The Rune of Eldrath.

CHAPTER 1: THE RUNE THAT SHOULD NOT BURN

"Stop touching things you do not understand, Kael," he muttered to himself.

He pulled his finger back from the scroll and stared at the last line on the page. It was past midnight in Vault Seven, the deepest level of the Royal Archives. Four floors of solid stone sat above his head. The oil lamps on either side of his work table were the only light in the room, and the only sounds were the wick burning and his own breathing.

He had been down here since the sixth bell, copying a scroll the Head Archivist had flagged as too fragile for the junior staff. Nobody else came to Vault Seven. Nobody else had reason to.

He had copied three hundred and twelve characters tonight without trouble. Then this. A single rune sitting alone at the very bottom of the parchment, below the final line of text, with no label beside it and no border marking it off from the rest of the page. The ink was darker than everything else on the scroll, almost wet-looking, even though the document was centuries old.

He picked up his quill and held it over his copy sheet. He set it back down.

"You are not in the original index," he said to the rune quietly. "You should not be here."

The rune did not answer. He leaned closer and held his lamp over it. The characters he had spent all night copying were standard old Archaic. He had read Archaic since he was twelve. This rune was not standard anything. It was pressed deeper into the parchment than the surrounding text, as if whoever made it had wanted it to stay there permanently.

He pressed two fingers directly against it to test the ink.

White fire shot straight up his arm.

Kael knocked backward off his stool and hit the stone floor hard. His right arm shook from the wrist to the shoulder. He grabbed his wrist with his left hand and pressed it against his chest and lay completely still until the shaking stopped. One of the lamps had tipped. Oil spread across the table and caught a small flame and he rolled up fast and slapped it out with his sleeve before it reached the parchment. He stood there with his burned sleeve and his shaking arm and his heart hitting the inside of his chest like it wanted out.

Then the archive was gone.

He did not fall. He did not pass out. The room simply stopped existing. The shelves, the stone walls, the smell of old paper and lamp oil. All of it cut out at once, like a candle getting pinched between two fingers. He was standing on a plain of cracked white rock under a sky that was completely black except for a dying ring of light at the horizon.

Wind moved across the ground in every direction at once. Far ahead of him, a figure the size of a tower stood with both arms raised and something poured out of it. Something between the two, something that moved like water finding a crack in a floor. It poured down into the ground. The ground sealed shut above it.

The figure dropped to its knees. The sky made a sound that Kael did not have a word for. Then the figure was gone and the plain was empty and Kael understood without anyone telling him that he had just seen the last few seconds of something that happened a thousand years ago.

He woke on the floor of Vault Seven with his cheek against cold stone.

He stared at the ceiling. His second lamp had gone out. The only light in the room came from his hand.

Kael sat up slowly and turned his right palm toward his face. A rune glowed there. The same rune from the scroll, sitting in the center of his hand just under the skin, pulsing with a dim gold light that grew brighter and then dimmer in a steady rhythm that matched his own heartbeat.

He pressed his left thumb hard against it. It did not smear. It did not move. It did not hurt.

"No," he said.

The word came out flat. He was not going to scream in a sealed underground room. He had lived in the Archives long enough to understand that panic in a confined space accomplished nothing. He stood up, righted his stool, sat back down at the table, and looked at the scroll. The rune at the bottom was gone. The space where it had been was completely blank parchment.

He looked at his hand again.

You are the vessel, something said.

Kael went very still. The voice had not come from the room. It had not come from the stairs or the walls or from anywhere outside him. It came from behind his own thoughts, low and steady and completely calm, like a word spoken in a different room that he heard through the wall.

"Who said that," Kael said out loud.

You already know.

He closed his fingers into a fist. He stood up and began collecting his things. Quill, inkpot, the finished copy sheets — he stacked them neatly. He tied the scroll closed and placed it on the return shelf the way he always did at the end of a shift.

His hands moved through the routine on their own because he needed them doing something normal.

You are the last door between this world and oblivion, the voice said.

"I am a scribe," Kael said. "I copy documents. That is my job."

The rune pulsed once in his closed fist, hard and sudden, and for a moment the warmth spread all the way up to his shoulder.

The archive doors at the top of the stairs burst open.

Boots hit the stone steps fast and loud, more than two sets, coming down hard. Kael turned toward the vault entrance. Torchlight appeared on the stairs before the soldiers did. He saw the black and silver trim on their chest plates while they were still halfway down.

Palace guard had no reason to be in Vault Seven at midnight, and he had no reason to feel good about their arrival.

The lead soldier reached the bottom of the stairs, lifted his torch, and found Kael's face across the room.

"There," the soldier said, turning to the men behind him. "That is him."

Kael looked down at his closed fist. Gold light pushed between his fingers.

He looked back up at the soldiers.