The room given to Dr. Alaric Voss was small—mud walls, a low ceiling, a thatched roof—but it felt like the heart of a cathedral.
Papers, sketches, and maps were pinned to every inch of wall space with hand-carved bone pins. His portable lantern flickered on the wooden table beside a rusted microscope and a tray of carefully sealed samples. Sigils, sketched in charcoal and red ink, lined his notes like constellations.
The body had barely cooled before Alaric's mind had ignited.
He'd gathered soil samples from around the corpse, taken detailed photographs of the burned symbols, even scraped fragments of the singed grass into vials. Now, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his spectacles slightly fogged from the humid air, he bent over the most perplexing discovery of his life.
The sigils shouldn't have registered anything unusual.
But they did.
The soil beneath each one pulsed faintly under the microscope. Not visibly—but chemically. The pH balance was warped, behaving like it had been exposed to intense radiation. But there were no burn marks around the outer perimeter—only at the center of each glyph. Controlled. Deliberate. Precise.
More than that—something biological remained in the residue. Cells.
Living.
He sat back, stunned. "Impossible…"
He reached for his field journal and flipped to the sketch of the largest sigil. A double-ringed spiral, the same one Amarachi had identified as a challenge. The outer ring was jagged, like sun rays twisted into thorns. The inner ring was smoother, almost seductive. A loop without end.
He began cataloguing:
Subject Alpha: Central spiral. Mild electromagnetic disturbance.
Subject Beta: Soil beneath sigil contains unknown organic compound.
Subject Gamma: Trace amounts of hemoglobin detected in outer ring.
He rubbed his eyes. "They're living glyphs."
Suddenly, the air in the room shifted.
The lantern guttered, casting shadows that stretched too long for the space. The sigil drawn on the parchment began to hum. Not audibly—but in his bones.
He stared at it. Every rational nerve in his body screamed to run, to explain it away as fatigue, heatstroke, anything. But another part—deeper, older—listened.
He leaned closer. His breath fogged the paper.
That was when it happened.
His finger brushed the spiral.
A flash—brilliant, searing—ripped through his vision. His heart slammed once, twice—and then…
Silence.
And then, a vision.
He was standing in an endless corridor of mirrors—except they weren't mirrors. They were memories. Each pane showed the same village, but altered—burning, reborn, buried, rising again. And always… her. Amarachi. In every version.
Sometimes a warrior. Sometimes a priestess. Once, a child in chains.
And he was always nearby.
A doctor. A soldier. A stranger. A lover.
In every life… drawn together.
"You are the breath to her fire," a voice whispered. "And now the fire remembers you."
The vision shattered like glass.
Alaric gasped, falling back from the table, sweat streaming down his face. His heart raced. The parchment was unmarked—but the spiral had burned into his palm.
He stared at the mark. Still glowing. Still alive.
The door creaked behind him.
Amarachi stood there, her eyes narrowing as she took in the sigils, the notes, the fevered look on his face.
"You touched it," she said softly.
He nodded, trembling. "It… it showed me things. Lives. You. Me. Symbols that speak in more than light. It's not just magic, Amarachi. It's… it's a language. A code."
She stepped forward, her expression unreadable. "You're hearing the Codex."
He looked up at her, breathless. "This isn't just superstition. This is science. A kind we haven't begun to understand. A technology so advanced… it feels like sorcery."
She sat across from him, their knees almost touching.
"That's why they want it. The witches. Because once decoded, the Codex can reshape reality. Not just through will, but through intention, through force. Rewrite flesh, matter, time."
Alaric whispered, "And you… you're the only one who can open it."
Amarachi looked down at his marked palm, then gently placed her own hand over it.
"And you're the only one who can read what it says."
The sigils beneath them pulsed in agreement.
For the first time, Alaric didn't try to explain it.
He simply believed.