Day One
The barracks was quieter at night, a valley of breathing bodies and muted boots. Outside, wind slid along the stone eaves like a restless thing; inside, the 21st's common room smelled of oil and old paper, of metal that had been polished until it shone with the memory of use. Leo had the lamp to himself and the stack of files Ashton had set before him — a tower of dried ink and battered covers that felt heavier than their pages.
He began with the oldest: The Forgotten Chapel. The scribe's hand had trembled. Ink bled into the fibres of the paper as if the words themselves had sweated with fear. The account was sparse — three nights of chanting, a merchant's sketch of a crescent crossed through by a line, the repeated fragment "Aru... Aru..." scrawled where the pen had dragged.
Leo's finger followed the margin. There, next to the repeated fragment, someone had drawn the same little crescent-cross again and again, each time smaller, as if shrinking it would make it less true. He traced the curved line with the tip of his fingertip, felt the faint ridges of ink. A soundless, ridiculous thought crossed him: that marks could be stubborn, that ideas could live on the edges of texts.
He read aloud under the lamp because the rhythm of sound steadied him. "Aru... Aru... A—" The verbal shape wanted to be finished. The page wanted to give him something solid to hold.
In the margin, a notation — a tiny letter underlined twice — pointed to the crescent-cross. Next to it, someone had written a single word in a cramped, older hand: Ala.
Ala.
Leo repeated it until the syllable nested in his throat. It lived there like a small stone. He did not yet know why a single syllable could bruise him into attention, but he noted it down. On a loose sheet he made a little column: "Ala — crescent-cross — Chapel." He would not yet rearrange them. For tonight, order would be treacherous.
Outside the window, the moon cut across the garden with a blade of cold light. In the barracks, the warmth of other men and women sleeping hummed like a second heart. Leo kept reading.
By two in the morning, he had stacked the next file on top of The Forgotten Chapel: Mawrech Perimeter Breach — Scout Log 42-C. The scout's sketch was crude: a spiral etched into the corner of a field, radial cuts like the ribs of a turning wheel. The scribe had been precise about direction — clockwise — underlined until the line was almost a score.
The note in the margin, not quite like the others, said: rotary — R. It had been boxed twice.
He chalked that onto his sheet next to Ala. Ala—crescent-cross. R—spiral. The pieces were pluralising, insisting on their existence.
The fatigue that had sat at the bottom of his ribs since the dagger trial loosened a little when his mind had the task of fitting these fragments together. The work was mechanical and intimate: find repetition, mark the oddities, ask what someone would hide in the spaces between lines.
At dawn, his hand cramped and his lamp guttered low. He looked at what he had. Crescent. Spiral. A single line of scribbled syllables. It was not enough to find a hideout, but it was enough to start.
...
Day Two
He woke with the taste of dust in his mouth and Vorak characters swimming at the edges of his vision. He kept the papers under his pillow during the briefed morning; for the rest of the day's drills and chores his eyes returned to them like a moth to a half-remembered flame.
It was Barrett who found him hunched at the long table when the sun had climbed thin above the barracks walls.
"You look like you swallowed the library," Barrett said, not unkindly. He dropped into the seat opposite and watched Leo's hands. "Any luck?"
Leo almost lied. "Patterns." He set the scout log and the chapel file side by side. "Letters. Sounds."
Barrett leaned in. "Tell me. Are they curses?"
"Not yet." Leo smiled, which surprised him — there was something like hope in it. "Crescent means A. Spiral means R. There's... another one." He pushed the next case toward Barrett: Outer Gate Breach — Witness Drawings. The drawing was jagged, pronged — three broken teeth pointing outward. Under it, the scribe had written, in fear or reverence, kha.
"Kha?" Barrett tried the sound and shut his mouth like a man who had bit his lip by mistake. "That's a throat sound."
Leo touched his own throat, trying, feeling the rasp as the kh scraped off the back of his tone. It was awkward, like learning to edge a sword with a hand that had been left idle. The sound was not a consonant in his old world, not a neat thing his tongue liked. It required breath, a small defiant cough into the sound.
He spent half the morning in the little courtyard outside, repeating kha until it stopped feeling like borrowed noise. A soldier passing by shook his head and made a face that mixed sympathy and amusement. Cyrus, who liked to appear lazy and clever at once, wandered over and raised an eyebrow. "Trying to summon a gate with throat-clearing?" he asked.
"If the gate answers, you carry me," Leo said. Cyrus grinned and left, and Leo kept practicing.
Back in the room, the pages unfolded like a measured map. The Subject X — Partial Statement file was the ugliest. Notes torn by panic, blotches of ink where someone had been trembling with cold. The subject had drawn an eye triangle on his palm and three short lines beneath — the triangular-eye scribble that kept repeating in records. Next to it, a single capital letter: H.
Triangular eye → H. He put that into the column. Ala. R. Kha. H.
Somewhere in the afternoon Ashton clapped a gauntled hand on Leo's shoulder. "You keep your head down and your hands busy, Vail. Good. Vorak isn't poetry. It's survival." He did not stay. His eyes carried the weight of men who had tried to teach and lost recruits to the kinds of things the 21st hunted.
By the time dusk fell, Leo felt the bones of a word forming like a skeleton under skin. He could see the arc of possibilities, and at the same time he felt the whorl of something bigger than himself — the shape of a gate, perhaps given breath by this syllabic skeleton.
......
Day Three
On the third day he found the lexicon.
