Lira began reading the moment the council ended.
Seven voices had filled the crystal amphitheater—hers and the other six—arguing about a red koi, a broken serpent, and whether "impossible" was still a useful word. When the link dissolved, she did not descend to wine or chatter. She climbed, alone, into the Spire's upper library.
Sunscale lay coiled beneath the oculus, breathing rainbows across marble and ink. Assistants learned silence. Tea cooled into footnotes.
The koi refused to leave her mind. Not because it was strong—it wasn't—but because it kept doing what power never planned for: improvising hybrid skills, borrowing signatures mid-battle, writing technique out of panic. "Impossible now," she had said of Tier Ones. Quieter: not never.
So she read.
Vellum that smelled of storm. Bark pages threaded with copper glyphs sharp enough to bleed. Thousand-volume ladders built and torn down again. The same families of myth recurred under every name: the Five Elements and the Origin. Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water—not as biology, but grammar. And always, before them, something older, the Origin. Never observed. Never recorded. Furniture in the mind, not data in the field.
On the third dusk, shadows bent in her alcove.
"Lira," said a voice like a hand over a candle.
She didn't look up. "Nyra."
"I found one," Nyra said, predator-quiet. "A room the librarians didn't know existed. Three locks. No footprints in the dust."
The book appeared between them: smoke-colored, bound in threads that looked like hair.
"Pre-human," Nyra murmured. "Language that keeps its secrets unless you stop asking out loud."
Lira did not touch it at once. "The Five and the Origin remain unobserved. Folklore only."
Nyra's smile was absence. "Open it."
Sunscale bent light to her fingers. The book exhaled sea caves and iron. Script that wasn't script fought itself in strokes until prism-logic coaxed it still. Nyra slid over her neat translation:
⟦ …path to the Origin Temple… ⟧
⟦ …the Five will stir again and reset the world… ⟧
⟦ …only the— ⟧
The ink fractured. The sentence broke.
Lira closed her eyes. "Origin Temple. Again. Always myth. Always unobserved. Always unfinished."
"Turn the page," Nyra said.
She did. A gate rose from the sea, scarred with glyphs. Ahead of it, something small leapt—a crude sketch, but insistent.
"A fish," Lira whispered, hating the way her pulse quickened.
"In dragon folklore," Nyra said, "fish don't exist. Not in walls, not in lullabies, not even in jokes. This page offends me beautifully."
"It could be metaphor. A mistake."
"Or memory," Nyra countered.
They fell silent. The missing clause—only the—itched like a splinter. Only the what? Only the Five? Only the Origin? Only… the leap?
Lira shut the book carefully. "If the Seven see this, Vera will erase, Kael will bury, Rashan will try to fight a god, Saphira will gossip. Joren will gamble. We watch quietly. Hints, not maps."
Nyra's smile curved like dusk. "Hints keep hunters honest."
Sunscale shifted. Light wrinkled across the ink, making it look freshly wet. Lira traced the arc of the leaper above the page without touching it.
"Impossible now," she murmured to herself. "Not never."
The library listened, the way stone does when it agrees to keep a secret a little longer.
And far below, in the vision hall where dragons breathe rooms into being, six voices were already gathering again—ready to declare the koi a mistake, to name its climb "impossible," and to let silence carry the words that would not be spoken.