The scream wasn't sound. It was a scraping, a pressure against the bones of the building—and against Rael's skull. A deep, resonant hum buzzed between his teeth like a tuning fork, thick and accusatory. Glyphs across the floor, hidden beneath years of soot and dust, lit up with jagged light. Not gold, not white. A violent, accusing crimson that poured out of the stone like bleeding commandments.
Rael stumbled backward, boots skidding over ancient scripture etched into the temple's tiled floor. "Oh no, no, no," he hissed, the breath torn from his lungs as panic set in. "Shitshitshit—"
The air folded inward as if the chapel itself were taking a breath. A ward-spike shattered through the ceiling, descending like a divine spear. It wasn't just energy—it was script incarnate, cast in spiraling lines of law. It scanned for intrusion. Not just seeing him—reading him.
Every etched scar of magic across his skin, every clause he didn't remember learning. The Mark of Deviance on his wrist pulsed hot like a live wire. The Name-Script at his chest flared to life, struggling, resisting, fighting something it couldn't reject.
He turned to run.
Too late.
The glyphspike struck the ground in front of him with a concussive wave of pressure that forced him still. A circle bloomed around his feet. Not like the crude binding glyphs of border guards or street enforcers. This was sanctified magic—true authority—the kind that had governed this world since before any man gave it a name. The temple had awoken, and Rael stood at the center of its divine courtroom.
His vision blurred. The threads he'd seen earlier began to return, trembling like plucked strings in the air, each a law vibrating with intent. One curled around his ankle, glowing faintly. Another snaked up toward his spine. They wanted to anchor him. Bind him. Render judgment.
Rael reached.
Not with understanding. Not with knowledge. With instinct. With that wrongness inside him—the flaw. The deviation.
He pulled.
The circle hesitated. Fractured. Not broken, not erased—just wrong. The magic twisted midcast, its foundation unsure. A spell built on certainty couldn't hold him because he wasn't certain. He wasn't meant to be here. And yet, he was.
A mechanical voice filled the temple, cold and detached, echoing from nowhere and everywhere at once:
"Unauthorized individual detected in Archive-Sanctum. Tier IV breach. Notified: Watch Orders."
The what??
Rael didn't stay to find out what Watch Orders meant. He tore free from the stuttering circle, breath catching in his throat, and bolted toward the only direction left—the heart of the archive.
He pushed through a warped wooden door hanging off its hinge, ducking into a long hallway lined with broken statues and chipped murals. Saints, scholars, glyphwrights—some of them faceless, others with symbols carved where eyes should've been. Glyphs curled across their shoulders and arms like ivy—static inscriptions that glowed faintly in his peripheral vision but dulled when he tried to look straight at them.
His footsteps were too loud. They echoed off old walls like accusations. Somewhere behind him, mechanisms turned, distant gears stirring in forgotten clockwork.
Still, he couldn't stop.
The threads tugged him forward. Not pulling him like a puppet, but suggesting. Beckoning. As if saying: You're meant to be here now.
At the end of the corridor, a door of iron and oak stood half-open. Behind it, something pulsed—a soft glow, pale and unsteady. Not light from fire. Not from ordinary magic. It was something older.
Rael stepped into the chamber.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold, the room shifted. Not visibly. Not in the way dust stirs or walls crack. No—reality adjusted. The very logic of space seemed to stretch, like something was making room for him, or deciding how he should fit inside.
A ring etched into the floor sparked to life. Glyphs spiraled outward from its edge, forming a circle of command.
And then it rose.
A construct. Tall, skeletal, half-statue and half-scripted armor. Its limbs bent wrong. Its face was a mask of blank parchment, and on its chest, a living glyph burned bright.
It moved.
Rael froze.
He didn't have time to think. Only time to see.
And he saw everything.
The glyph on the floor. The command sequence written into the ring.
"If target enters ring → Execute Protocol."
Target: him. Intruder. Scriptless.
But he wasn't Scriptless anymore.
With nothing but the craziest idea under his belt, Rael focused his energy on the glyph on the floor. Biting his lips, Rael clenched his hands around the thin thread that binds the writings on the glyph. The glyph opened before him—not like paper, but like code. A layer beneath language. He understood it. Not in words. In correction.
So he changed it.
One line. One glyph-node, twisted just slightly.
"If casterenters ring → Execute Protocol."
Reality blinked.
The construct stuttered.
Then lunged—into the ring.
And the rule activated.
The spell turned on its own creator.
"That actually worked?!" Rael's eyes widened in shock as his crazyy suicidal idea wasn't as crazy or as suicidal as it seemed.
Rael stared as the construct froze mid-stride. The glyph in its chest flared, lines tangling in recursive loops. Feedback surged. Light poured from its joints. Its limbs twitched, then curled inward like a collapsing trap.
Then it exploded.
Rael hit the ground hard, shielding his face. Shards of scripture and marble tore across the room. The glow faded. The air smelled like burned ink and ozone.
Silence returned. Heavy. Charged.
Rael lay on the floor, heart hammering.
He had done that.
He had edited a spell in real-time. Not cast, not countered—rewritten.
He got to his knees slowly. "I… changed it," he whispered. "I changed the law. Holy shit? Am I God?"
Somewhere deep in the cathedral, bells that hadn't rung in decades tolled with mechanical dread. The glyphs along the walls shivered. One by one, they blinked into life.
"EDIT DETECTED."
"UNSANCTIONED."
"LOCATING SOURCE."
"TRIGGERING REWRITE."
The walls began to move. The stone folded like origami—corridors shifting, glyphs sliding into new positions. The archive was rewriting itself around him. Locking down. Preparing to excise the anomaly.
"Okay. Maybe not." Rael ran.