The veil-band itched.
Lyric had tied it carefully around his second mark — just beneath the collarbone, where the skin pulsed faintly like breath trapped beneath flesh. The fabric was thin, near-translucent, yet laced with silver ink that shimmered against light it didn't reflect.
No one had spoken to him in class that morning.
Not out of cruelty. Out of calculation.
Whispers swirled faster than ink in water.
He could feel the space around him shifting — how students from the Ring of Vigilance glanced too long, how even the instructors asked him to demonstrate last.
That never used to happen.
Not to a Velastra.
Not to someone born marked by the divine.
Glyph Theory had been the first to falter.
The instructor, a gaunt woman with seven rings etched into her robes, had projected a memory-echo across the blackstone wall — a divine sequence designed to summon a stabilizing ward.
Lyric stepped forward.
He shaped the glyph with careful fingers, letting the ink from his tattoo bleed into the markstone. It should've settled.
Instead, it twisted.
A burst of light flared.
The ward collapsed in a violent hum, and one of the younger aides screamed as his memory thread briefly snapped — forgetting his own name for seven whole minutes.
Lyric's chest had burned the whole time.
Afterward, he'd been asked to leave.
In the Lineage Rhetoric wing, a shadow waited outside his classroom.
A Pale Witness.
Unmoving. Veiled. Robed in moon-silver thread, face mirrored and silent.
They didn't follow him in. Didn't speak. Just stood.
Watching.
Even when the instructor called Lyric to speak on Velastra's rites of ink-binding — the Pale Witness remained still. But Lyric saw the movement in the mirrored mask. A faint shimmer of lips moving behind it.
"You were marked twice… but you haven't chosen once."
That night, the dream came.
It wasn't his.
He stood inside the Grand Academy's hollowed ink chamber, the sacred place where new divine tattoos were first tested under flame.
But there were others. Students he'd never met. Faces blurred. They were chanting a name he recognized and hated.
"Orryn."
He turned—too late.
Ink rained from the ceiling like blood.
And someone whispered in his ear, not in anger — but in mourning.
"It's not your mark they fear. It's the memory buried inside it."
When Lyric woke, his room was already glowing. Not wardlight. Not magic.
His second mark had burned through the veil-band.
And outside the dormitory, the walls were whispering again.
Only this time, they used his name.