Back in the Hidden Alcove of the Library
The next morning, Ari returned to the library, not to read—but to confront.
He found Eluin seated in the hidden alcove again, fingers tracing runes in the margin of a massive tome titled "The Inversions of Causality: Theoretical Temporal Magic and Forgotten Runes."
"You knew that would happen," Ari said.
No accusation. Just gravity in his voice.
Eluin didn't look up at first. She pressed her thumb against a glyph, and it dimmed—sealing the page from being read aloud by wandering spells.
Then she closed the book softly and finally looked at him.
"Not exactly. But I suspected your spell threads would destabilize the moment you tried to constrain them with standard Signum."
"You didn't warn me."
"Because I needed proof, Ari," she said. Her voice was calm but her eyes glinted with something that wasn't nervousness. It was purpose.
"Who are you, really?"
"My full name is Eluin Seryel." She stood and touched her stylus to her badge, causing its shimmer to falter—revealing a glyph beneath it. A triple-spiral symbol etched in rotating layers of glowing script.
"I'm a sleeper apprentice of the Echo Vault, operating under sanction of Vault Directive Thirty-Two."
"You're... Vaultmarked?" Ari asked, stepping back.
"Yes," she said. "We've been watching for the return of you—or rather, your Echo Signature—for almost fifty years."
"But I'm twelve."
"So was the last Dreamer," she said.
What is Dreamscript?
Eluin moved to the chalkwall and drew a shape—three overlapping loops with foreign script orbiting a central void.
"What you cast yesterday was not a mistake. It was Dreamscript—a language older than Signum, older than the Threads. It was the coding language used by the System when it was still writing the world."
"You mean the magic system?"
"No," Eluin said firmly. "I mean the literal system. The one that dreamt this world into structure. The one that seeded Thread Types, Lineages, and even the illusion of choice."
She circled the middle of the diagram.
"Dreamscript wasn't meant to be used anymore. It was sealed when the first Script War ended. Every time someone speaks it... something listens."
"Your soul is Null-Origin," she continued. "Not 'Threadless' like the instructors believe. You are not devoid of affinity... you're outside the Thread system entirely. You weren't born into the world's logic—you were plugged in."
Ari didn't respond at first. He sat, feeling the glyph pulses beneath the stone floor. The hum he'd begun to notice since the failed spell. A rhythm. Like breathing.
"Then why me?" he asked. "Why now?"
Eluin hesitated, then offered him a worn crystal. It flickered with records—moments recorded by the Vault.
"Because once before, someone like you triggered a Dreamscript surge... and rewrote a battlefield. He resurrected the dead without necromancy. Reversed entropy. But then—he vanished. System rollback. Memory erased."
"And you think I'm him?"
"No," she said. "We think you're what comes after him. A recursive instance. A Dream-echo."
"So what's your job? To spy on me?"
Eluin shook her head.
"To guide you when the System starts waking up."
She knelt and held out a spell matrix.
"And to teach you how to speak its name."