The old vault wasn't marked on any of the imperial maps.
But Mizan found it anyway.
Not by accident. And not entirely by design. The trail had begun as a whisper — a stray note in a burned ledger, a carved sigil on the underside of a ruined well near the barracks. Too precise to be vandalism. Too ancient to be rebellion.
He hadn't told the others he was leaving the city for a night. He didn't owe them that.
The vault lay in the center of a crater, half-buried beneath a collapsed shrine. No sigil welcomed him. No Thread wards hummed. But something in the dust of the place recognized him the moment he stepped across the broken threshold.
The door — if it could be called that — crumbled under his fingers.
Inside, the silence changed.
It wasn't the hush of decay or abandonment. It was a hush carved into the bones of the place. Intentional. Sacred. The kind of quiet that dared you to speak. The kind of quiet that remembered things even the Empire had tried to erase.
Mizan knelt. Not in reverence. In instinct.
The rune on his forearm flickered. Not with power. With memory.
He raised his palm, pressing it gently to the cracked floor.
The dust shifted — but not along the ground.
Above it, in the vault's air, something stirred.
Not Thread. Not breath.
Light. Sharpened into shape.
Runes — jagged, unfamiliar — began to carve themselves into the air itself. Not drawn by hand. Not woven by Threadcraft. They formed like wounds reopening in the fabric of the space, curling into symbols that twisted as they stabilized. They pulsed once, in rhythms too precise to be chance and too wrong to be Imperial.
Mizan's heart slowed.
These weren't sanctioned glyphs.
Not from the Codex. Not from any Thread-script allowed within the Empire's doctrine. They didn't echo with law or flame or even resistance. They echoed with truth—the kind that had been buried so deeply it warped the air when brought near light.
One rune — shaped like an eye flanked by an open jaw — spun faster than the others. Then stilled.
The vault breathed.
And then the wall to his left… opened.
Stone didn't grind. It folded.
Behind it, shelves of crumbling tablets and fractured glyphbooks lined the chamber. But one caught his attention immediately — not because it glowed. Because it didn't.
A black tablet. Smooth. Blank to the eye.
But as he reached toward it, the rune on his skin pulsed again.
And the tablet responded.
Lines scorched themselves across its surface, not carved, not inked — but burned, as though his presence alone had reawakened it. Symbols older than Threadwriting took form. Some he recognized from study. Others, he didn't. But one stood clear:
⸺ The Thread That Breaks Shall Be Born of Glyph and Grave.
His breath caught.
The phrase was a ghost.
A fragment he'd once heard muttered by a prisoner during a low-security escort run. The man had bled from the ears, speaking in tongues — dismissed as Arcana-touched and later executed.
But he'd spoken that exact line. And now it was written here, in a place only Mizan could seem to enter.
He brushed his hand across the tablet again. A second line revealed itself.
⸺ The Root of Names is Not the First.
Beneath it: a sigil. A twisted variant of the Empire's seal — but inverted, with the Crown broken and the Flame reversed.
Mizan stepped back.
Something cold slid beneath his skin — not fear. Recognition.
He didn't know what this place was. Not yet. But it had waited for him. It had buried itself so deep that only someone like him could find it — someone not raised by name, but by silence. Someone with glyphs etched into his skin before he knew what names were.
He returned to the tablet.
Carefully, he traced the words into a fresh page of his journal. Not just copying. Translating. Interpreting.
Then he paused.
There was a small indentation at the top of the tablet — a shallow curve, about the size of a fingertip.
Without fully thinking, he pressed his thumb to it.
The vault pulsed.
Not violently. But with a resonance that struck something behind his ribs.
He blinked.
For half a second, the world around him… shifted.
Not in light. In memory.
He stood, suddenly, in a vast stone hall — or the memory of one. Figures passed through the space around him, translucent and flickering. Not ghosts. Echoes. A gathering of witches, glyphmakers, Threadbreakers.
He saw them raise blades not made of steel, but carved symbols. Spoke names like spells. One, a woman, turned to the wall behind her, dragging a bloodied glyph across the stone.
"No more cycles," she said.
Then the memory collapsed.
But not all of it.
The hall dissolved — walls flaking into dust, voices unraveling into static.
But one image lingered longer than it should have.
Not part of the vision. Not part of the past.
Something bleeding through.
A girl stood in the ruin.
Not among the glyphmakers. Not with the witches. Alone. Young.
Young. Still. Ash clung to her skin like a second breath, her robes torn in places where Thread had once bled through. Her hair, dark and tangled, was braided with a single silver band. And in her hands — too small to carry it — she held a flame.
Not metaphor. Not Thread. A real, burning flame — one that pulsed with violet and gold, as if it remembered a world no longer allowed to exist.
Behind her: a shadow.
No face. No voice. Only breath — whispering near her ear.
"Let it burn."
She didn't answer. But she didn't drop the flame either.
She simply stood — like someone who had already decided to carry what others would not name.
Mizan trembled.
The girl flinched — not in fear. In knowing.
The flame wavered.
The shadow leaned closer.
You were never meant to carry it alone.
And then—
Mizan blinked.
For a moment, he almost reached for her. Not to save. To remember.
But she was gone.
A name he didn't know clung to the back of his tongue.
Only silence answered it.
He exhaled once.
Then the silence inside the vision cracked again—
And she appeared.
One figure lingered longer than the others — not fading, not moving.
A woman stood at the edge of the great hall. Cloaked in shadow-haze. Motionless.
Her face was hidden beneath a half-veil, stitched with mirrored scales. In one hand she held a chain, in the other, a sealed scroll. She did not look at him — she reflected him.
A thread of fear curled in his gut. Not terror. Not warning.
Recognition.
As if this was not their first meeting.
As if she had always been watching — from the folds between names.
"You are not the first," she said. Her voice was slow. Balanced. Measured like water finding its level.
"Only the next to ask what cannot be answered."
Her hand extended, fingers dusted in ash.
"You will not find truth."
"You will find judgment."
"And you will be its measure."
Then her image cracked —
And the memory shattered like glass dropped in still water.
He gasped, stumbling backward into the vault.
Only dust remained.
But her voice stayed — not in his ears, but in the balance behind his breath.
And now, something stirred deeper in him. Not power.
Resolve.
This wasn't just about who he was. Or what Thread flowed through his blood.
This was about why they had never told him the truth.
Why the Empire feared glyphs that wrote themselves.
Why old temples were buried instead of studied.
Why no one finished the orphan's song past the fourth verse.
He had to know more.
He would find more.
And if he couldn't… he'd carve it himself.
Into stone.
Into truth.
Into whatever this world had become.
When he opened his journal to write again, he found a mark burned into the margin.
Not one he had drawn.
A simple sigil: a scale, unbalanced — yet holding equal weights.
Below it, a line in ash-scorched ink:
The eye that sees both paths still must walk one.