It was raining.
A cold, miserable drizzle that turned the road into a slurry of mud and horse manure.
Elias sat in the back of the cart, water dripping from the rim of his hood, staring at a wooden sign posted twenty feet away.
NO GOATS ALLOWED.
He had read it four hundred times. He had analyzed the brushstrokes. He had critiqued the kerning.
Boredom, Elias had discovered, was a dangerous state.
He looked at the Iron Bridge ahead. It was a massive suspension structure spanning the Grey River. It vibrated slightly in the wind.?
The tension on the tertiary cable is uneven, Elias noted silently. If I applied a vector force of four newtons to the anchor bolt...
He squinted. He visualized the bolt. He imagined it twisting, just a fraction, to relieve the stress.
PING.
A metallic sound echoed from the bridge. A cable slackened. The bridge groaned.
Elias blinked. He shoved his hands deep into his sleeves.
(He had to stop doing that. He was subconsciously unweaving civil engineering just by looking at it.)
"Move up!" a guard shouted.
Barnaby the donkey took a single, spiteful step forward, then stopped.
"We are next," Rylus whispered, wiping rain from his face. He looked nervous. "Sir, please. Do not speak. Do not cast. Do not look at the structural integrity of the checkpoint."
"I am merely observing," Elias muttered.
A woman stepped out of the guard booth. She did not look like a guard. She wore a stiff gray uniform with brass buttons and a monocle that glowed with a faint, magical light. She held a clipboard like a shield.?
Entity: [Inspector Valdis]
Class: [Bureaucrat of the Crown]
Level: 18
Ability: [Detect Irregularity]
Barnaby saw her and immediately pinned his ears back. He lunged, snapping his teeth at her sleeve.
"Control your beast!" Valdis snapped, stepping back. She adjusted her monocle and glared at Rylus. "Papers."
Rylus fumbled with his pack. He handed over a sodden scroll. "Sir Rylus Valerius. Knight-Errant. House Valerius."
Valdis scanned it. She stamped it. Then her monocle swiveled to the back of the cart.
She looked at Elias.
Elias looked back. He tried to look innocuous. He failed. He looked like a pale, void-touched statue wrapped in wet rags.
"And him?" Valdis asked. "Where are his papers?"
Rylus froze. "He... he is my grandfather."
Elias raised an eyebrow.
"He does not have papers," Rylus continued, sweating despite the cold rain. "He is... from the deep country. He is simple. And mute."
Elias stiffened.
(Mute? He was not mute. He possessed a vocabulary of forty thousand words in High Draconic. He simply chose not to use them because most people weren't worth the breath.)
"Mute?" Valdis leaned closer. The lens of her monocle whirred. "He radiates background mana. High density. Is he an unregistered caster?"
"No!" Rylus laughed nervously. "He just... ate a lot of mana-berries as a child. Digestion issues."
Valdis narrowed her eyes. "If he has no papers, he needs a Temporary Identification Scroll. Fill this out."
She thrust a blank piece of parchment at Elias.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
"Name. Origin. Occupation," she listed. "And it must be verified by a mana-imprint. No lies. The ink reacts to deception."
Rylus looked at Elias with panic in his eyes.
Elias sighed. He took the paper.
He couldn't write "Grand Archivist of the Third Era." That would raise questions. He needed a forgery.
I can fix this, Elias thought. I remember the spell for temporary library passes. [Inscribe Credentials]. It pulls the user's data and prints a card.
He just needed to tweak it. Make it lie a little.
He placed his finger on the paper. He focused on the concept of 'Elias Vane, Normal Human Grandfather.'
"[Inscribe]," he whispered, barely moving his lips.
He pushed the mana.
He forgot, as usual, that the System did not care about his imagination. The System cared about Hard Data. And the System recognized him.
The paper didn't turn white. It turned jet black.
Smoke rose from the clipboard.
Silver letters seared themselves into the page, burning with the light of a dying star.
NAME: ELIAS VANE
OCCUPATION: [CALAMITY / VOID WALKER / ERROR]
STATUS: EXISTENTIAL THREAT
Then, the paper screamed.
It wasn't a metaphor. The parchment opened a jagged, ink-stained mouth in the center of the page and let out a high-pitched, soul-rending shriek.?
"REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—"
Valdis dropped her clipboard. Her monocle cracked.
"What in the hells?" she yelled, covering her ears.
Elias stared at the screaming paper.
"That," Elias noted, "is not the correct font."
Rylus reacted instantly.
The Knight lunged over the side of the cart. He grabbed the screaming, black, smoking paper from Elias’s hand.
