Chapter 38
LYRA
By the time Dax understood the Lumina Codex was an actual book, I had already regretted telling him.
Not because I thought he would betray me.
Yesterday had settled that question when he and Raiden had agreed to carry another secret they had never asked for.
I regretted it because he had been staring at the Codex for nearly a full minute with the delighted fascination of someone who had just discovered a new way to get himself into trouble. “So it talks.”
“Yes.”
“To you?”
“Mostly.”
He leaned closer to the closed book. Silver traced the worn edges of its dark leather cover, brightening faintly beneath his attention. “Can it hear me?”
“It likes to pretend otherwise.”
“And it understands me.”
“Unfortunately.”
Dax planted both hands on the table. “Do you like me?” The Codex remained still.
Raiden made a sound from the other side of Vareena’s shoulder. “I think you have your answer.”
“I believe first impressions matter.”
“You nearly fell into a live ward conduit yesterday. Maybe give it time.”
“That had nothing to do with my personality.”
“It had almost everything to do with your personality.” Emrin quietly moved a stack of records out of her brother’s reach.
I rubbed my forehead. Lidia sat beside her, sorting Elyndorian transcriptions without joining in.
Things between us were still wrong. She had come tonight, which mattered, but she’d chosen a seat away from me and spoken only when the work required it.
I was trying not to turn every silence into judgment.
At the far end of the table, Kieran and Eiryx bent over two Umbrael copies, one acquired from somewhere Eiryx refused to explain.
Vareena sat between Raiden and me with three Elyndorian volumes open before her, dark hair slipping from its pins as the records contradicted one another.
We had started with one question: what did Starborn actually mean?
Three hours and seventeen documents later, four realms had given us four different versions of the answer.
I pulled the oldest Elyndorian transcription closer. “Read the palace one again.”
Vareena found the place she had marked. “‘When the divided blood returns beneath the star, the old boundary shall answer, and that which was sundered shall remember its first shape.’”
Dax leaned over Emrin’s shoulder. “Why does everything involving ancient magic sound like it expects someone to die?”
Vareena continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Then it changes.”
Raiden shifted closer. “Changes how?” She turned the volume toward him. There was nothing visibly wrong with the page. No torn parchment or water damage, but the sentence ended halfway down and the next section began in language that felt as though it belonged somewhere else entirely.
Vareena read it aloud. “‘And Elyndor shall keep the eastern flame until the heavens are made whole.’”
Lidia looked up from the binding in front of her. “That sounds like somebody shoved an Elyndorian blessing into the middle of the original.”
Vareena’s eyes went back to the page. “That’s what I thought.”
Raiden reached awkwardly for one of the Cindralith records.
His shoulder was still bound beneath his shirt after Court Six, and he had spent the evening making increasingly unconvincing attempts to behave as though it didn’t hurt.
Earlier, he had tried reaching for a book from one of the higher shelves.
Vareena had gotten there first, handed it to him without comment, and returned to her seat.
He hadn’t argued.
I had learned more from that than either of them wanted me to.
Raiden found the passage he wanted. “This one came from a temple outside Drakorra. ‘Five fires stand beneath one sky, but the star belongs to no throne.’ After that there’s a line about a return, except…” His voice trailed off.
Dax looked over. “Except what?”
Raiden passed me the page. The parchment was rough in the center. Someone had scraped the ink from it. I brought the lamp closer. “That wasn’t age.”
“No.” Kieran looked up. “Neither was this.” He and Eiryx brought the Umbrael copies down the table. The older Shadow script meant nothing to me, but Kieran read it without hesitation. “This version says the Starborn appears when the Veil weakens.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t say.”
Eiryx set a second transcription beside the first. “This one does.” He read the older line quietly.
“‘Born where day and night share one blood.’” The room lost whatever amusement Dax had brought into it.
My mother had wielded Light. My father had wielded Shadow.
There was nothing new in the implication anymore, but seeing it written in something centuries older than Aurenya and Maerox made my stomach tighten anyway.
Vareena compared the pages. “These aren’t just different translations.”
“No,” Kieran said.
“What does that first copy have where Eiryx’s has the line about shared blood?”
“A warning against boundary corruption.”
Lidia stopped turning pages. “So somebody replaced it.” Kieran nodded.
Emrin had been listening without interrupting.
She began pulling the records into the middle of the table, lining up the Elyndorian transcription with the Umbrael and Cindralith copies before adding a Tharellan field translation from Verdant storage.
