8 Years Earlier
The ink had long dried, but the glyph still shimmered faintly in the candlelight.
Mira knelt at the foot of her study, fingers steady despite the cold. Evelyn, only a child then, slept in the adjoining room—curled around a threadbare plush stitched with protective knots. It had once belonged to Mira's sister, lost in the flood that followed the southern breach.
Mira glanced at the door.
Still shut. Still safe.
She returned to the scroll and continued her silent work.
Core Harmonics, the text was titled—an illegal treatise smuggled from a fallen Guild spire, half-burned at the edges and sealed by a blood-lock she had broken at great personal cost.
The concept was radical: that cores—like voices—could resonate, could harmonize. That the act of Binding wasn't just an imprint of soul upon stone, but a conversation with something older. Something deeper.
The Hollow doesn't only devour. It listens. It remembers.
Mira had nearly stopped reading at that line. But she hadn't.
She unrolled the final page of the scroll and spread a fresh vellum beside it. Carefully, slowly, she began copying the final glyph—one not recorded in any sanctioned Guild index.
A double-looped sigil with mirrored spires, meant to be traced in two directions simultaneously.
It was said to do what no ordinary ward could.
Reveal truth.
She dipped the stylus into warm ink laced with the tiniest drop of her own blood.
"To remember what was lost," she whispered. "To bind what was never meant to be split."
A knock startled her.
Not from the door.
From within the wall.
From beneath the floorboards.
She froze. Listened. Nothing more came. Just the usual night groans of a timber house settling under wind.
Still…
She stepped to the door connecting Evelyn's room and opened it softly.
The girl was not asleep.
She stood at the window, barefoot, staring at the elderwoods swaying in the moonlight.
And she was humming.
A tune Mira did not recognize. Ancient. Laced with a strange pulse.
"Evelyn?"
The girl didn't respond. Her silver-blonde hair shimmered in the moonlight like threads of wire.
Mira crossed the room. "Darling, what are you—"
Evelyn turned.
Her eyes glowed faintly, briefly, like lantern-light through frost.
Then she blinked, and it was gone.
Later, after Evelyn had been tucked into bed, Mira returned to her study.
The glyph she had drawn had changed.
The ink had shifted, curling into a spiral that wasn't there before.
In its center was a mark she hadn't drawn—Evelyn's birth sigil, the one they'd painted on her forehead as a newborn.
Mira's hand trembled.
"This wasn't supposed to touch her," she said aloud. "It was mine to bear."
But in her heart, she knew. From the moment of Evelyn's birth, the melody had passed on.
She's hearing what I could only study.
That night, Mira sealed the scroll in a warded box beneath her bed and painted a final glyph above it—an oath of silence, woven with the threads of forgetting.
She swore to herself: Evelyn would never know. She would grow up free of it.
But truth always hums beneath the quiet.
And some songs never really stop.