Chapter 2:
Kael didn't sleep that night.
The scroll lay unrolled across his desk, its strange symbols flickering under candlelight. The letters didn't behave like normal ink—they shifted, shimmered, as if resisting being understood. He'd copied hundreds of scrolls in his life, but none like this. These symbols were older than anything in the royal archives.
He worked in silence, slipping into the guild's cellar long after midnight. Behind a stack of dusty ledgers, he found what he was looking for: a banned lexicon, bound in cracked leather and stitched shut with red thread.
He opened it.
There it was—etched in faded gold ink.
The Seal of Narezz.
A sigil older than Marukh itself. A mark outlawed by every high temple. A name that wasn't supposed to exist.
But it did.
And Kael had copied it.
When the temple guards pounded on his door at dawn, he was already sitting at his table, waiting.
He didn't need to ask why they'd come.