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Heaven's Forsaken

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Chapter 1 - Part 1 : Ash and a book

Greyhaven smelled like wet ash and old iron after the purge. Smoke clung to the streets in thin ribbons. The charred ribs of the old temple stuck out of the ground like a broken crown.

Elyon Veyr moved through the ruin the way a stray cat moves through a new alley—quiet, wary, eyes sharp for nails and men alike. He wore a patched coat tied at the waist and a scarf that hid the lower half of his face. The scarf was for the smoke, but it also helped people forget faces. In Greyhaven, forgetting could save your life.

They called yesterday a cleansing. Torches. Edicts. Banners with the silver scale of the Covenant. A priest cried about false books and godless men while soldiers dragged crates out into the street and fed them to the fire.

Elyon had not come for relics. He had come because the temple had kept a ledger, and the ledger held names. One of those names was his brother's—Godren Veyr—accused of theft and treason and then "lost during transport." Lost. The neat word tasted like rust.

He climbed over a collapsed beam and slipped into what had been the southern archive. The roof here had fallen in. Rain had come in the night, hissing on the fire and turning the ash to slick paste. Shelves leaned like drunks after a long night. Most scrolls were gone or boiled into black shells.

Something pale caught his eye inside a charred bookcase—a small shape wedged behind a crossbeam. He pushed aside a slice of timber and reached in. His fingers touched something cool that did not feel like wood or leather.

He drew out a book.

It wasn't large. It could fit under a coat, easy. The cover looked like stone that had learned to breathe—matte gray with faint veins of silver. A symbol lay in the center: two intersecting strokes, simple and clean, like a cross a child might draw in dust. When Elyon shifted the book, the veins flickered as if catching a hidden light.

He hesitated. The Covenant burned books like this. That made it dangerous. It also made it valuable.

Someone coughed behind him.

Elyon turned, body low, hands empty and friendly. Three boys stood at the hole in the wall. They were older than him by a year or two and younger by ten in the places that mattered. The one in the middle had a scar across his lip and a wooden club in his right hand.

"Found something, Veyr?" Scar-Lip asked. He tried to sound casual and almost managed. "Priests say anything not stamped is heresy. Heresy belongs to the city."

"Does it?" Elyon asked, voice mild. "Which part of the city are you?"

Scar-Lip's friends laughed. Scar-Lip did not. He took a step forward.

Elyon tucked the book under his coat. "I found charcoal and a broken shelf," he said. "If you want either, I'm generous."

Scar-Lip lifted the club. "You think you're smart because you used to read for the temple rats. You're a Veyr. The city remembers Veyrs."

"So do I," Elyon said.

He didn't wait. He kicked a heap of ash toward their faces. While they coughed and cursed, he slipped through a gap in the fallen wall and into a narrow alley. He moved fast, feet finding the dry spots. Greyhaven was a web of little ways if you knew them. Elyon knew them.

He didn't stop until he reached the canal. Boats bumped the stone like sleeping animals. A fisherman watched him without interest.

Elyon crouched behind a stack of traps, heart punching at his ribs. His hands shook. He breathed until they didn't.

Only then did he open the book.

The pages were thick and pale. No script at first, just grain and light. On the inside of the cover, a line appeared as if written by an invisible brush.

For the forsaken who hold the light, the Codex will speak. Read honestly. Act faithfully. Pay what is asked.

The words were simple. They felt heavier than they looked. Elyon touched the line with one finger. The page warmed under his skin—not heat, exactly, but a gentler thing, like a coal under snow.

Letters formed on the first page, clean and spare.

PAGE ONE — LAMP

Name yourself in truth. Speak it aloud. Accept the weight of your oaths. A lamp cannot burn with stolen oil.

Elyon glanced up. The fisherman was still there, chewing something, staring at the water. No one else was close.

"Elyon Veyr," he said under his breath.

The name sat in the air between him and the book. It felt honest. It felt exposed. Something in the page answered. A thin thread of light trembled across the paper like a strand of silk.

