By the time he reached the Arcanum, the hallways were still half-empty, echoing faintly with the rhythm of his own steps. The vast archive smelled of parchment and the faint metallic tang of ink. He passed familiar faces, exchanging small nods, all while forcing his posture to remain calm, his breath steady. Every time he blinked, the corridor seemed to stretch, the light shifting too slowly, like the world itself lagged a second behind.
At his desk, Ryneth pulled out his notes and began reviewing the transcriptions. The script swam slightly on the page, curling at the edges of his vision. He blinked again — it returned to normal. He blamed the lack of sleep, the strain on his eyes. Yet, when he reached for his quill, he noticed the faintest trace of another handwriting on the margin of his parchment, thin and unfamiliar.
"Listen closer."
He froze, heart pounding.
He looked around — no one. Just silence, the distant scratching of pens from other rooms.
When he looked back, the words were gone.
By the time afternoon light filtered through the high windows, Ryneth's mind felt heavy, sluggish. He tried to concentrate, but his thoughts slipped like oil through his fingers. Every sound seemed distant, like it came from the other side of glass. Even his reflection in the polished inkpot seemed wrong — it didn't blink when he did.
He stood abruptly, pushing the chair back, deciding to call it a day before exhaustion made him collapse. The corridors seemed darker than usual as he left, though the lamps burned the same. On the way out, he caught sight of his reflection again in the tall glass of a cabinet door — standing a few inches behind him this time, tilted at an unnatural angle. He turned around. Nothing. Just the empty hallway.
When he reached home, the sun had already begun to sink. He washed his face, changed, and lit a candle on the desk. The texts he'd taken from Leslie sat where he'd left them, bound in pale leather, edges frayed and uneven. For a long while, he only stared at them, weighing whether to continue or burn them outright. But the pull — that same, quiet tug that had haunted him since the night of her death — urged his hand forward.
He brushed a finger over one of the covers. The candle flickered. The flame bent toward the book, like a plant toward the sun.
Ryneth swallowed hard, closed the book again, and leaned back in his chair.
He was tired. Bone-tired. "Tomorrow," he muttered to himself, trying to sound convincing. "I'll read more tomorrow."
But when he stood to snuff the candle, his eyes fell upon the mirror near the door. A figure — faint, colorless, unmoving — stared back at him, standing where he had been seconds ago. His own face blinked in sync with the reflection, but the faint image behind it did not.
He stared for a long time. The room's air felt heavy. The figure did not move, did not fade. Only when he whispered to himself, "Just sleep," did he finally look away.
The candle's flame flinched once, then went out.
The glass stayed warm for a while.
Sleep did not come easily. The walls of Ryneth's small room felt closer than before, as though the air itself thickened with his thoughts. He lay still, staring at the faint pattern of cracks on the ceiling, following them like roads that led nowhere. The candle had burned out hours ago, but the room wasn't entirely dark. The faintest shimmer lingered at the edges of the furniture, as if the shadows had learned to breathe.
He knew it now — there was no mistaking it.
The symptoms had begun.
The same whispers that had haunted Leslie's final entries now brushed against his ears, light as the stirring of pages. They weren't words, not truly — more like echoes of language, the shape of speech without sound. Sometimes they carried a tone, almost curious, almost gentle. Other times, they rose like a tide pressing behind his skull. He pressed his palms against his ears, but the sound was inside, not out.
"I must find a way to get myself out of this," he muttered under his breath, trying to catch his own voice in the rising static of his thoughts.
The Glassmind — he remembered how Leslie's words had dissolved into disjointed phrases, how her handwriting began to tilt as though the world had been slipping sideways in her mind.
"She heard the whispers by the third day," he whispered to himself, "and by the fifth… the reflections began to move on their own."
He could feel it — the same pattern, only faster. His pulse raced. His breath came unevenly. His mind, sharper than most, worked too fast for its own safety. He was an Echoed of the first veil, yes — but that meant his perception was already unstable, already closer to the Reach. Leslie, for all her brilliance, had time to fall. He was already falling.
Ryneth turned over on his bed, gripping the sheets, as if holding the fabric could anchor him to reality. "No medicine for perception," he reminded himself. "No cure for what's seen through the wrong lens."
If he wanted to survive, he would have to do what the Arcanum never taught — stabilize the resonance on his own.
"Align it," he whispered, eyes shut tight. "Condense it. Collect it. Focus."
But focus was like sand slipping between his fingers. The moment he grasped one thought, another bled through — voices, flickers of faces in the dark, fleeting moments of light that weren't there.
The ceiling shifted again, or maybe it was only his sight that trembled. The whispers grew fainter, further away, until only one lingered close —
a low, fragmented echo that almost sounded like his own voice.
> "You're already too far."
He jolted upright, heart hammering. The room was empty. The only sound was the faint creak of wood and his ragged breath.
He sat there until the first light of dawn filtered through the curtains, his eyes wide open, afraid to close them again.