It was thin, almost humble, its edges browned and soft. Ashton had not put it in the bundle with the other reports — this one had been shelved apart and labeled in a hand he could not match to any of the others. When Leo opened it, the Vorak characters on the first page were like teeth in the dark. He knew no language that used such marks; their strokes moved with a rhythm that suggested prayer and mathematics at once.
But the lexicon also offered translation, not in full but in hints — in a scholar's marginalia that had been inked with a trembling, weary care: crescent = a; spiral = r; prong = kha; triangular eye = h; twin-arch = ael; cleave = ē; hook = l (soft final).
The page smelled like old storms. Leo's hands were slick. He could, if he allowed the thought to enter, test the syllables together. He might stand at the city's edge and speak the sounds that stitched from the margins like a seamstress's thread; he might see what happened when sound met stone.
But the lexicon came with a warning in the rounding script beneath the table — a single line notched across the bottom of the page: say the fold: Ar-kha-ël and beneath that another hand had scrawled: Do not sing it twice.
Leo slowed on the last syllable, tried it carefully: Ar—kha— The kh scraped his throat and the ël tasted like the last bell of the day. He said it again, slower still, and the room seemed to hold its breath — not in warning, not in fear, just an attentive silence that made the hairs on his forearm stand up.
"Careful," Carly said from the doorway. She had been watching him for hours, as if a book could become a rival to boredom. "What'd you find?"
He showed her the page.
She read the scholar's line once, her face drawn into a calculation. Then she laughed softly, a small sound that did not make the room lighter. "Ah. The scholars are dramatic."
"Is it a gate?" Leo asked.
"It is a door word," she said, tasting the difference like a coin between her fingers. "A look and a word. Doors are listened to; some like them loud."
She did not press him to more. Carly never volunteered advice unless she expected the cost. The danger rolled in the space between her words and the ease with which she could have told him to forget it. He had the sense she had encountered something like the lexicon before and chosen to stay alive rather than brave the language's appetite.
He read the lexicon until his eyes blurred. Each marginal glyph anchored to one sound, and the sounds made shapes in his mouth that were unfamiliar but real. The Vorak was not a language of songs but of half-mechanics and half-prayers — sounds designed to take hold of something and hold it in place. A word here was less an invitation and more an alignment.
There was a second sheet tucked in the lexicon, smaller, dirtier. Someone — a hand with a different tilt and less patience — had drawn a composite sigil: crescent connected to spiral, to pronged teeth, to a triangular eye and twin arches all cleaved by a line and finished with a hooked stroke like a fish's mouth. Under it, the scholar had written very small, as though the ink might leak into the wrong place: Ar-kha— and then a long dash. Someone had started the sound and stopped.
Leo closed the book and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. His pulse thudded in the soft hollows of his wrists. He had the pieces mapped now: Ala/A — crescent. R — spiral. Kha — prong. H — triangular eye. Ael — twin arch. Ē — cleave. L — hook. The sound that stitched them together had been noted but not assembled aloud by others.
For a full hour he sat without moving, the lamp a lonely sun in a small private sky. He felt like a man standing at the edge of a sea and being handed a rowboat and told it was his to cross. He could see the opposite shore; he could see the line where sunlight broke on rock. He felt the truth of the words in his mouth like the taste of rain.
Then — because the weight of choices had a shape and heat to it — Leo did a thing that surprised him: he opened the lexicon again, set the composite sigil on the table, and said the syllables softly so no one could hear them but the paper and the lamp.
"Ar—" his voice was an ember that wanted breath. "Ar-kha—" the kh scraped. "Ar-kha-ë—"
A dull vibration threaded through the floorboards, a small, like a held note under the barracks. He felt the lamp's flame hiccup; the shadows around the room thinned with attention. He stopped so suddenly the sound of his own breathing seemed obscene.
Then he flung the book.
He didn't mean to be theatrical. The lexicon hit the wood with a thud and slid, pages fanning like a small, startled bird. The breath he'd been holding spilled out of him in a hoarse laugh that was half relief and half terror. The lamp's flame settled as if nothing had happened at all.
Carly looked over from where she was packing a bag. "Well?" she asked, an arch of eyebrow making the question blunt.
"I... learned new things," Leo said. He was laughing now, incredulity and the thrill of having touched the hinge of power braided together. "It feels like the world just opened a little bit more."
She came to the table and picked up the lexicon, fingers skimming the composite sigil, then the margin where the scholar's warning lived. "Useful," she said at last. "Dangerous. Useful."
Leo nodded. The word — a map made of sounds — sat in his mind, not yet complete but no longer silent. He could hear the syllables when he closed his eyes, like a tide at the edge of hearing.
Carly pushed the lexicon back toward him. "You sleep," she said. "If you decide to test that word again, do it where you can run if it bites."
"Where else," he whispered, "would I go?"
Outside, the wind flirted with the eaves. Inside, the barracks settled. The 21st's world was built on small pragmatic truths: be ready, keep your wits, do not repeat a ritual three times just because it tastes like power. Leo collected the stack of files and the lexicon and made a neat pile beside his bunk, as if order could protect him from curiosity.
He lay awake for hours, the sounds of the other recruits breathing like a second language. His mind traced the sigils again and again until the syllables were a small, warm chain in his mouth.
When at last sleep dragged him under, it was with the sense that the world had acquired one more person willing to learn its hush.
The next day he would go back to the quay, to the old stones Ashton had mentioned in passing. He would look for the twin arches carved in merchant routes, for a pier that had once been a threshold to trade. He would test the syllables, once, in the quiet place where a door might be found.
But for now, he turned in his bunk, the lexicon under his arm like a sleeping thing, and let the letters stew in the dark until the morning asked for their answer.