New lines unfurled.

Acknowledged. The lamp is lit.

Virtues measured:

Honesty: 1

Mercy: 0

Resolve: 0

Faith: 0

Breath practice unlocked: Lumen Breath (Novice).

Sense unlocked: Light-Sight (Faint).

Task: Before sunset, return what is owed. Serve with your hands. Reward: Page Two—SERVICE.

Elyon blinked. His pulse stuttered. The letters did not look like any language he knew and then they did. He felt the meaning more than read it. A quiet hum filled his ears as if the book had a voice too soft for the world to hear.

Lumen Breath. Light-Sight. Virtues measured. It sounded like a cultivation manual, yes—but not like any he'd seen copied for the sect recruits at the edge of the city. Those were full of diagrams of meridians, charts of herbs, long lists of stances. This was a few lines on a white field, and it spoke to the kind of person he chose to be, not just the strength of his muscles.

He closed the book and tested the new sense—if there was one. At first, nothing. Then, when he relaxed his eyes and softened his breath as if he were reading a faded script by candlelight, the world shifted.

The fisherman's shoulders wore a faint glow, like breath on glass. The glow was crooked on one side around the man's chest. Elyon didn't know what that meant, but it made him think of a winter cough.

He looked down at his own hands. A paper-thin film of light sat along his knuckles and palms, faint as a memory. His right palm pulsed, once. It left no mark anyone else could see.

"This is mad," Elyon whispered, and the Codex warmed, as if amused.

He tried the breath. In through the nose, slow, broad in the ribs; out through the mouth, longer than the in-breath. On the third cycle, something in his chest cleared. On the fifth, the smells of canal and ash grew sharper, but less oppressive. On the seventh, his thoughts arranged themselves into neat rows like books on a shelf.

Before sunset, return what is owed. Serve with your hands.

He thought of Scar-Lip and the club. Not that. He thought of his brother and the ledger. He had nothing to return there. He thought of the baker's alley and the little boy who coughed blood in winter.

He rose.

"Boy," the fisherman called as Elyon turned to go. "You look like you found a ghost."

"Just a page," Elyon said before his caution could stop him. "Keep your chest warm. Drink ginger if you can find it."

The fisherman grunted as if he had been told the weather. But when Elyon glanced back, the man had rested his hand on his chest with a puzzled tenderness.

The baker's alley lay three streets in, under a laundry line that never seemed empty. Elyon knocked on the door with the peeling blue paint. A woman answered, hair half-netted, flour on her arm. Her eyes went wary and then soft.

"Elyon," she said. "You shouldn't be out today."

"Neither should the city," he said. "Is Tiran worse?"

She moved aside. The boy lay on a pallet, skin shiny with sweat, breathing too fast. Elyon knelt, set down his pack, and felt his own fear drop into a dark bucket inside him. Not gone—contained.

He couldn't afford medicine. He could afford water and honey and what the Codex offered.

He washed his hands three times. He boiled water with a handful of thyme from a cracked clay jar and a pinch of salt. He cooled it. He checked the boy's skin. He spoke to him even when the boy didn't answer. He had learned in the old temple that speaking reorders breath. He had learned from his mother that saying a child's name is a way of holding.

"Easy, Tiran. Slow. In. Out." Elyon breathed with him, leading, counting softly. "In. Two. Three. Out. Two. Three. Four."

When he matched his breath to the Lumen practice, the room brightened in his eyes. A faint lattice of light hung over the boy's chest like threads in a loom, broken in places, tangled in others. Elyon didn't know how to mend threads. He could only offer rhythm, warmth, and presence.

He scooped a spoon of honey into the cooled thyme water and let the boy sip. The Codex warmed against his side, not hot, but attentive—like a teacher watching a first attempt.

Hours moved. The sun slid. Tiran's breath eased from frantic to thin to steady. When he slept, it looked like sleep, not a fight.

