The days after the book spoke were quiet.
Not peaceful—quiet. Like the world held its breath.
Elna noticed it first.
The neighbors didn't talk as much. Old Mara, who usually sang while hanging her laundry, stood in silence now. The baker forgot to shout his prices. Even the dogs barked less.
"It's like something's missing," she murmured one morning, eyes scanning the rooftops. "Like a sound we forgot we used to hear."
I nodded, though I didn't know what it was either.
But I felt it too.
Like a thread had snapped, and we were all waiting to see what would unravel.
The book remained silent.
Its pages still turned. Still shimmered faintly under moonlight. But no more words appeared. No new symbols. Only the ones I had already traced, already memorized.
I didn't mind.
I didn't want to rush it.
Something told me the book revealed itself in rhythm—its own strange pulse, not mine. It was like the breath of a deep forest: slow, steady, and ancient.
So I waited.
And in the waiting, I listened.
Dustwall coughed into spring with cracked lips and dry hands.
The harvest was thin that year. The soil had turned strange—too loose in some places, too hard in others. My father cursed under his breath as he tilled the stubborn earth. Mother worked longer hours with the midwife, delivering babies in the shivering cold before dawn.
No one complained out loud. Not really. Complaints here were like dust—silent, ever-present, impossible to clean.
Fenn had started drawing in the dirt beside me each evening. He didn't copy the symbols anymore. He made his own.
Spirals. Eyes. Trees with roots that reached upward.
Once, he pointed to a symbol I didn't recognize and said softly, "This one means not-here."
"What's not here?"
He just looked up at me, blinking.
"You'll find it."
Then he went back to drawing.
One night, a fog rolled in.
Not the usual kind that hugged the ground like spilled milk.
This one was thick, high, and heavy. It covered the rooftops. It muffled footsteps. Even the fire in our hearth seemed dimmer beneath it.
I didn't sleep.
Neither did Elna.
We sat by the small window and watched the gray creep through the streets. There were no stars. No moon. Just the fog, pressing in like silence with a shape.
And then we heard it.
A sound I hadn't heard in years.
The voice.
Not the wind-chime whisper from before. Not the soft echo in my dreams.
This time, it spoke clearly.
"Saen'thera… ul kha'tel… Yul."
It said my name again. But different now—deeper. As if calling not to a child, but to something older sleeping beneath my skin.
Elna grabbed my hand.
"Did you hear that?"
I turned to her.
"You heard it too?"
She nodded slowly. "It sounded like… it knew you."
The fog didn't lift until dawn.
When it did, the walls of Dustwall looked different. Not damaged. Not changed. Just older.
As if they had shed their disguise.
Later that week, a man went missing.
Dalen, the fisherman who lived two homes down. His boat was found tied at the river's edge, untouched. His tools still hung on their pegs. His wife swore she'd heard him leave before sunrise.
But no one had seen him since.
No one searched.
Disappearing wasn't new here. People vanished sometimes—lost to sickness, river currents, or simply to silence.
Still, something about it felt wrong.
As if Dalen hadn't vanished.
As if he'd been taken.
The book remained silent.
But the air around it felt heavier, like the quiet that comes just before a bell rings.
I started sleeping with it under my pillow.
One night, I woke to find the pages glowing again.
But not white this time.
Red.
Like embers under ash.
I opened it.
A new word had appeared:
"Trespass."
I didn't know what it meant.
Not fully.
But I had a sense.
Something had crossed a line.
Something that didn't belong here had entered—Dustwall, the city, maybe the world itself.
And the book had felt it.
Maybe even invited it.
The next morning, the trader's son came to me.
His name was Thale. Taller than most boys our age, sharp-eyed, always hungry for stories. He'd seen me copying symbols before and asked once if they were magic. I'd told him no.
He hadn't believed me.
"I had a dream," he said now, standing just outside our door. "About you."
I stared at him.
"You stood on the middle wall," he said. "And the city was burning. But you weren't scared. You held something—like a book, but it was made of shadows."
"And then?"
"You looked down and said, 'It begins in the dust.'"
He paused.
"Then I woke up."
I didn't speak.
He didn't wait for me to.
He just nodded, as if satisfied, and left.
That night, I returned to the woods.
To the stone pedestal where the first symbol had appeared.
The trees felt different. Not hostile. Just… watching.
I placed my hand on the stone.
It was warm.
A shimmer ran through the moss.
And then I heard the voice again.
Clearer now.
Like wind sweeping through a vast hall.
"The path remembers you."
I didn't answer.
I only whispered the word the book had given me.
"Trespass."
The pedestal pulsed beneath my fingers.
And something answered—
Not in words.
In silence.
A deep, echoing silence that wasn't empty—but full. Like the space between heartbeats before something breaks.
Then, from beneath the stone, I heard it.
A second voice.
Not soft.
Not calling.
But listening.