his focus just enough to pull him back from the dangerous edge of conceptual void. "Your mind is roaring.
That's what the Watchers hear."
Elias opened his eyes, trembling. He felt the terrifying closeness of the Zero-Vault, a cold, crushing conceptual emptiness. "I have to force the script. I don't have the years an Archivist takes to refine their intent."
"Refinement is pointless if you're dead," Kaelin retorted, placing her whetstone aside. "The Archive is powerful because it is vast and slow. The Watchers are their eyes, and they don't see movement; they see
signature. Every time you used your Aether to rewrite a law, you left a huge, volatile signature."
Kaelin picked up a small, smooth river stone and idly began drawing a simple line in the dirt with her finger—a basic, crude representation of a Pathfinding Rune.
"My people, the Road-Scribes, we deal with the chaotic, wild scripts outside the city Runes. We learned quickly that you don't fight the law; you trick it. The Watchers use massive, powerful Tracking Runes. They look for sudden, concentrated bursts of Aether. Like your Inverse Inertia. Like your Volume Exchange."
She pointed to the crude rune in the dirt. "If you want to survive the Archway, you have to scatter your signature. Don't use one powerful blast. Use a thousand tiny whispers."
Elias stared at the line in the dirt. A thousand tiny whispers.
"The Rune of Thermal Diffusion," he whispered, realizing the implication. "I could slowly, constantly rewrite the local air temperature around us, just enough to create a low-level, continuous Aetheric disturbance. It would look like atmospheric static to the Watchers, not a single, focused blast of illegal magic."
Kaelin nodded slowly. "That's how you hide from a Watcher. You make noise, but you don't make a scream. The Grand Archive is only interested in screams."
She shifted the conversation to the immediate danger: the Archway. "The Archway Guardian won't use a powerful Null-Rune unless they have confirmed you are a Rewriter. They will start with a general dampening field. Their main weapon is the Disruptor-Script Shield—a shield that projects a random sequence of contradictory low-level scripts. It won't stop a Librarian, but it will confuse a Scribe into paralysis."
"But the Guardian will still be using their Null-Rune on occasion," Elias countered. "I need the Subspace Distortion, Kaelin. When the Null-Rune activates, my Aether will shut down. I need a place of safety where the Null-Rune can't reach."
"Then you must find the key to the Zero-Vault in the script," Kaelin pressed, her voice demanding. "How do you tell the law of space that your body has temporarily left its jurisdiction?"
Elias closed his eyes again, but this time, he didn't fight the concept of non-existence. He accepted Kaelin's advice and tried to find the scattered, subtle parts of the script that allowed the non-existence, the subtle trick that allowed the Archway Librarians to archive goods.
He realized the missing conceptual link wasn't force; it was permission. The script didn't just move the volume; it first had to tell the local Rune of Containment that the volume was no longer relevant.
Elias's mind snapped into clarity. He saw the full script of the Subspace Distortion not as a brutal command, but as a graceful, three-stage handshake with the laws of the Realm.
The first six strokes (which he already had) established the target's volume. The next stroke—the one he was struggling with—was the Rune of Conceptual Irrelevance. It was a complex, nearly invisible script that functioned like a legal waiver, informing all adjacent Runes (Gravity, Light, Air) that the volume it encompassed should be momentarily treated as if it did not exist in their calculation.
It's not moving volume, Elias realized with a jolt of understanding, it's making the Realm forget the volume is there.
A small, thrilling surge of Aether Ink, clean and concentrated, flowed from his core. The realization itself was the fuel. Knowledge was the most potent form of Aether replenishment.
He quickly retrieved the parchment and, with the regained clarity, began to draw the full sequence of the Dimensional Phase Shift on a fresh piece of parchment. He started with the familiar strokes of Volume Exchange, anchoring the script firmly in reality, and then, with utmost precision, he layered the new, conceptual strokes of Irrelevance.
The quill scraped across the leather parchment. As he finished the final line of the Rune of Conceptual Irrelevance, the parchment shimmered. It didn't glow with power like the earlier runes, but instead, it looked strangely flat and dull—as if the parchment itself was struggling to retain its existence.
Elias had done it. He had the conceptual blueprint for Subspace Distortion.
"You've got it," Kaelin stated simply, seeing the tension finally leave his posture.
Elias nodded, his eyes shining. "I have the script. It needs Aether, but I have the knowledge. If a Null-Rune hits us, I can now temporarily phase us out of existence. We will be invisible to light, immune to physical contact, and safe from the Archivist's laws."
"Good," Kaelin said, standing up and retrieving her saddlebag. The sun had completely set, and a deep, starless night had fallen over the plains. "Then we are done resting. The longer we stay, the more time the Watchers have to narrow their search grid. We use your subtle Aetheric static trick to hide our movements, and we push through the night."
She pointed toward the distant, hazy horizon. "The Archway is two days' hard ride from here, but the checkpoints are only a day away. We go through the wild scripts and reach the Archway by tomorrow evening. Get your horse ready, Elias. The law doesn't wait for Scribes to recover their strength."
Elias carefully rolled up the new parchment, the Rune of Dimensional Phase Shift tucked safely alongside the earlier Displacement texts. He looked out at the oppressive, script-filled darkness. He was no longer just running; he was actively breaking the universe's rules for survival.
He mounted his horse, settling in behind Kaelin as they departed the safety of the deactivated shelter. Their movement was silent, hidden beneath the carefully managed Aetheric static that Elias was now radiating—a constant, subtle whisper of law-breaking that was, paradoxically, their best defense.
The small, insignificant movement of a Scribe defying fate was now a continuous, albeit quiet, ripple in the cosmic ocean.
In the depths of the void, light-years away from Veridia, the immortal entity known only as the Overseer, seated upon the script-woven Throne of the Grand Archive, paused its eternal work. A faint, continuous static filled the lower band of the Tracking Runes—a persistent, scattered noise that spoke of a Rewriter who was learning to hide. It was not a concern yet, merely an irritant. The Overseer adjusted the global Rune of Dimensional Integrity to slightly harden the membrane of the Zero-Vault, making the next attempt at Subspace Distortion infinitesimally more difficult, then continued its census of the galaxies. The matter would resolve itself.
End of Chapter 4