A Sudden Blackout
Cael and Mireth settle in a cavern oasis sheltered from stormwinds. Cael attempts another glyph experiment—this time sketching an anchor rune across stone using the bone quill and a trace of Void Essentia.
But the moment the glyph finishes…
—Everything vanishes.
No sound. No light. No sensation.
"This isn't sleep," Cael thinks. "This is absence."
The Memory That Isn't His
Cael floats in a shapeless dimension.
From the void, a memory unfolds—not his, but stored within the quill itself.
He sees:
A cloaked figure, faceless, standing at the edge of a Fracture far older than Cael's world
A librarium of bones, carved with spells in forgotten languages
A massive ritual: hundreds of scholars sacrificing knowledge—literally removing memories from their minds and binding them into a final object:
A single bone quill, glowing faintly with each mind it consumed.
"So long as one hand writes with truth, the Fracture cannot lie."
The Archivist's Warning
The vision sharpens. The cloaked figure turns—no face, but a voice that presses against Cael's skull.
"You are not the first. Nor the last. This quill remembers more than minds—it remembers mistakes."
Cael asks:
"Why show me this now?"
"Because you've started to rewrite reality. And reality is a poor editor."
Suddenly, Cael sees echoes of all the glyphs he's ever drawn, hanging in midair around him—some perfect, others malformed. One—the reverse seal—quivers.
"One of these will undo you."
Awakening
Cael snaps back into his body, gasping.
He's surrounded by floating glyph-embers—each one flickering, dissolving, then vanishing into smoke. Mireth kneels nearby, shaking him.
"You were gone, Cael. Eyes open. Not breathing. Just… writing in the air."
He looks down. The bone quill is scorched black at the tip.
Worse—the glyph he wrote is gone. The stone is blank.
He didn't just write a rune. He erased the moment it existed in.