The temple chamber was dim, its silence thick enough to smother a heartbeat. A single lamp burned on the desk, its flame oddly steady despite the draft that crept through the stained glass windows. The priestess sat alone, her veil drawn close around her face.
Her hand hovered above the parchment. It trembled—not from cold, but from the weight of what she was about to consign to ink.
The quill dipped, drawing up black liquid that clung too heavily, as though reluctant to serve. This was no ordinary ink. Within it churned threads of sanctified moonlight, ground starlight resin, and the faintest trace of quicksilver. To write with such a medium was to braid language into wards, to tie one's words to the very fabric of Aetheros. Once written, such a message was no longer mere report—it was testimony etched into the marrow of faith itself.
The priestess inhaled sharply. Then she began.
Each stroke of the quill made the air tighten. Her words shimmered faintly, and for a brief moment, they seemed to resist her gaze, as though not meant for mortal eyes even in the act of being written.
"On the night past, a boy under the custody of our branch church has confessed to a vision. He claims to have glimpsed the veiled Lady whom the orthodox scriptures name as the Twilight Matron."
"He spoke of a sky eternally setting, yet never fallen. Of horizons that bled violet. Of countless eyes, all sealed, waiting beneath veils of shadow. And of a woman, robed and veiled, who stood at the cusp between dusk and oblivion."
Her fingers stiffened on the quill. The words pressed too heavily upon the parchment, dragging down her arm with invisible gravity.
The flame of the lamp guttered once, as if some breath unseen had swept across it.
She hesitated, her heart lurching against her ribs. To even write such imagery was to court danger. The Twilight Matron was a name carried carefully, spoken in chants at dawn and dusk but never woven into vivid detail, never conjured with such intimacy. Too close, and one risked calling forth the very presence one sought to honor.
And yet… and yet, the boy had seen this.
The priestess shut her eyes beneath her veil, steadying her pulse.
She dipped the quill again.
"Ordinary mortals, when brushing against even a fragment of Her shadow, are consumed. Their reason frays; their minds splinter; they either collapse into raving husks or become vessels for whispers unholy."
"But the boy did not fall. He endured. More than that, he spoke of it without trembling. His tone carried no madness. His eyes—though heavy with exhaustion—were lucid."
A shiver coursed through her as she wrote. The memory of Seth Virell's steady gaze pressed unbidden into her thoughts. It was wrong. Wrong that one so ordinary in birth, so uninitiated in holy discipline, could speak of such a vision with clarity.
Her quill scratched harder, faster.
"This is not survival. This is omen."
"I submit this testimony to the Higher Clergy of the Moonlight District. If true, the boy is no mere witness. He is marked. Perhaps chosen. Or perhaps cursed."
The final words bled onto the page like wounds. She paused, staring at them as if they might rearrange themselves into something safer.
But they did not.
Her throat dry, she reached for the seal.
It was a silver sigil set into the head of a small stamp. Its surface glimmered faintly with lunar inscriptions that shifted when not directly looked at.
She pressed it down against the parchment.
For a heartbeat, the entire chamber froze. The ink across the page stiffened, then seemed to crystallize into frost. The letters glowed faintly with a cold radiance, then collapsed inward, sinking into the parchment until nothing remained but faint silver lines, etched like veins beneath the paper's skin.
The seal itself pulsed once. The air rang with a low tone, like a bell struck in the marrow of the world.
It was done.
Her words now belonged to the hierarchy of the Church. No other mortal, no thief, no rival sect could read them. To attempt would invite blindness or worse.
The priestess sat back in her chair, her chest heaving. She pressed her gloved fingers to her brow beneath the veil.
The boy's image returned again. Seth Virell. Dark hair damp with sweat, eyes reflecting something far older than his years. He had spoken of horizons as though he had stood at their edge.
Her lips moved behind the veil. A prayer, or perhaps a warning.
"If true, this boy is no mere survivor. He is a bearer of omen."
The lamp flickered.
The silence of the chamber deepened.
And far beyond the temple, in the heart of the Moonlight District itself, bells began to stir.
The Moonlight District was not a place most dared speak of casually. It was the marrow of the Church's dominion, a quarter of Aetheros where time itself seemed to slow beneath towers of ivory and spires that clawed at the star-strewn firmament.
There, amidst sanctums veiled from profane sight, the Highest Clergy resided.
And there, in a spire wreathed in perpetual glow, a man cloaked in ceremonial silver opened his eyes as the sealed report arrived.
The parchment had appeared upon his desk without sound, its surface shrouded by delicate frost. He regarded it with eyes that seemed carved from polished obsidian.
Slowly, he lifted a hand. His fingers traced a sigil in the air—three crescents overlapping, their glow unraveling the seal.
The letters emerged, pale and shivering, as if reluctant to stand before him.
He read.
With every line, his expression deepened. Awe did not cross his face, nor fear. Only the stillness of a man accustomed to weighing the weight of catastrophe.
At last, he leaned back in his chair. His gaze lingered on the final words.
"A bearer of omen."
A faint smile touched the corners of his lips. Grim. Almost pitying.
Outside his chamber, the bells of the Moonlight District tolled faintly, their echoes rolling like waves across the city.
And in a dozen sanctums, priests and seers lifted their heads, sensing the change.
Back in the branch temple, the priestess knelt in silence, head bowed. She did not know how soon her report would be read. She did not know whether Seth Virell would be condemned, sanctified, or erased.
But she knew this: she had consigned him into the currents of forces that did not err on mercy.
The quill lay abandoned, its nib still wet with sanctified ink. It gleamed faintly in the lamplight, like a shard of night caught in glass.
The priestess whispered a prayer she could not name, to a god she could not risk addressing directly.
In the silence, her own words from the report echoed back to her, inscribed not on parchment but on the walls of her heart:
"This boy is no mere survivor. He is a bearer of omen."
And somewhere, in the depthless dusk where no mortal gaze could reach, veiled eyes stirred.