Chapter Sixteen: The Clean Cut

His name was Saren.

At least, that's what he gave when he first arrived in Silverwood — a quiet, well-dressed scholar with questions too polished and a smile too well-measured.

He claimed to come from the coastal academy at Lorn's Reach — a place known for taking in outlanders, scholars, skeptics. Not uncommon.

But his eyes didn't match his voice.

When Ezrel first met him, Saren asked all the right things — but too eagerly. He asked for diagrams. Notation. Logic trees. Variations of spell results under different emotional conditions.

"Do you think the memory layer can be replaced with symbolic placeholders?" Saren asked one morning. "Some kind of reference table that indexes commonly felt emotions to neutral glyphs?"

Ezrel frowned.

"No. That's the point. You can't abstract the resonance layer. It's personal. If you reduce it to templates, it loses the nuance. The Pattern listens to truth."

Saren nodded.

"Of course. But if it's scalable... wouldn't that be useful?"

Ezrel hesitated. "Scalable isn't always a virtue."

But Saren was already smiling.

Unseen: The Message Sent

That evening, deep in the shadow of an abandoned waypost two ridges north of Silverwood, Saren knelt in a hollowed chamber lined with bone-etched tiles. The stone was cool beneath his fingers, the glyph etched into the slab before him glowing faintly as he fed it the final symbol.

:: Report — ProtoGrimoire viable. System extractable. Core anchor dependent on emotion-layer. Redundancy noted. Request permission to proceed with reduction protocol. ::

A pause.

Then the glyph shimmered.

Response received:

:: Approved. Phase One: Simplification. Target: Remove intent layer. Streamline execution. Archive functional syntax. Obscure author if possible. ::

Saren smiled.

Back in Silverwood

Two days later, Lira came to Ezrel with a scroll.

"Someone's copied your ring. But it's… different."

Ezrel unrolled it. His gut twisted.

It looked like his framework — the modular ring structure, the glyph slots — but the anchor layer was missing. In its place was a mock-up — a static placeholder glyph labeled Intent-A.

A fake.

"Where did you get this?" he asked.

"Found it posted near the market. No author."

Ezrel's eyes scanned the layout. It wasn't just stripped — it was streamlined. Slick.

Dangerous.

This isn't just someone misunderstanding the work.

This is deliberate.

That evening, he found Saren near the glade where he had first demonstrated the Hearthlight spell. The man stood with folded arms, looking at one of the posted scrolls like he hadn't written it himself.

Ezrel held up the forged copy.

"You recognize this?"

Saren turned slowly.

"It's… efficient," he said carefully. "Cleaner, you might say."

Ezrel's voice sharpened. "You removed the resonance layer. You took away the very thing that keeps it grounded. Without the self-check, the Pattern becomes a mirror with no meaning."

Saren tilted his head.

"Or perhaps it becomes something… more manageable."

"You don't want to teach people. You want to use them."

Saren's smile returned — thinner now.

"I want magic without baggage. Without guilt. Without... stalling on emotion. You could make tools, Ezrel. Repeatable, reliable magic — without reverence. Think what could be done."

Ezrel stepped forward.

"What you're building isn't understanding. It's compliance. And if someone casts this wrong, without intention… they won't just misfire — they'll harm themselves."

Saren's tone turned cold.

"Progress doesn't wait for perfection."

Ezrel's voice didn't rise — but it hit like iron.

"Then I won't wait to stop you."

Saren stepped back, nodding slowly.

"So be it. But your Grimoire is public now. And it no longer belongs to you alone."

He vanished into the trees like a ghost with a deadline.

Later That Night

Ezrel sat alone beneath the lanternfruit tree, rewriting the scroll. Reinforcing the philosophy layer. Encrypting portions with variable glyphs that could only be aligned by emotional resonance — not by code alone.

The Pattern deserves better.

He burned the false copy beside him. Not in anger.

In warning.

The Grimoire could enlighten.

Or it could enslave — if stripped of its heart.