The city of Elaren had no gates.
It was not that it lacked walls—they stood, tall and blackened, ribbed with obsidian veins and crowned with rusted spires—but the city itself had turned inward long ago. The walls were no longer meant to keep danger out. They were meant to keep truth in.
Saran stepped across its threshold without fanfare, the Chronicle tucked beneath one arm, cloaked in a silence that moved with him like mist. None challenged him. None greeted him. The guards at the inner ward simply looked through him, their eyes glazed by faith or forgetfulness.
The streets wound like scars—narrow, crooked, and choked with incense smoke. Temples leaned toward each other like old conspirators. Statues lined the main square, faceless and crumbling, holding offerings from hands that had long since turned to dust. And above it all, rising like a spear through the sky, was the Temple of the Absolute Word.
He remembered it. Not fondly.
Here, in this city, his name had once been sung from balconies of white marble. Here, they had crowned him beneath a rain of lilies and gold dust. Here, they had stripped him of that crown, word by word, scroll by scroll, until even memory dared not speak him aloud.
And now, here he was again. Unwritten.
He paused at a market stall, where a hunched old woman sold relics from false ages—rusted trinkets, broken bones lacquered in silver, shards of "divine glass." Her eyes, milky and blind, flickered toward him.
"You're late," she said, as if it were the end of a conversation they'd never started.
"I was erased," Saran replied.
She cackled like a crow. "Not well enough."
He moved on.
The Chronicle pulsed against his side. Each heartbeat felt echoed in the spine of the book, as if it were attuned not just to his thoughts, but to the shifting tension of the world itself. Every stone of Elaren whispered. Every prayer hummed from behind shut doors. This city didn't sleep. It dreamed, and those dreams were poisoned.
He passed under an archway inscribed in a language no one had spoken in centuries. As he stepped into the central plaza, he saw them.
The Ascendants.
Clad in robes so pale they seemed woven from moonlight, seven of them stood in a half-circle atop the Temple's black steps. Each wore a mask carved from ivory—expressionless, ageless, inhuman. They didn't speak. They didn't move. But their presence alone was a judgment.
Saran stopped at the edge of the plaza. The crowd that had gathered parted in ripples of unease. No one said his name. But they all felt it. Like a dream remembered too late.
The central Ascendant finally stepped forward.
"The Book speaks," she said. Her voice was soft, but it carried across the stones like thunder. "And it speaks blasphemy."
Saran held up the Chronicle. It opened of its own accord, pages fluttering as if winded. A single line emerged, etched in dark ink.
> They call it blasphemy when truth arrives too early.
A hush fell.
The Ascendant flinched. Only slightly.
"You twist reality," she said. "Bend faith into fracture. What you write becomes."
Saran's voice was quiet. "I do not write for power. I write to remember. To restore."
"To destroy," she snapped.
But Saran simply gazed at the temple behind her.
"Once, I stood in that hall," he said. "I read from the Scroll of Origins. I held the Sigil of Flame. I believed."
"And you lost your way."
"No," he murmured. "I found the end of theirs."
He stepped forward. The crowd didn't move. Couldn't. The Chronicle glowed faintly now, not with light, but with gravity—drawing the breath, the attention, the soul.
Another line bloomed on the open page:
> Belief is not a shield. It is a mirror.
Suddenly, the temple's great doors groaned open behind the Ascendants. Wind poured from within—not cold, but dry, arid, like the exhale of a tomb.
From that darkness emerged a man. Tall. Cloaked in ink-black robes. His face was bare, but his skin bore hundreds of tiny letters—tattooed scripture crawling from his throat to his temples. His eyes were not eyes. They were wells.
"Saran," he said, with a voice like crushed stone. "You come at last."
"Archivist," Saran replied. "Still playing custodian to a godless order?"
The Archivist smiled.
"Still writing your own heresies?"
Saran turned to the page. Thought.
> I never claimed to be right. Only real.
The Archivist stepped to the foot of the stairs.
"You know what lies beneath the Temple."
"I do."
"And yet you return."
Saran nodded. "Because truth buried too long begins to rot."
The ground trembled.
A low groan issued from beneath the plaza. The crowd recoiled as cracks spiderwebbed through the stones. The Ascendants drew back. Even the Archivist paused.
From below, something moved. Something vast. Ancient.
Saran didn't look down. He looked forward. Into the temple's heart. Into the dark.
He stepped across the cracking plaza. Toward the truth.
The Chronicle whispered with every step:
> "Let the buried speak. Let the silence end."