And he shoved it into his mouth.
He chewed. Frantically.
The screaming became a muffled mmph-mmph-mmph coming from Rylus’s throat. Smoke poured out of his nose. His eyes watered. He swallowed hard.
The screaming stopped.
Silence returned to the rainy bridge.
Valdis stared at Rylus. Rylus stared at Valdis.
"Why..." Valdis whispered, her voice trembling. "Why did your grandfather's identification scream?"
Rylus burped. A small puff of black smoke escaped his lips.
"It's a... family tradition," Rylus choked out. "Vocal parchment. Very rare. From the... South."
Valdis looked at the Knight. She looked at the pale man in the cart who was watching the scene with mild interest. She looked at the donkey, who was trying to eat her clipboard.
"Go," Valdis whispered. "Just... go."
Rylus snapped the reins. "Hya, Barnaby!"
The cart lurched forward.
Elias watched Rylus’s back as they rattled over the iron bridge. The Knight was clutching his stomach.
(A Knight of the Realm had just eaten a Tier-8 Cursed Object to save Elias from a parking ticket. Master Arion would have laughed until he cried.)
Elias felt a strange warmth in his chest.
"That was imprudent," Elias said softly. "Ink is toxic."
"Shut up," Rylus groaned. "Please. Just shut up."
They stopped an hour later at a roadside waystation to let the rain pass.
Rylus ran to the latrine, looking green. Elias stood under the awning, studying a large, weathered map of the Kingdom pinned to the wall.?
He traced the coastline with a finger.
"Here," he muttered. "The Western Reach. The tea plantations should be..."
His finger stopped.
The Western Reach wasn't there.
Where the lush highlands should have been, the map showed a jagged, broken coastline labeled The Shattered Coast.
He moved his finger inland. He looked for his home province. The place where the Athenaeum sat.
It was labeled God's Fall. A massive crater icon dominated the region.
Elias’s hand trembled. He pulled it back as if the paper had burned him.
"The geography," Elias whispered. "It is... incorrect."
Rylus emerged from the latrine, wiping his mouth. He walked over, looking weary.
"Sir?"
"The map," Elias said, his voice tight. "Who drew this? They have erased the Western Highlands."
Rylus looked at the map. "The Shattered Coast? That happened during the War of Ash, Sir. Two hundred years ago. A tectonic mage duel gone wrong."
"Two hundred years ago," Elias repeated.
"Yes. And God's Fall..." Rylus pointed to the crater. "That’s where the Void Gate opened. Where Master Arion died. The land is cursed. Nothing grows there."
Elias stared at the ink.
He had missed the Apocalypse. He had missed the Golden Era. He had missed the War of Ash.
The world hadn't just moved on. It had changed the shape of its face while he slept. And he didn't even have a picture of the old one.?
(He felt a sudden, desperate urge to organize something. To catalog. To put things in order. But he couldn't catalog a crater.)
"I see," Elias said.
He turned away from the map. He couldn't look at it anymore.
"We should move," Elias said. "Barnaby is eating the support post."
They camped under the far side of the bridge that night. It was dry, at least.
Rylus was curled in a ball, groaning. The screaming paper was disagreeing with him.
"Drink water," Elias advised. "It dilutes the curse."
"It tastes like charcoal and hate," Rylus whispered.
Elias sat by the small fire, watching the rain fall in sheets beyond the archway.?
Far in the distance, back at the checkpoint, a figure stood on the ramparts.
Inspector Valdis held a brass telescope to her eye. The lens glowed. She was watching them.
She lowered the telescope and pulled out a fresh notebook.
Subject 1: Suspicious Donkey.
Subject 2: Eater of Screams.
Subject 3: The Pale One. (Warning: Tried to unmake the bridge).
She underlined the last entry three times.
Under the bridge, Elias pulled his hood tight. He closed his eyes, but he couldn't sleep. Every time he drifted off, he saw the map. He saw the empty space where his favorite tea shop used to be.
"Three hundred years," he whispered to the rain. "And they broke the whole continent."
He sighed.
"At least the bridge held."
(He decided not to mention that he had accidentally untightened three bolts with his mind while waiting in line. It was probably fine.)
For the first time since waking, he had proof in ink and contour lines: the world had filed him under “lost item” and moved his shelf to a crater.
Mana Consumed: 0.0005% (Screaming Paper + Bridge Destabilization)
Current Mood: Displaced
Rylus Loyalty: +10 (Digestive Distress)
Reputation: Suspicious Persons (Active Investigation)?