The sigil still hadn't faded.
Spandrex stood before the dormitory mirror, sleeves rolled to his elbows, his eyes locked on the curling glyph across his wrist. It should've vanished hours ago, even with perfect form. Glyphs like this weren't meant to last past the classroom.
Unless they weren't just glyphs anymore.
He leaned closer. The black lines writhed slightly beneath the skin—no longer smoke, but something inked deep, like a pact.
The room behind him blurred.
"Still here," he whispered to the mark.
And it pulsed.
The day unfolded with slow, deliberate cruelty. A mandatory lecture on Rune Degradation Theory filled the morning, taught by Arch-Scribe Fenric, a man with a voice like gravel and breath like fermented chalk.
Spandrex kept his wrist covered, his satchel tight across his chest. Every few minutes, he'd feel a cold trace from under his skin, like frost moving through bone. No pain. Just presence.
At lunch, he sat in the far corner of the dining hall. As always, alone. Students talked in low murmurs, laughter breaking out in bursts like sparks. Plates clattered. Forks scraped. Spandrex's stew was untouched.
He wasn't hungry.
He was listening.
A hum. Faint. Beneath everything. Beneath sound. Beneath thought.
He closed his eyes—and the humming became words. Not spoken aloud, but formed within.
"Ash does not mourn flame. Nor shall you."
His eyes snapped open.
The sigil pulsed under his sleeve.
That afternoon's assignment was a basic one—Rune Stability Practice. Simple formations. Steady inkwork. Unremarkable incantations.
Each student was issued a strip of ashen parchment—the kind used for spell drills. Most scribbled lazily or copied from the models on the board.
Spandrex, seated at the far edge of the hall again, didn't touch his quill.
He stared at the parchment.
And it began to blacken.
Slowly, like it was smoldering from inside. No fire. No heat. Just… decay.
He blinked. The sigil on his wrist pulsed once more. And then, without touching it, the rune for Silencing Flame etched itself across the strip.
Not with ink.
With ash.
He looked up, heart racing.
No one else had noticed.
Except her.
Mistress Kael stood at the back of the room, her arms folded, eyes fixed on him like daggers made of dusk. She didn't speak. Didn't move.
But she had seen.
And she understood.
When class ended, she said only one thing:
"Stay behind."
The room emptied. Footsteps faded.
Only then did she speak again.
"That glyph," she said, walking slowly toward him, "was not part of the curriculum."
"I didn't write it," Spandrex replied quietly. "It… wrote itself."
Kael stopped a pace from him. Her eyes were strange in the low torchlight—soft, but unblinking.
"What have you bound?"
He hesitated. "A shadow. I think."
"No," she said. "Not a shadow."
She stepped closer and brushed his sleeve back. The glyph still writhed on his wrist, more alive now. Her breath caught.
"…Vehrash," she murmured. "But deeper. A variant I've never seen."
She looked up at him—not with suspicion, but almost… reverence.
"There are old forms," she said softly. "Ones the Academy doesn't teach. Buried sigils from before the Rune Accord. Before control replaced connection."
"I didn't mean to find it," he said. "It found me."
Kael gave the faintest nod. "That's how the strongest ones always begin."
Then, her voice dropped low.
"Whatever it is… it's awake now. And if it chose you, Spandrex, you need to decide something very quickly."
He waited.
Kael leaned in, her voice barely audible.
"Will you be its vessel… or its victim?"
That night, Spandrex couldn't sleep. Again.
Not from fear this time.
But from urgency.
The shadow had chosen him. The rune had etched itself into his body like it belonged there. Like it had been waiting.
He didn't know what it wanted.
But he would find out.
He sat up, reached for a blank page, and began drawing. Not from the book this time.
From memory.
From somewhere else.
The glyphs came smoother now, stranger. They coiled into shapes that felt like questions and answers folded into each other. By the time the candle had burned halfway down, the parchment in his lap was no longer white.
It was grey. As if smoke had bled into the fibers.
He traced the final line, spoke no words—and felt something shift in the air.
Not a spell.
A summoning.
From the corner of the room, a shadow detached from the wall. Tall. Humanoid. Its outline rippled like heat on stone. No eyes, but Spandrex felt it see him.
It didn't speak.
But it bowed.
And in that moment, he understood:
He hadn't summoned it.
He'd answered it.