The fog in Vel Quen was not natural.
It clung to rooftops and alley mouths like a thinking thing, coiling around lantern posts as if eavesdropping. It muffled footsteps, softened voices, and dulled the sharp edges of buildings until the city seemed half-dreamt. The fog was part of the city's blood—pumped through valves, woven into contracts, bargained for in breath and bone.
Silas Veyne walked its veins as a ghost wearing stolen flesh.
He moved quickly through the Outer Rings of Vel Quen—districts half-forgotten even by those who lived there. The buildings leaned inward like conspirators. Arcane graffiti marked sealed doors: looping sigils, blood-painted warnings, strange algebra that rearranged itself when viewed too long.
He kept his right hand gloved. The brand had stopped burning, but it pulsed faintly whenever he passed certain doorways, like a tuning fork reacting to a frequency just outside hearing.
> Codex Fragment: Stable.
> Mental Integrity: 91%.
The numbers worried him. He didn't know why.
---
He arrived at a rusted boundary gate marked Sable Warrant: Expired. Beyond it lay the Hollow District, where old faiths went to rot.
Statues of headless saints lined the entry arch, their hands raised in blessing or warning. A pair of pale-eyed children watched him pass from behind a ruined fountain, whispering in a tongue older than trade. He didn't stop.
He needed shelter. He needed to understand what had happened to him. And most of all—
He needed information.
---
The Archive of Knots
It was a place even beggars avoided.
Built from chained books and stone carved with logic knots, the Archive once belonged to a minor order of historians known as the Ten Thousand Ties—obsessed with fate, probability, and forgotten cause. When they disappeared one winter, no one claimed the place. Too many noticed their dreams changing if they slept nearby.
Silas pushed through the door.
Dust and candlelight greeted him.
The air inside was heavy with unspoken sentences. Books lined the walls in tangled, spiraled shelves. Some were stitched shut. Others blinked. A few whispered prayers in dead dialects. At the center of the room stood a desk fashioned from tombstones, and behind it—
A woman in rags.
Her eyes were blindfolded. Her hands were ink-stained. A long iron needle was pierced through her throat horizontally, like a forgotten quill.
"I smell a Codex fragment," she rasped, not lifting her head. "I smell ash and stolen breath."
Silas did not speak. The Codex in his mind stirred slightly.
"You seek to read?"
He nodded.
She lifted her hand and pointed to the narrow spiral stairs behind her. "Pay your price and climb. Speak no titles. Leave no lies."
He hesitated. "What price?"
Her sightless eyes smiled beneath the cloth.
"Your memories. Or someone else's."
---
He chose his own.
The moment he set his hand to the stairs, something within him was pulled—a thread unravelling, a foggy image lost: a girl's face, laughing in the sun. He didn't even realize he had remembered her until she was gone.
> Codex Fragment: Access Node Unlocked – "Oathbound Initiate"
> Mental Integrity: 87%.
He climbed.
---
The Fifth Landing: The Book Without Ink
It waited for him.
A blank tome resting on a glass pedestal. As he approached, letters slowly appeared on its pages—written not with ink, but shadow and breath.
He read.
> "Power is not drawn. It is remembered. The path of Ascension begins not with force, but with truth—a truth that rewrites the self."
> "Your Codex fragment has chosen you. You are Oathbound. You are cursed. You are seen."
Below that, a diagram unfolded: a spiral with thirteen paths, each lined with symbols—keys, blood, stars, and bells.
He tried to turn the page. It resisted.
Only one symbol pulsed faintly: a sealed bell in a triangle of ash.
He touched it.
Pain lanced through his head. Visions poured into him like molten glass:
A man ringing a black bell that cracked the sky
A sea of corpses floating upward into an inverted sun
A throne of whispers bound by oaths that bled
He collapsed.
---
When he woke, the book was gone.
So was the room.
He was outside, slumped in an alley beneath a gaslight. A slip of torn parchment fluttered in his hand, bearing only four words:
> "The Thirteenth Bell Hungers."
---
Far above, in the shattered skies of Vel Quen, a shard of the old ringstone pulsed once—faint, red, and unseen.
And in a tower across the city, cloaked in gearwork and silence, a woman with stitched eyes whispered:
"The Sealed Codex has opened again. Another soul walks the Spiral."
---
[End of Chapter 2]
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