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Chapter 2 - The Thirteenth Bell

Kael'ith did not sleep again that night.

The thirteenth bell had long stopped echoing through the stone alleys of Iskarion, yet its resonance lingered—inside him.

It throbbed beneath his ribs, like an invisible chime still ringing somewhere just behind his breath.

The quill lay silent now, its inky glow extinguished.

The page it had written upon had curled at the edges, as if scorched from within.

Its message remained:

I have returned, Kael. The world you live in is a lie I wrote to protect you. But I am no longer its author… You are.

He tried to tear the page.

It did not rip.

He tried to burn it.

The flame flickered once, then died mid-air, vanishing before it even touched the paper.

Kael'ith stared down at the cursed thing, heart cold, hands trembling—not from fear, but from recognition.

Something inside him knew this page. This script.

Not the words—but the handwriting.

It was his own.

---

As dawn bled across the sky, casting gray over the ashen rooftops of Iskarion, Kael'ith wrapped the book in layers of cloth and stuffed it into a sealed satchel.

He left his room without a sound.

The boarding house keeper didn't see him pass.

Nor did the guards at the courtyard gate.

But in a shattered window, a raven made of ink watched him go.

---

Kael'ith made his way to the Archivum Infernum—the sealed vault beneath the Scholar's Chapel.

No common citizen had access to it, but Kael'ith had once studied there as a novice transcriptor.

He still remembered the back entrance carved into the cliffside, hidden by ivy and time.

Inside, the dust was thick.

The air smelled of ink and dried candlewax.

And silence pressed against his chest like a weight.

He lit a single match. The flame barely clung to life.

Shadows flickered across endless rows of forbidden tomes. Titles struck from memory. Languages no longer spoken.

Or perhaps… never spoken at all.

He unwrapped the quill and set it on a desk older than the empire.

Beside it, the book lay still.

He hesitated.

Then opened it.

---

The ink shifted.

Not visibly—but impossibly.

The letters bent, reorganized. Symbols moved where there had been none.

New words appeared.

There are sins buried in this world that even the gods cannot remember.

You were one of them.

Write… and you will remember too.

---

Kael'ith didn't know what compelled his hand—curiosity, fear, destiny.

But his fingers closed around the quill.

It pulsed—twice, faster this time. Hungry.

He dipped it into nothing.

Yet it emerged dripping with deep black ink.

He wrote his name on the first empty page.

Kael'ith Varion

The ink vanished.

And then…

He screamed.

---

Visions flooded his mind—of cities burning backward, of faceless gods erasing themselves, of a boy writing names in a book that unmade time.

And a voice—his own, from another life—whispered:

"You were never meant to forget."

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