CHAPTER 7 — SYMBOLS AND SECRETS
The rain tapped lightly against the obsidian windows of the Nightshade estate, a steady rhythm that Zephyr could almost follow with his heartbeat. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the alchemy archive, a small slate balanced on his knees, a stub of charcoal clutched in one hand.
Symbols crowded the surface of the slate—some scribbled by his own hand, others traced faintly from copying Selara's demonstration. He paused, tilting his head. One mark leaned too far left, a swirl slightly broken. He erased it and redrew it.
'Attention matters,' he thought.
'Even in small things, mistakes speak louder than words.'
Selara watched quietly from the archway, arms crossed but eyes never leaving him. She didn't correct him, didn't prompt him.
"Why do you bother correcting it if no one else will notice?" she asked finally, voice calm but carrying the weight of curiosity.
Zephyr considered. "Because it matters if I understand it," he said. Not defiant. Not arrogant. Matter-of-fact.
Selara's lips twitched in the faintest smile. She nodded and walked away.
Over the next several sessions, Selara escalated the difficulty. Symbols were no longer isolated—they were functional sequences. Emberleaf dust now sat beside a vial of duskroot, a tiny card between them marked with a spiral and a slash.
"Arrange them in order," Selara instructed once, barely louder than a whisper.
Zephyr studied the glyphs, fingers tracing them. One mistake could spell ruin if this were an actual experiment. He tested the combinations mentally before moving the vials, shifting them subtly until the sequence satisfied both function and safety.
Then he wrote it down.
Mistakes were subtle—angles wrong, curves imperfect—but he corrected them immediately, instinctively. Every error corrected became a lesson learned, every success noted in his mind.
'Reading is not letters,' he realized.
'It's prediction.'
He began to experiment on his own. He scribbled notes on scraps of parchment, often hiding them in folds of his robe when servants entered. Some were notations about reactions, others were observations of patterns in behavior.
He noticed that adults sometimes spoke in incomplete statements, assuming the listener could infer the rest.
'People are careless with words,' he mused.
'It is why I will never be.'
Once, a servant accidentally left a ledger open. Zephyr glanced at the pages—numbers, symbols, shorthand.
'So this is their record,' he thought. 'And I can read it if I choose.'
He didn't choose immediately. But the thought lingered. He folded the ledger back carefully, exactly as he had found it. No one noticed. No one had to.
By now, literacy had become more than reading and writing. It was subtle manipulation. He began leaving decoy notes, rearranging minor glyphs in the workspace to test Selara's attention. She noticed once, raising an eyebrow, but didn't scold him.
"Interesting," she murmured, walking past. That was all.
The lesson was clear: even small actions could be observed. Even small observations could be interpreted. Control was often invisible.
System symbols still lay beyond his reach, but Zephyr's understanding of functional glyphs gave him an edge he could sense but not yet name. He noted patterns in the alchemical archive: which items were checked most frequently, which sequences caused the most corrections, even which symbols Selara lingered on when she walked past.
'Soon,' he thought.
'Soon I will read everything. Not just here. Everywhere.'
He even started inventing his own shorthand: tiny scratches on parchment that meant only one thing to him, such as "danger," "important," or "observe." A note might be just a single loop, but he remembered what it meant.
This was literacy as preparation, not schooling.
Evenings became his practice sessions. While the estate's wards hummed quietly, he sat by the window, reproducing symbols from memory, inventing new ones, cataloging sequences in his mind. Sometimes, he hid these notes under the floorboard of his chamber, sometimes tucked them in books he wasn't supposed to read.
He had no illusions about secrecy. If someone noticed, consequences would follow. But the lessons learned in risk were always more potent.
One night, as lightning traced the distant horizon, Zephyr paused over a particularly complex sequence. A series of spirals intertwined with slashes, indicating combination and instability. He traced the lines, spoke the glyphs silently.
'Mistakes here cost more than ink,' he thought. 'They cost life.'
The realization was not frightening. It was clarifying.
And in that clarity, he smiled faintly.
'Everything has rules,' he mused. 'Even people. Even systems. And rules can be learned.'
The Nightshade estate hummed around him. The world outside remained chaotic, violent, and unyielding.
Zephyr Nightshade had begun reading it all.