The Forsaken Scavenger’s Rise to Godhood

Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Scholar Who Recognized the Impossible

Mira Veyne pulled a knife on him before he finished knocking.

"Wrong door," she said.

Zephyr stood in the doorway with a tent pole under one arm and dried blood on his face. "You translated for the Marrow crew last spring. They said you could read anything."

"They also said I was a fraud. Go away."

"I have a mark on my chest that a man says hasn't been seen in three hundred years."

The knife stayed where it was. But her eyes dropped to his shirt, then back to his face.

"Come in," she said. "Fast."

Her room was a cramped attic above a bookbinder, stacked with papers up to the ceiling. Mira was about twenty-five, thin, with ink on her sleeves and the tired look of someone who hadn't slept properly in years. She locked the door, pulled the curtains, and pointed at a stool.

"Show me."

Zephyr pulled his shirt open.

The black crown mark sat over his heart, sharp as a brand. Mira stared at it for a long time. Her face went slowly pale.

"Where did you get this?"

"A ruin in the dead zone. A chamber nobody's mapped."

"Describe the walls."

"Amber script. Spiral patterns. The writing glowed."

Mira sat down on the floor like her legs had quit. She reached under her bed and pulled out a battered leather folder, then spread loose pages across the boards. They were copies of copies, covered in the same angular script he'd seen in the chamber.

"Two years ago I was a junior researcher at the Veyne Institute," she said. "I found these in a sealed archive. They describe a civilization that has no name in any official history. They studied life, death, and the laws of the world itself. They had a crown symbol. The same one."

Zephyr looked at the pages. "So it's real."

"It's impossible." Her voice shook. "The Institute says nothing existed before the gods. The records say otherwise. I wrote a paper about it. I accused three senior scholars of burying the evidence." She laughed, short and bitter. "They expelled me and burned my reputation. Now I translate for scavengers."

Zephyr understood that kind of loss better than she knew. "Then help me read what's in my chest."

"I can't read what's in your chest. But I can read the ruin it came from." She looked up, and there was a hungry light in her eyes. "Take me there."

"No."

"I'm the only person alive who can translate what you found."

"I just met you."

"And I just saw proof that I wasn't insane." Mira stood. "Do you understand what that's worth to me?"

"Do you understand what it's worth to the people hunting me?"

They glared at each other. Neither moved.

That was when Zephyr noticed the street had gone quiet.

He crossed to the window and eased the curtain open. Below, a line of city guards in blue cloaks was fanning out across the street. At their head stood a man in a gray coat with a black hawk stitched on the shoulder. Not Garrick Thorne. Someone cleaner, with a clerk's face and a sealed scroll in his hand.

"Zephyr Kaelith!" the clerk called up to the building. "By order of the Nethralis magistrate, you are under arrest for the murder of eleven licensed workers at the Hollow Stair expedition. Come out with your hands visible."

Zephyr's blood went cold.

*Eleven. There were three bodies in that ruin.*

Cassian hadn't just put a notice on his name. He had built a murder charge around him, and he'd built it in less than two days.

"That's impossible," Mira whispered beside him. "A warrant that fast needs a magistrate's signature, a witness statement, and a filed report. They didn't investigate. They *already had it written.*"

"What does that mean?"

"It means someone planned this before the expedition even left." She spun away from the window. "Which means someone knew what you'd find down there."

Boots hit the stairs. Four, five, six pairs.

Mira grabbed her folder and shoved it into a satchel. She dragged a rug aside and pulled up a loose floorboard. Beneath it was a square hatch.

"Old drainage line," she said. "The bookbinder's cellar connects to it. I use it when creditors come."

"You trust me enough to run?"

"I trust that they won't let me walk out of here after hearing your name." She dropped through the hatch. "Move!"

Zephyr lowered himself in after her, pole first. He pulled the board closed just as the door slammed open above them.

---

The drain was narrow and stank of rot. Mira went first with a shuttered lantern. Zephyr followed on his bad leg, scraping his shoulders against the wet brick.

Above them, boots stamped across the floor. A man's voice shouted, "Empty! Search the cellar!"

"Left," Mira hissed. "Then straight. Don't stop."

They splashed through ankle-deep water for what felt like an hour. Twice Mira stopped dead and held up a hand while guards shouted somewhere overhead. Each time Zephyr counted his breaths and prayed the sound of his heartbeat wasn't carrying through the stone.

At last they climbed a rusted ladder and came up inside an abandoned tannery. Gray dawn leaked through broken windows. The smell of old hides hung everywhere.

Zephyr collapsed against a vat. His leg was on fire. His hands were shaking.

Mira sat across from him, breathing hard. She pulled off her wet coat and looked at him for a long moment.

"We rest an hour," she said. "Then we leave Nethralis, or we die."

"I'm not leaving. My brother is in Cassian's warehouse."

"Then you're already dead."

"Maybe." Zephyr met her eyes. "But you want that ruin. So you're going to help me get him back first."

Mira opened her mouth to argue. Then she closed it.

"One condition," she said. "When this is over, I get the ruin."

"We'll see."

It wasn't a promise, and they both knew it. But she nodded anyway.

Zephyr slid down against the vat and let his eyes close. Within a minute he was asleep, exhausted past dreaming.

---

Mira waited until his breathing slowed.

Then she pulled a sheet of paper from her satchel and a stub of charcoal. She crept over to Zephyr, careful as a thief, and looked at the black mark on his chest through the gap in his shirt.

She copied it. Every point, every line. Her hand didn't shake.

*I'm sorry,* she thought. *But I need to be sure.*

Back in her corner, she pulled out a small, battered family book she had carried from childhood. Her grandmother's records, copied in faded ink. She had always assumed the strange crown symbol on one page was a decorative flourish.

She turned to it now and laid her new drawing beside it.

They were identical.

She read the name written beneath the old symbol, a name she hadn't seen since she was a little girl, a name her grandmother had forbidden anyone to speak.

*Kaelith.*

Mira stopped breathing.

Across the room, Zephyr slept, and the mark on his chest pulsed with a faint, steady light.