You are not valid.
The words weren't spoken. They etched themselves into the dark, as if carved across the back of Rael's skull. A voice that had no sound, no direction, and yet—
He sat up with a gasp, fingers clutching the threadbare lining of his cloak, heartbeat pounding against his ribs like it was trying to get out.
Dunesmir's morning air greeted him the way it always did: cold, ash-tinged, and full of smoke from ten thousand chimney-pipes snaking through the bones of a dying city.
"Wake up, thief," someone muttered, shoving a boot into his ribs. The fucker could've just woken him up regularly.
Rael rolled away from it before he could even think. Reflex. Life had trained him well.
The enforcer walked off without looking back—probably recognized him. Raelus Voren, slum-rat, market scum, unlicensed caster of nothing. No worth. No name-script. No lineage. In the eyes of the world, he was as good as air. Heck, air might have had more uses than him at this point.
He stood, shaking the alley dust off his shoulders, and made his way toward the market.
"Good morning, you beautiful piece of shit city." Rael muttered to himself as he stretched out his back and joints.
Dunesmir's lower tier was a choking hive of stone, iron, and forgotten architecture. Buildings stacked like broken books. Magic didn't flow right here—too many spellmarks buried beneath the cobblestones, too many eras layered like sediment. Light didn't shine down so much as bleed through cracks in the upper district.
Rael slipped between stalls with the practiced ease of someone meant to be ignored. Noticed, but never remembered.
He stopped in front of an old vendor, a wrinkled man with eyes like polished coins and hands that smelled of copper and oil.
"Hey, boss. I've got some goods," Rael said, pulling a rusted trinket from his coat—a small disc etched with faded glyph-lines.
The vendor took it, turned it in his fingers. The glyph glowed faintly for half a second. Then fizzled out.
"Half-alive relic," the man said. "Useless."
"Still hums," Rael replied, pouting. "Means it's got breath in it."
The vendor stared at him for a moment. "You got a license token to trade with this?"
Rael didn't answer. Didn't need to.
The vendor tossed the trinket back. "No license, no sale."
Rael caught it before it hit the ground. Of course. No Scripted blood, no magic. No magic, no license. No license, no valid trade.
No voice, no worth.
He walked away, biting down the frustration. A noble could trade a curse for a castle. Rael couldn't trade magic for bread.
This was bullshit. Everything was bullshit.
But the city didn't care. The Grand Script ruled all. In Aetherron, the world worked because the old magic said it must.
Rael had never seen it, not with his eyes—but he felt it everywhere. Every wall, every whisper, every spark of fire that obeyed its caster. The laws etched into the bones of the world. The nobles were born with clauses stitched into their blood.
People like him? Just blank space. A margin note. A mistake.
"Rael," a voice hissed from behind a cloth stall.
He turned. Grim Voss, one of the older smugglers, ducked into view. Crooked smile. Fingers missing two joints. Always smelled like rust.
"You still looking to eat tonight?"
Rael rolled his eyes, "Yeah, man. I'd rather not die of starvation, thanks."
Jem grinned wider. "We've got a run. South of that old, abandoned gold mine. Unsealed just this week. Rumor says it's untouched."
Rael frowned. "Scripted?" He'd find the greatest of treasures there and it still won't be worth it if the script would just detect their presence there and alert the enforcers anyways.
"Dead zone," Grim said. "No glyph activity. Just rubble, dust, and gods know what else. Easy salvage. We just need to retrieve an artifact some old noble lost."
Easy jobs never stayed that way. Something easy might end up with him dead. But Rael had seen something in his dreams—fragments. Glyphs that bent like roots. Places where the Script didn't bind quite right.
He nodded once. "When do we leave?"
"Tonight," Grim said, glancing over his shoulder. "When the lamps gutter out and the lawfolk go to sleep dreaming of their taxes."
He slipped a scrap of parchment into Rael's hand—rough coordinates scrawled in ink. Rael folded it once and tucked it into his boot without looking. Questions could wait.
Grim leaned in closer, breath hot and sour. "Bring a nullstone if you have one. Just in case my informant is lying."
Rael's brow twitched. "I thought you said it was a dead zone."
Grim just grinned, mouth crooked like a snapped rune. "So they say."
Then he was gone, swallowed back into the crowd, trailing the stink of iron and wet stone.
Rael stood there a moment longer, the last embers of morning glinting off rusted chimneys. The city wheezed. The towers moaned. Something in the bricks whispered.
You are not valid.
The words again. Unspoken but felt, like pressure behind the eyes.
—
Night fell like a curtain soaked in soot.
Rael met Grim and three others just outside the southern wall, past the old mining quarter. They carried packs, rope, torches—not enchanted ones, just the old kind that burned oil and made shadows long and nervous. They'd be idiots otherwise, if they brought enchanted gear. They'd be snuffed by the law enforcers faster than a lightning bolt could hit ground.
The mine entrance yawned open like a cracked tooth in the hill. A half-collapsed arch still bore the sigil of an extinct house, weathered into something unrecognizable.
Rael paused.
He could feel it. Faint, but real. Like a tension in the air, a hum just beneath the range of hearing.
The Grand Script wasn't active here. Not entirely. But it also wasn't gone. It was… watching.
"Still with us, kid?" Grim asked, one eyebrow raised as he lit his torch.
Rael nodded. "Yeah. Just listening."
"To what?"
Rael stared into the dark. "…The part of the world that forgot how to speak."
Grim gave him a look, like he wasn't sure whether to be confused or unnerved. Then he shrugged and descended into the ruin, torchlight flickering down uneven steps. You gotta respect the man, he knew when not to ask questions.
Rael followed, hand brushing the stone wall. His fingertips came away smeared with something black, dry, and brittle—not soot.
More like… ink.
They moved in silence for a while. The deeper they went, the quieter the air got. Not in the natural way. Sound itself seemed reluctant, like it was being pulled into the stone.
No wind. No drip of water. Just footsteps and breath.
Then came the glyphs.
At first, they were faint. Etched into the walls in crooked lines, too old to glow but still present. Most were fractured. Some pulsed weakly, like they didn't know they were supposed to be dead.
Rael's stomach tightened. Something here was out of sync.
"Don't touch the walls," he murmured.
Grim gave him a glance. "You see something?"
Rael didn't answer. He was staring at a glyph inscripted in the wall just ahead—one that bent sideways in a way that made his eyes ache to look at.
He didn't know that much when it comes to magic, to the Grand Script.
But glyphed words don't bend like that. Not unless they were breaking.
At the next junction, the ceiling had collapsed inward, forming a funnel of broken stone and tangled beams. But underneath it—just barely exposed—was something different.
A surface too smooth for rock. Too symmetrical.
Rael knelt and brushed dirt aside.
A panel of dark metal, etched with old glyphs. But these ones weren't faded. They moved, just barely—like ink still drying. Like they knew someone was watching.
"Is that a vault?" one of the others whispered.
Rael didn't hear them. He was already reaching out, drawn by the wrongness of it. Not compulsion. Not curiosity. But of recognition.
He touched it. And the glyphs opened.
Not like a door. Like an eye.
The world buckled around Rael. The world buckled inward. The tunnel folded. The ground beneath him twisted, fracturing into black threads. The others screamed. Rael didn't.
There was no time. The glyphs flared. One word echoed, carved directly into the space behind his eyes:
"The Mark of Deviance is now assigned. The Scriptbreaker has been found."
Then the floor vanished.
And Rael fell through the Script.