The ink burned before it dried.
Lyric didn't flinch. He was used to painting dressed as a ceremony. The branded scent of charred myrrh and god steel needles curled through the hall, mixing with holy oils and silence. Around him, the entire House Velastra stood in rigid formation—an audience of relatives, rivals, and priests, none of whom looked directly at him. Not even his mother.
The First Mark was supposed to be sacred. It was the moment a noble heir received their god's claim—a seal of divine right, proof of lineage and purpose. Lyric had memorized the rite's steps since he was five. Recited the hymns. Fasted. Breathed. Obeyed.
So why was there a second mark blooming across his skin?
The priest chanted louder now, voice faltering. His brush froze mid-glyph. Gasps rippled through the watchers like wind through the glass. Even the God-Sigilist, a man who had once tattooed kings, took an uncertain step back.
The second tattoo had written itself. It shimmered faintly under Lyric's shoulder blade, inkless but vivid—a glyph that pulsed not with divine fire but with something colder. Older. The skin around it warped slightly as if rejecting the space it occupied.
Someone screamed. A servant dropped a censer. Lyric simply stood, breathing slowly, as the mark whispered its first word through his bones:
Remember.
The next morning, he was gone from the main house.
No explanation. No punishment. No ceremony. Just relocated—quietly exiled to the Ring of Echoes at the Grand Academy, a tower usually reserved for foreign tattoo clerics or unstable heirs.
He didn't argue.
What could he say? The tattoo wasn't meant to exist. His House was known for diplomacy and quiet allegiance. They had no room for anomalies. Certainly, not anomalies tied to forgotten gods.
The Ring of Echoes was damp. The glyphs on the walls flickered when he passed, as if unsure what he was. His new room was small and bare. One window. One cracked mirror. A basin that filled on command—though the water tasted of salt.
They left him no servants.
Only books.
And whispers.
Classes began the same day.
He sat in the back row during Glyph Theory, listening to the instructor stutter through a section on divine syntax, pausing every time his eyes wandered to Lyric's desk. When asked to demonstrate a prayer-glyph to House Velastra's patron—Elyss, the Veiled Harmonist—Lyric complied.
The glyph shimmered perfectly into form. Balanced. Obedient. The room exhaled.
Then the second glyph followed. Of its own will.
It grew like an after-image, cold and translucent, threading behind his first mark as if correcting it. Where the Harmonist's symbol was melodic and curved, this one was jagged. Quiet. It split the light in the room and made three classmates bleed from the nose.
Lyric didn't move. He was used to pain dressed as silence.
The instructor dismissed the class early.
In the days that followed, Lyric became something between myth and scandal.
He wasn't expelled. He wasn't summoned to court. His House said nothing. But other students stopped speaking his name out loud. He heard it whispered between Rings, etched in chalk on his door:
Dual-marked. Unchosen. Falseblood.
He found one message written in red on the underside of his desk:
"You're not a prophet. You're a wound."
He erased it. But the ink bled back.
Then, one night, he dreamed of a face.
Eyes like stitched stars. A voice-like breath in a forgotten cathedral. The mark on his back burned, not with pain—but with purpose.
"You are the hinge," the voice whispered. "You are the lie that will become the truth."
He woke to find three words etched into his mirror in condensation:
"I am watching."