Chapter 97
The symbols stayed maddeningly out of reach.
I spent several minutes staring at them, willing my brain to cooperate.
Nothing.
I tapped the end of my pen against the table. Once. Twice. Three times.
"Threatening it won't help," Rhaevan observed without looking up.
"I'm threatening my memory."
"Has it surrendered?"
"Not yet."
I muttered something decidedly unflattering under my breath and reached for a clean sheet of paper. The symbols appeared again, copied exactly as they were on the map: crescent, star, circle, crescent.
No matter how many times I wrote them, they remained meaningless. Frustrated, I pushed the parchment away, letting my eyes catch on the fresh sheet beneath it.
Without thinking, I began absentmindedly doodling in the corner-a little star, a triangle, a spiral, a flower.
My pen stopped. A strange feeling washed over me.
I knew this. Not the symbols, but the habit. Doodling in the margins whenever I couldn't solve something. My breathing slowed. A classroom. Sunlight through dusty windows. A notebook and a much younger hand holding a pen.
The memory when I was Amanda.
The memory grew clearer, surfacing in fragments.
A diary hidden beneath a mattress, filled with ridiculous complaints about teachers, my aunt, and classmates.
I had been absolutely convinced someone would read it, so I had hidden everything behind a substitution cipher. I used to make them all the time.
My eyes widened. "Oh."
Rhaevan straightened. "Cassiane?"
"Oh!" I shot to my feet so abruptly my chair nearly toppled over. "They aren't letters. They're replacements. Every symbol stands for an ordinary alphabet."
Rhaevan's expression sharpened instantly. "You've solved this kind of puzzle before?"
I laughed incredulously. "Yes!!".
Granted, mine were designed to stop my aunt from reading my diary, not to protect the secrets of an ancient civilization. But the principle is exactly the same.
Rhaevan slid every copied page toward me without a word. I looked at the rows of moons and stars, then down at the blank page, slowly beginning to draw a grid.
"If I'm right," I murmured, writing the first symbol, "somewhere in this mess is an alphabet waiting to be uncovered."
The room fell silent once more, but it no longer felt like defeat. It felt like the first move in a game the Ardentians had begun centuries ago.
"If it's a substitution cipher," I said, pulling my chair closer, "we'll need to identify the repeating symbols first. In any language, some letters appear more frequently than others."
His brow lifted. "You studied cryptography?"
I snorted. "No. I was an exceptionally paranoid child."
To my relief, Rhaevan asked no further questions. Together, we copied the sequence onto a fresh sheet of parchment, circling every repeated symbol while Rhaevan counted their frequencies and jotted neat columns of numbers beside them.
"This crescent appears seventeen times," he observed. "The four-pointed star appears twelve. The circle with the line through it..."
"...only once," I finished. "So that's probably not a vowel."
For an hour, the study became a battlefield of ink and discarded theories. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the jumble of moons and stars began to resemble a pattern. I smiled despite myself.
"We're getting closer."
Beginning with the repeated symbols, I assigned letters where they seemed most likely to fit.
One word appeared three times; another always followed it; a third appeared only once, almost certainly a proper noun or place name.
One correction led to another. A wrong letter became the right one, and a meaningless string transformed into a recognizable word.
Then, everything aligned.
I stopped writing. The room fell completely silent. The symbols were still there, but now, I could read them.
A slow smile spread across my face. "I did it." Smoothing the page I began reading aloud.
When our light is swallowed, and our name is buried beneath ash...
Seek not among crowns, courts, nor the living. Turn instead to the forgotten places, where memory lingers after men are gone.
The path to what was sealed begins where the earth still bears the scars of fire. Where stone remembers the flame that shaped it... there rests the First Fragment.
Let only the worthy proceed.
The final line stood apart from the others, written in slightly larger symbols as though carrying greater weight than everything before it.
I slowly lowered the page. "...My ancestors really had a flair for dramatic speeches."
Rhaevan didn't smile. His eyes remained fixed on the translation. "'The First Fragment,' he repeated quietly."
His gaze shifted to the living map, his finger tracing the faded mountain ranges before stopping over the single marked location. "They hid the path."
The answer had finally been revealed, yet somehow, it felt less like the end of a mystery-and more like the beginning of a much larger one.