The rain whispered over the rooftops of Asemir, a city never listed on maps, yet always known to those who need to find it.
It was 3:17 a.m.
The hour when all things soft become sharp. When the air tastes of metal. When the sky forgets the stars.
Inside the flickering walls of Room 7-B, in a crooked apartment above a shuttered curiosity shop, Vincer Dagon sat cross-legged on a floor of cracked obsidian tiles, surrounded by a circle of salt, dead moths, and rusted nails. The air smelled like time—old parchment and forgotten breath.
His eyes were closed, but he was not meditating.
He was listening.
"Third breath... fourth angle..." he muttered, voice low and gravel-thick. "Open the Echo."
The sound came from nowhere. Or rather, from between places. A whisper that moved like smoke through a closed room.
> "What do you remember?"
Vincer opened his eyes. One was green. The other, obsidian black.
Neither of them blinked.
---
He didn't know where he was born. No hospital, no records, not even a false name on paper. Just a series of symbols carved into his shoulder blade, left by someone who didn't want him to forget something. Or maybe—someone who wanted him to remember something wrong.
They say your name holds power. But what if the name you use isn't the one you were meant to have?
What if your entire life is someone else's sentence, spoken in a tongue no longer known?
---
The ritual faded. The voices retreated into the gaps in the walls.
He blew out the circle's central candle, stood, and pulled his coat from the back of a chair. In its inside pocket was a silver-bound notebook—the only thing he'd kept from the monastery before it burned. Its pages pulsed faintly, and if you held them up to the light just right, the ink would whisper syllables your ears could not comprehend, but your dreams would remember.
---
Asemir – The City of False Intersections
Asemir is a city that shouldn't exist.
The locals—those who are left—don't speak of it in the day. But at night, stories float from cracked windows and burning oil barrels. A city that rearranges itself when you're not looking. A place where certain corners don't lead back, and mirrors show moments that haven't happened yet.
In one district, the streetlights never turn on. They say a man in gray took all the bulbs down to trap the stars inside.
In another, time stops between 3:15 and 3:20 a.m.—a five-minute freeze where you can move, but the city holds its breath.
Vincer lived between those two districts, where the rules were less clear.
---
He left the apartment, stepping into the cobbled alley known only as "Sorrow's Vein." A black cat watched him from atop a trash bin. It had three eyes, but only blinked with two.
> It blinked the wrong one last.
That meant something. He paused. Wrote it down.
---
The Note
Inside the silver notebook, several entries had been written in the last 48 hours:
"Lexicon VII leads to III if spoken backward through water."
"The Hollow Choir never sings before a storm."
"Avoid The Bleeding House on Solace Street. It remembers him."
"Why did they erase the year 1884 from Asemir's library? Who replaced it with 'Year Nought'?"
But the newest note read:
> "Find the Echo Archive. They're hunting again. The Index has moved. She's awake."
---
The Crimson Index
Vincer hadn't thought about them in years.
The last time he crossed paths with the Crimson Index, he had nearly lost his skin—literally. They believe the soul is bound in blood, and that ink is a diluted form of sacrifice. They wrote entire books with bloodlines—literal ancestral lines carved onto flayed bodies, preserved in glass.
And now, according to the notebook, they were moving again.
Why?
And who was "she"?
Vincer's fingers traced the leather cover. He closed it and looked up at the crooked skyline of Asemir.
Something deep in the Veins of the City was waking.
---
The Archive
He'd heard whispers: a place called the Echo Archive, not a building, not a vault—more like a memory nested between the folds of time.
You didn't find it by walking. You had to recall it.
And to recall it, you had to have seen it in a life you didn't live.
Vincer knew one person who could help.
---
The House of Unbirth
Three hours later, he stood outside a door with no hinges.
It was smooth, silver, carved with the Zodiacum Pactum's symbol—a circle of teeth orbiting an eye that weeps sand.
He knocked twice. Waited. Knocked again in the pattern: slow, fast, fast, slow, hold.
A voice answered.
> "Speak your Lexicon."
"I do not belong to one," Vincer replied.
> "That is your lie. Now speak your truth."
"I belong to Silence."
> "Then enter, Seeker."
---
Within the Door
A hallway stretched too far. Gravity bent. The walls pulsed. On one side, paintings screamed without sound. On the other, clocks moved backward in time zones that never existed.
He followed the hallway until it ended at a room with 13 mirrors and no reflection.
Inside stood a woman with silver veins across her skin, eyes filled with rotating constellations.
She said, without greeting:
> "The Archive moves in patterns. Find the next Severance. It left residue in the dream of a dying god beneath the bridge of Solace."
He didn't ask for clarification.
He simply nodded.
---
Final Thoughts (for Now)
Later that night, as he sat beneath the Bridge of Solace, Vincer tasted the air.
It smelled like regret and burnt syllables.
He waited.
And then the sky cracked—not thunder, but something deeper. Like a language trying to escape the throat of the world.
A drop of black rain struck his page and did not disappear.
Instead, it formed a shape.
A glyph.
A symbol he hadn't seen since the monastery burned.
> The 13th Letter.
He froze.
Because it wasn't supposed to exist.
And it was written in his handwriting.