The baker's wife pressed her hands together hard. "You're a good boy, Elyon," she whispered. "If the Covenant asks, I'll tell them you were never here."

"They don't ask," he said, and tried to smile. "They prefer to know."

He packed his things and stepped into the late afternoon. The Codex pulsed once.

He opened it in the alley's shade. New lines had appeared.

Task completed. Owed care returned.

Mercy: 1 → 2.

Resolve: 0 → 1.

Light-Sight (Faint) → (Steady).

Reward unlocked: PAGE TWO — SERVICE.

PAGE TWO — SERVICE

Power without service is a shadow that thinks itself a man. To grow, give. To see, stand where the pain is.

Technique unlocked: Hands of Ember (Novice).

Effect: Channel warmth to ease pain, purge minor corruption, accelerate natural healing. Cost: Breath + Intention. Stable when used for others; unstable when used for self.

Elyon exhaled. His hands still held a ghost of warmth from where he had held Tiran's wrist. He had not done anything a temple healer would call a technique. He had boiled water and held a child's hand. Yet the Codex had answered with terms the sects used—unlocked, technique, effect—and tied them to service.

A light book, he thought. A book that does not let you climb without carrying someone.

He almost laughed. It was the first time anything about this day had made simple sense.

He slid the Codex back under his coat and headed toward the market for a crust of bread. People moved with their heads down. Small talk hid under carts and would not come out. Soldiers watched corners. Inquisitors in clean gray walked like knives.

Elyon felt it before he saw it—attention, cold and precise, like a line of chalk drawn across his path. He looked up into eyes the color of river stone. A woman stood at the mouth of the alley, cloak the exact gray of law. She wore the Covenant's scale at her throat. Her face was not older than twenty-five, but it had learned how to be tired without showing it.

"Elyon Veyr," she said.

He didn't ask how she knew his name.

"What do you want?" he said lightly, as if the answer could be a lemon and a laugh.

"You came from the old temple." Her voice was flat. Not cruel. Not curious. "Relics were stolen. Books."

"I came from a canal," he said. "It's wet there. Less fire than a temple."

Her eyes did not move. "Search."

Two soldiers stepped forward.

Elyon's breath tried to speed. He slowed it. In through the nose. Out longer than in. The world sharpened. The glow on the woman was cold and tight around the throat. The soldiers' light was dull, like old coins.

Hands of Ember (Novice) is not a weapon, the book reminded him silently. But light can be hidden.

"Do you enjoy scaring bakers?" he asked, and shifted as the first soldier reached for his coat. Elyon let the man grab empty cloth, moved his shoulder, and slid to the side. The second soldier swung for his ribs. Elyon dropped his weight and the blow skimmed his shoulder instead of breaking it.

"I don't have what you want," he said, truth and misdirection holding hands.

"Take him," the Inquisitor said.

Elyon ran.

He didn't sprint. Sprinting ends fast. He threaded between baskets, under a butcher's hanging ribs, through a curtain of glass beads. He knew the market's small ways the way a scribe knows where ink pools when the quill is wrong. The Codex thumped against his side, warm and steady. His breath stayed long. His feet found stone where others would have found water.

He cut left at the candlemaker's and slipped into a back lane that smelled of wax and dye. He heard shouts. Boots. The clean snap of orders. He slid under a sawhorse and over a stack of crates and out the far side—

—into a girl.

They almost collided. She stumbled, caught herself on the wall, looked up, and he forgot how to move for a breath.

She was not like the girls who worked the market stalls, though she wore simple travel clothes and a cloak the color of river moss. There was something too still about her face, as if she were listening to a song no one else could hear. Dark hair hid a scar near her left ear. Her eyes were the bright gray that happens in a sky after a storm has passed and before the sun decides what to do next.

"Sorry," Elyon said automatically.

The girl looked past him toward the shouts, then back at his face as if measuring two futures. Her gaze flicked down, and Elyon knew she had seen the book's edge under his coat. She did not point. She did not call the soldiers.

