The Sigil Unbound

By morning, the eclipse journal had changed.

Or rather—it had responded.

Where once there were only faded glyphs and damaged lines, a new mark had surfaced in the lower margin of the central spread. Not ink. Not physical.

A burn. Perfect and clean.

A Veilbrand.

Eline stared at it with Kael in the dawnlight, the journal open between them on the far end of the east wing gardens. They sat beneath a low awning, where Whisperer sightlines were sparse, and few dared wander this early.

"That shouldn't be possible," Eline said, tracing the edge of the burn without touching it. "The runes on this vellum are inert. Sealed twice over. For that to emerge..."

Kael finished for her: "It would mean the seal was never complete."

"Or that someone weakened it intentionally."

Their eyes met.

Neither said Vireth's name—but both thought it.

The Whisperer archives kept seven tiers of access. Most initiates never passed level two. Senior handlers held tier five.

Kael and Eline now planned to breach level six.

They moved that night, beneath a sky cloaked with low veilclouds. Eline had secured a second-hand sigilist ring from an old contact—an ex-handler too loyal to her to ask questions. The ring's veil-threaded matrix flickered softly around her fingers as she led Kael through a disused corridor near the Hall of Sanctums.

A single door barred their way. Carved from black veilstone, it bore no handle—only a socket for a ring of precise resonance.

Eline pressed her sigilist band into it.

A click. Then silence.

Kael tensed.

Then the door breathed.

A slow exhalation of shadowed air, as if the vault itself had been asleep.

And waking meant remembering.

They stepped into the dark.

The interior was far larger than Kael expected.

Not shelves, but vaults—carved recesses into veilstones, each containing fragments: broken records, scarred glyph-plates, books bound in seals so tight they vibrated when approached.

Eline guided them to Vault C-22. A compartment keyed to early Fracture-era witness accounts. Most were illegible, corrupted, or redacted.

But one caught Kael's attention.

A single scroll, bound in veilthread and sealed with a sigil he now recognized: the same half-eclipse that marked the journal.

He reached out—and the sigil parted.

No barrier. No resistance.

It had been waiting for him.

The scroll unfurled without dust. Without age.

At the top, a line in old Veilscript:

"The Song That Broke the Chain."

Kael read silently, breath shallow. The testimony was fragmented, but one thing was clear: the original Veilheart did not fall to an enemy—but was bound by their own kind.

Whisperers.

Eline's voice was thin. "They didn't lose control of the Veilheart…"

"They sealed them."

Kael looked up, jaw clenched. "Which means someone here knows. Someone's been keeping it buried."

And now, they'd begun replicating those same seals.

On him.

As they exited the vault, Kael paused. The torchlight shimmered strangely against one of the deeper recesses, like the air bent around it.

He stepped close.

Etched beneath the veilstone frame was a sigil nearly invisible unless viewed from a certain angle.

But Kael saw it—felt it—in his bones.

A mark not of suppression… but of betrayal.

The glyph of the False Bind. A sigil meant not to contain, but to isolate—designed to turn a bonded being against its host. It was Veilwrought treason.

Kael backed away, voice low. "That glyph. I saw a trace of it during my containment trial."

Eline's face paled. "You think they tested it on you?"

"Not all of them. But someone."

He looked to her.

"You said someone's altering access logs. If they're using this glyph… they're trying to sever me from Tenebris. Not protect me from it."

Eline nodded, furious and afraid. "We need proof. Something we can use."

Kael gestured to the now-unsealed scroll. "We already have it."

"Not enough," she said. "We need to know who."

They didn't return directly to their quarters.

Instead, Eline guided Kael through the lesser-used lower wings—specifically to a small, neglected observatory where one of the Watchers, a low-tier surveillance Whisperer named Merev, kept night logs.

Merev owed Eline a favor.

And he wasn't in the mood to argue.

He passed over a cipher-locked prism, encoded with lens-glyphs used for internal tracking.

"You didn't get this from me," he muttered, eyes darting to the empty hallway beyond. "And if you're right about glyph anomalies in containment… the Council won't stop with whispers."

Kael took it, nodding once. "We'll handle it."

But Merev shook his head. "No. You don't get it, Kael."

His voice dropped to a whisper.

"They're not afraid of Tenebris."

Kael froze.

Merev's eyes locked with his. "They're afraid of you."