The bells echoed long after they stopped ringing. Not in the air, but in the bones of the city. Low Marrow shivered. The Temple District tensed. Even the high scholars in their glass-topped towers hesitated before turning the next page. Something had changed, and though no one could name it, they felt it just the same.
Finn returned to the shadows before anyone could give him a name again. He slipped through a broken aqueduct and into a weaver's crawlspace, staying low as if the scroll itself were a flare calling down eyes. The moment the reader touched it, something rippled through the world. A silent wake. He had felt it in his spine, and in the stillness that followed. It wasn't just read. It was received.
The scroll hadn't written again. Not immediately. It was quiet. Satisfied. But Finn didn't believe in peace. Not anymore.
He pulled the scroll from his coat by candlelight. The edge was warm. Still breathing.
He whispered, "What did you show them?"
Nothing. No answer. Only ink that flickered beneath the surface, like veins catching light.
He almost closed it when a single word formed.
Marked.
Finn blinked. "Who?"
The scroll's reply was slower this time. The ink curled into a shape, more than a word. A symbol.
He didn't recognize it. Three lines. One broken. One curved. One bleeding at the tip.
"What does it mean?"
This time, the words came with no hesitation.
The first to see you.
He leaned back. The girl. The reader. She had screamed. Dropped the scroll. Not from pain. From recognition.
She had been marked.
Finn rubbed his thumb over the symbol. It didn't smear. It pulsed.
He rolled the scroll carefully and tucked it back inside his coat.
He had questions. Too many. But he needed fewer witnesses first.
By nightfall, he was at the edge of the Ledger District, a place of dust and walls, where scribes lived without names and wrote fates for those who had never met them. The people here did not speak loudly. They dealt in silence, ink, and appointments that no one remembered making.
Finn found a doorway with no sign. A hinge that creaked the wrong direction. He knocked once, waited, then twice in rapid rhythm. Gutter had taught him the code.
A voice answered. Male. Unfriendly.
"You're early."
"I'm already late," Finn said.
The door opened.
Inside, the room was narrow. Lined with scroll tubes, sealed with red wax. The air tasted of parchment and something metallic.
A man stood behind a slanted desk, silver ink on his fingers, eyes tired from not blinking enough.
"You're the boy with the echo," he said.
Finn nodded. He didn't ask how the man knew.
"Sit."
He did.
"You touched the Temple," the man said, not a question. "And it touched back."
Finn said nothing.
The man leaned forward. "She's marked. The reader. Do you know what that means?"
"Only that it matters."
"She'll see echoes now. Fractures in the page. Every time a name is spoken, she'll hear what wasn't. Every time a fate is read, she'll feel the weight of the one next to it. She won't last long."
Finn's jaw tightened. "What do I do?"
The man frowned. "You ask the wrong question. The scroll isn't a tool. It's a wound. And now the city is bleeding."
Finn stood. "Then I'll find the vein."
The man's expression flickered. Approval? Pity? Hard to say.
"You're looking for the first mark," he said. "The one who saw without looking. Find her. She'll tell you how to end it."
"I thought endings were forbidden."
The man smiled. "Only when they work."
Finn left through the back. No one followed. No one watched. But the scroll whispered as he crossed into the fog-drenched alleys of Duskmarket.
Soon.
He didn't know if it was a promise or a warning.
He walked through torchlight and echoes. Past blind vendors and broken clockfaces. Toward a girl who had screamed not from fear, but from knowing.
He didn't go directly to her. He waited until the sun dipped low and the street vendors grew quiet. He shadowed the courier routes and found the temple-side dormitories where the readers were kept between their duties. High walls. One gate. Three guards. But guards grew tired. Finn did not.
He watched until one of them stepped away. Then he climbed the ledge above the dormitory's south wing, slipped through a broken tile in the roof, and dropped silently onto the floor of a narrow hall.
It didn't take long to find her. She was sitting in a cold reading room lit only by oil lamp, staring at her hands like they had betrayed her.
She looked up when he entered. No scream. Just a gasp.
"You," she said.
Finn nodded.
"What did you do to me?"
"I don't know yet," he said. "That's why I came."
She stared at him, eyes dark with confusion and something else. Fear, yes. But underneath it—recognition.
"I see things now," she said softly. "Not dreams. Not madness. Just… wrongness. Every name I read, every fate I speak. There's a voice underneath. Yours."
Finn took a step forward. "And what does it say?"
She swallowed. "It says none of this was supposed to happen."
He reached into his coat, pulled out the scroll, and placed it gently on the table between them.
"You're marked," he said.
"I feel it."
"Then help me understand what it means."
She hesitated. Then nodded.
They sat in silence as the oil burned lower.
When the scroll opened again, it didn't whisper.
It sang.