The cuneiform strokes tasted of burnt honey.
Noa Serrin traced the ancient clay tablet with her fingertips, her synesthesia translating each wedge-shaped mark into a swirl of ochre and gold behind her eyelids. The symbols hummed against her skin, a low vibration like a cello string bowed too slowly. She exhaled, pulling back. The client—some university historian—wanted this translated by Thursday. It was mundane work, the kind that paid just enough to keep her cramped apartment in Eira's oldest district and her cupboards stocked with bitter black tea.
Outside her window, the city groaned. Rain slicked the cobblestones, and the flickering neon of storefronts bled into the puddles, staining them unnatural purples and greens. Eira was always loud, always *too much*, but tonight it felt worse. The shouts of street vendors grated like sandpaper, and the rhythmic *clank* of the tram wires made her teeth ache.
A knock at her door.
Noa stiffened. No one visited her. Not since the university, not since the Incident in the linguistics lab that had left her branded as "unstable."
The knock came again, sharper.
She opened the door to a man in a charcoal-gray overcoat, his face all angles and exhaustion. "Noa Serrin?" His voice was flat, bureaucratic. "Agent Ravel, Department of Structural Preservation. We need your expertise."
She didn't move. "I don't work for the government."
He slid a folder across her desk. Inside: photographs of a tunnel, its walls carved with jagged, spiraling glyphs. Noa's breath caught. The symbols were *wrong*—not just unfamiliar, but *impossible*. They twisted in her vision, edges blurring like smoke.
*"What is this?"*
"Found three days ago beneath the old Quartermarket. Our linguists can't parse it." Ravel's gaze lingered on her hands, still hovering over the images. "But you can."
Noa's pulse thrummed. She shouldn't say yes. The DSP was a ghost of an agency, rumored to clean up its messes with bullets and silence. But the glyphs... they *pulled*.
"Triple my rate," she said.
Ravel smiled. It didn't reach his eyes.
---
The ruins stank of wet stone and something older, something metallic and sharp. Noa followed Ravel and a silent guard down a rusted maintenance shaft, the fluorescents flickering like dying stars. The deeper they went, the heavier the air became—thick with the weight of centuries, of something *waiting*.
Then she saw them.
The glyphs covered the tunnel walls, floor to ceiling, their lines too precise for any human tool. Noa reached out, her fingers trembling.
The moment she touched the nearest symbol, the world *shuddered*.
The glyph darkened, ink-black liquid welling up from the stone. It dripped onto her fingers, cold and alive, and suddenly—
*—she wasn't alone.*
A presence pressed against her mind, vast and curious. It had no voice, no shape, but it *knew* her. And it was *hungry*.
Noa jerked back with a gasp. The guard grabbed her arm. "You okay?"
She stared at her hand. The black liquid was gone. But the glyph... it had *changed*. The lines now curved inward, like an eye blinking open.
Ravel watched her, unreadable. "Well, Ms. Serrin? Can you read it?"
Noa swallowed. The answer lodged in her throat, terrible and true:
*Yes.*
And it was reading her back.