"Anika, sit down before you break my skull with your stupidity," Idona snapped, her thumb pressing into the chalk on her slate until the brittle stick snapped in two.
Anika did not sit. She stood by the shattered pedestal near the outer colonnade, brushing masonry grit from her gray woolen cuffs. Her chin remained lifted, stubborn and infuriatingly steady. "I am preparing the peripheral nodes. You have ten minutes to cross-reference Joric’s binding array, Idona. Don't waste them lecturing me on prudence you never practiced yourself."
She turned on her heel, marching toward the east vestibule to set the secondary chalk wards, leaving them.
Cold air rolled through the rotunda’s broken skylight, smelling of sodden moss and wet black coal. Across the flagstones, Joric lay sprawled beside an overturned lectern, clutching his ribs, wheezing each breath through blackened lips. For a few brief, frozen moments, the space belonged only to two.
Roric stepped closer. The viscous, living ebony that had encased his throat and jaw drew back like receding tide water, sinking beneath his skin in fine, bruised networks. His shoulders dropped. When he raised his hand to rub the bridge of his nose, the skin was raw and pale, yet entirely human.
"She shouldn't do this," Roric said. The sound was like gravel dragged across dry vellum, unused for half a decade, scraping its way past scarred vocal cords. "You know what it extracts."
"Anika has memorized seven dialects of High Ostran just to mock my accent at breakfast," Idona muttered, keeping her gaze pinned to the floor slab where the geometric diagram had to be inscribed. Her palms were sweating. "She is sturdier than she appears. More to the point, she won't listen to me. She never has."
"Idona."
The friction of her name on his tongue made her hand jerk. The chalk skittered across the floor, leaving an ugly, erratic scar over an open pentagram.
"Do not interrupt my calculations, Lord Ulbrek. If the syntax slips by three syllables during the transfer, the feedback will liquefy your parietal lobe, and I will have traveled five hundred leagues into an unpaved swamp for absolutely nothing."
"The rotunda isn't just an archive foundation," he said, ignoring her bristling defense. He sank onto his good knee beside her, near enough that she could smell rain, old tallow, and the sharp copper tang of iron gall. "You need to know the origin before you try to balance the equation. You cannot solve a syntax whose root you misread."
Idona paused, the broken piece of chalk hovering a hairsbreadth above the slate. "The pact between your father and the Scriptorium."
"A lie told to keep the inspectors from digging beneath the bedrock," Roric rasped. His knuckles tapped against the central floor tile, where a ring of dull lead sealed a deep wellspring beneath the stone. "Beneath Gloomfen rests the Well of Primal Syntax. It is not an artifact. It is raw, unformed intent—the wellspring of every dialect ever spoken in Vesmaria. My bloodline was never nobility. We were jailers. We kept it quiet. We kept it asleep."
Idona set her jaw as the missing link aligned. "And Joric didn't come here to suppress his wasting rot. He came to harness it."
"He wanted to forge a new lexicon," Roric said quietly. "He believed if he could write a dialect that bypassed physical mortality, he could rebuild his lungs, his marrow, his blood. He thought he could out-argue death itself. But the source cannot be shaped by human will alone. When the grammar collapsed, it began to swallow him whole. I took the grammar into my own flesh to stop the well from bursting into the valley. I thought I was strong enough to hold the closure."
A dry, self-mocking curve touched his lips. It made him look young—terribly young, and exhausted down to the calcium of his bones.
"It turned me into an animal," he whispered. "A cage of unsaid words. For five years, the only thing that kept my mind from dissolving into that pool of ink was the fact that someone might eventually walk through those doors who could read what I had become. And then you arrived. You didn't run. You simply complained about my spelling."
Idona swallowed around a sudden, thick dryness in her throat. She looked at her slate, at the tidy columns of runes she had drafted to dissect his agony like an anatomical specimen.
"You aren't a text, Roric," she said, the words coming out lower than she intended, stripped of their usual razor-sharp cadence.
"I am terrified, Idona," he murmured. He didn't look at the chalk or the runes. He looked directly into her eyes, with none of the polite distances of the court or the Scriptorium. "Not of dying. I have been half-dead since the frost came five winters ago. But if this ritual unravels, Anika's mind will burn out, and you will be left with the wreckage. I would rather sink into that bog forever than let my silence drown you both."
Idona felt the cold draft biting through her woolen coat. The familiar protective shell—the dry condescension, the academic superiority she wore like plate armor—felt hollow, useless against the heat in his gaze.
"Do you know why I took this commission?" she asked, her voice steadying as she stared down at the gray stones between them. "Because the Scriptorium was choking me to death. I told myself I loved the quiet. I told myself other people were merely noisy, tedious interruptions. But it wasn't peace. It was a tomb where everyone smiled, quoted dead poets, and waited for someone else to make a mistake so they could publish a critique."
She looked up, meeting his unblinking gaze with fierce clarity.
"I spent twenty-four years believing I was superior because I needed no one. And then I came to this miserable, rotting pile of stones, and I met a man whose flesh was a scream, and for the first time in my miserable, arrogant life, I found something I couldn't bear to leave unread. You are not a research paper to me, Roric. You never were. Deciphering you is the only honest thing I have ever done."
Roric inhaled sharply, his chest rising as though struck. He reached out, his bare palm brushing the back of her ink-stained hand. The touch was warm, slightly rough, entirely devoid of the shifting darkness that had haunted him for half a decade.
A sickening crack split the air.
Across the rotunda, Joric arched violently off the floor. Black ichor sprayed from his nose, spattering across the pale limestone. The glyphs carved into his forearms flared with an oily, violet radiance, his skin smoking as the flawed containment gave way from the inside out.
He tumbled sideways, clawing at the stone, his eyes rolled back until only red-veined whites showed.
"Idona!" Anika shouted from the archway, sprinting back toward the dais with her chalk pouch swinging from her belt.
Joric’s nails gouged into the mortar between the stones. He dragged himself an inch forward, his voice tearing from his throat in a wet, frantic whistle of escaping air.
"It’s time. Now, or never."