Dax reached toward one. She slapped the back of his hand. “I was helping.”
“You alphabetized your herb notes by how dangerous they looked.”
“It was useful.”
“You couldn’t find anything.”
“I knew which ones could kill me.”
“You already knew that before you wrote them down.” Their argument continued while Emrin worked, but she barely seemed to hear him.
She aligned the beginnings of the surviving passages, adjusted one translation for a difference in phrasing, then ran her finger down all four. “Here.”
We crowded around her. The beginnings weren’t identical, but they carried the same ideas. Then every version went somewhere different.
Elyndor claimed an eastern flame. Cindralith made Fire central to whatever came next. Tharellan turned the language toward roots and kingdoms. Umbrael transformed the same section into a warning against corruption.
Dax stared at the arrangement. “So every realm rewrote it to make themselves important.”
“That seems to be the general idea,” Vareena said.
Emrin pushed the Tharellan copy toward him. “Read ours before you judge anyone else.”
Dax did. He made it halfway through before his confidence abandoned him. “‘The root shall endure beneath every broken kingdom, for earth remembers what crowns forget.’” Lidia groaned. Dax put the page down. “I accept no responsibility for my ancestors.”
“Good, because they sound exhausting.” Raiden reluctantly checked his own record. “Cindralith’s is worse.” That was enough to draw everyone’s attention. He sighed and read it. “‘Fire alone shall test what the fallen heavens cannot.’”
Lidia stared at him. “What does that even mean?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
For a little while, the room loosened. Dax and Raiden argued over which realm had embarrassed itself most. Emrin corrected their translations.
Vareena reached across me for another record.
Even Lidia, though still keeping her distance, was here.
At the far end of the table, Eiryx occasionally failed to hide his amusement while Kieran watched the room like a battlefield whose exits he’d already counted.
And the Codex sat between us.
Until tonight, it had belonged to the most isolated part of my life.
I had found it alone, hidden it, lied about it, and carried its pieces of my history until I could barely tell which questions were mine.
Now Dax was insulting it. Somehow that helped.
Silver brightened around the cover. Dax stopped talking.
The Codex opened on its own, pages turning fast enough to disturb the papers around it. They stopped on blank parchment.
Dax leaned toward it. “Did I offend you?”
Silver letters appeared:
YOU OFFEND MANY THINGS, DAXERAN.
Lidia laughed before she could stop herself.
Dax pointed at the page. “See? It likes me.”
Another sentence wrote itself:
YOUR EGO IS A DANGEROUS THING.
Even Emrin smiled at that. I gave the Codex a few seconds to enjoy itself before leaning over the page. “What did they change?” The silver faded.
When new words appeared, there was no humor in them:
WHAT THEY FEARED.
Kieran folded his arms. “That isn’t an answer.”
The Codex ignored him.
“Which version is real?” I asked. “Elyndor? Umbrael? Tharellan? Cindralith?”
For several seconds, nothing happened.
Then:
ALL REMEMBER.
A second line followed:
NONE REMEMBER WHOLE.
Vareena read it under her breath. “Every version reserved part of it.”
“Every version lost part of it too,” Lidia said.
Emrin glanced at the records she had aligned. “Or changed it.”
Kieran asked Eiryx how old the oldest Umbrael transcription was.
“Three hundred and twelve years, this copy.”
“The source?”
“Supposedly older. We don’t have it.”
Vareena immediately checked a notation inside the Elyndorian volume. “This one is two hundred eighty-seven years old, copied from something it calls a pre-Veil fragment.”
I looked at her. “Pre-Veil?”
“That’s what it says.”
The Codex had been irritating me for long enough that I expected the answer before I asked.
“How can there be a Starborn prophecy from before the Veil?”
The silver came quickly:
YOU CONTINUE TO MISTAKE THE WALL FOR THE BEGINNING.
Dax stared. “I understand why you yell at it now.”
Kieran leaned over the table. “The Veil wasn’t the beginning of what?”
Nothing.
His jaw tightened. “Answer me.”
The page remained blank.
“It does that,” I said.
Raiden picked up his temple copy again, but Lidia had gone still beside Emrin.
“Wait.” She reached for the Elyndorian volume.
“What?” Vareena asked.
“The binding.” Lidia held the old book upright and ran one finger gently along the inner seam. “These pages were rebound.”