The grove was unnaturally quiet. The kind of silence that hummed—not emptiness, but something waiting. Moonlight bent strangely through the crystalline mist that circled the hollow, forming arcs of colorless halos over a polished obsidian floor.
Ari stood there, the envelope of mist parting only slightly as a figure approached—elegant, veiled, and slow-moving, as though every footstep obeyed a rhythm older than gravity.
She did not speak at first. Instead, she raised one hand, fingers trailing glowing particles of soft teal light, and drew a sigil in the air that folded into itself like origami and vanished.
"No words shall be stolen here," she said. "Even the Echo Vault cannot listen in Larkveil's Hollow."
Ari bowed his head slightly, though unsure why.
"You know who I am?" he asked.
The woman, robed in semi-transparent layers of memory-thread silk, lowered her veil. Her face was ageless, delicate and sharp at once, with eyes like quiet mirrors—reflecting not just Ari's face but flickers of his expressions from seconds before.
"I am Lirael, Highweaver of House Larkveil. Keeper of timelines unchosen. Archivist of dreams yet to break."
Ari blinked. "That's not an answer."
"It is the only kind we give."
She stepped closer, and the mist curled around her, avoiding contact. Lirael studied Ari as if examining a foreign object—a relic from a civilization that shouldn't exist anymore.
"You walk without a Thread. Your very soul is unindexed. A ghost in a system built to measure everything."
Ari swallowed. "I didn't ask to be this."
"And yet you are," she replied softly, "as are all things that awaken."
"You Are a System Divergence"
They sat on opposite ends of a floating stone platform above the memory pool. Lirael gestured with a single finger and dozens of thin glass strands rose from the waters—floating, branching, displaying snippets of lives past, present, and future in shimmering sigil-code.
"These are not dreams, Ari. These are lives—threads coded into the skein of the world. Most follow the weave."
She touched one. It showed a noble child being trained in sword and spell, rising to become a Sanctum Archon.
She touched another. A merchant's son, quietly poisoned by ambition and failure.
Then she waved her hand—and one glass thread turned black.
"But some… break away."
The black thread flickered—and showed Ari. Casting unstable sigils. Breaking dueling protocols. Saving the Vastelune princess. His spell lines rewriting themselves mid-cast. Cerys Aetherrose watching him warily.
"Every time you cast, the System resists you. But it also... adapts to you. Your spells rewrite the base glyphset. You're not just unregistered—you're recursive."
"What does that mean?" Ari asked, eyes narrowing.
"It means you don't follow the world's language. You speak your own. That frightens the System."A pause. "And it frightens us."
"Why Did You Summon Me?"
"You're a threat to the narrative of this realm," she said. "And yet, you saved the princess at the royal ball. You let her win—not out of weakness, but to prevent the System from justifying her execution."
Ari's jaw clenched. "You saw that?"
"We saw what the System would have done. Royal Threads cannot afford shame. It would have overwritten the outcome... unless you gave it a 'heroic loss' instead."
Ari looked away. "So what now? You'll erase me too?"
Lirael leaned forward, lowering her voice.
"No. I offer you what no one else can: a chance to watch the System from outside of it."
She produced a small sphere—white-gold, semi-transparent, swirling with shifting glyphs that weren't even part of known Signum. It was warm in her hands, humming with low frequency vibrations that echoed in Ari's ribs.
"This is a Larkveil Observer's Sigil. With it, you can access threads that never came to be, and glimpse futures that try to write themselves around you."
Ari stared at the orb. It frightened him. Fascinated him.
"Why me?" he asked quietly.
Lirael smiled, softly, like the end of a poem no one heard.
"Because even we cannot predict you. And that makes you the most valuable anomaly of all."
Lirael stood, the orb vanishing back into her sleeve.
"You will not remember all of this. Not yet. But the offer remains. When you are ready, seek the place where time sings. Until then…"
She raised her hand again, drawing a glyph in the air made of light and silence. The world folded.
Sleep.
And Ari collapsed gently, the mist catching him like a cradle.
Back in his dorm, Ari awoke drenched in cold sweat, unsure if anything had been real.
But carved into the underside of his desk, in a place no one could see:
Edit[Access Unlocked: Larkveil.Observer{tier=1}]
And outside the window, the morning birds hadn't started singing yet.