"Turn right," she said softly. "Not left. Left is a dead end."

He didn't ask how she knew. He turned right. She moved with him as if they had practiced all morning.

They reached the tanners' quarter. The air bit the throat. Hides hung like flayed flags. The shouts trailed behind. The girl took a narrow stair up the back of a warehouse and onto a roof that sagged in the middle like a tired mattress. From there they crossed to a lower roof and another, stepping where the tiles did not crack. Elyon's legs burned. His breath stayed steady.

"Who are you?" he asked when their feet finally hit a lane three streets from the market.

"No one," she said, which is another way to say, Not yet yours to know. She looked at the light under his skin. She didn't look afraid.

"Thank you," he said. "For the turn."

She nodded and was gone, into the weaving noise of Greyhaven, the way a bird vanishes by refusing to be where you expect.

Elyon stood in the lane and looked down at his hands. The thin film of light was brighter now, steady as a second skin. The Codex warmed his ribs.

He opened it because he had to.

New script waited for him like a patient teacher.

Mercy given under pressure. Resolve strengthened under pursuit. Light-Sight (Steady).

Virtues:

Honesty: 1

Mercy: 2

Resolve: 2

Faith: 0

Next task: Speak truth where a lie would be easier. Reward: Page Three—CONFESSION.

A small note appeared under the task, the letters thinner, as if written by another hand.

Be gentle. Confession given as a weapon becomes a sin.

Elyon closed the book. He laughed once, breathless. Even its warnings sounded simple and sharp.

He had a place to sleep in the attic of a cooper's shop where the rats were polite and the barrel hoops sang when the wind shifted. He made it there by dark, after two detours and a slow walk through a lane no one used because it was rumored to remember names.

He set the Codex on the floor. He lit a stub of candle. He listened to the city's low thunder.

Betrayed by his clan. Condemned by the heavens. Left to rot.

That was what men said about people like him. The Codex did not say any of those things. It asked for breath and small acts. It told him to serve before he tried to be strong.

He had thought cultivation was for sect heirs with stone courtyards and masters who spoke in riddles. He had thought strength was something you took. The book spoke like a road that started right where he sat.

Elyon Veyr placed his right hand on the first page. He read the first line again. It didn't change. It didn't need to.

For the forsaken who hold the light, the Codex will speak. Read honestly. Act faithfully. Pay what is asked.

He breathed the Lumen Breath until the candle flame leaned with his exhale. He let the day pass through him: the ash, the boy's breath steadying, the Inquisitor's eyes, the girl on the rooftop who knew which way was not death. A name moved at the back of his tongue—Seliah—but he did not know why it ached the way a scar aches before rain.

The Codex warmed one last time.

Tiny pale letters appeared at the very bottom of the page, almost lost in the paper. He had to hold the book close to see them.

When the lamp burns low, borrow light from the one beside you. You were never meant to climb alone.

A bell rang somewhere past midnight. Not the city bell. A smaller one. A signal.

Boots entered the alley below his attic.

Elyon closed the Codex and held his breath. The light under his skin dimmed to a whisper. He didn't move. The boots stopped. A voice spoke—a woman's, even through the floorboards you could hear that it was soft and certain.

"Search up," the voice said. "He's near. The book is awake."

Elyon's heart took one hard swing. He slipped the Codex into his coat and moved to the window without making the floor complain. Outside, the roofs stretched like a series of low waves under a moon smudged by smoke.

He climbed out and closed the sash behind him with two fingers. On the roof, he crouched, felt the city air on his face, and looked east. Somewhere beyond the river, a new day waited.

He breathed in. He breathed out longer. The world cleared.

Behind him, the attic door eased open. Light cut the room in a square. A gray shadow crossed the floor.

Elyon ran the rooftops toward the light he couldn't see yet, trusting a book he had met in ash and a road he had not earned.

The Codex thumped against his ribs like a second heart.

The city gave chase.

And Greyhaven—watching, listening—kept its secrets for one more night.