Page Section Written 11/05/2025

ZHAEDRIM

The Umbracite Depths

The dark is articulate. It speaks in low‑lit grammar across the vaulting of Umbralith, where bridges suture stalactite to stalagmite with threads of midnight glass. Vein‑light travels your peripheral vision like shy fish. A column of hearth‑blue fire breathes in the Nocturne Rotunda, and your skin answers with a prickle of kinship instead of fear. Here, shade is not absence but ancestry.

You kneel to lace your boots; your reflection completes the knot a heartbeat later. It is not defiance. It is lag, shadow’s right to consider. Along the tunnel mouth, glyphs of Night‑Law glow, edicts etched shallow so they can be rewritten without breaking stone: Mask is courtesy; blade is argument; truth must be carried wrapped. A patrol cat twines a slow figure eight through your calves and departs with a thread of your warmth for its own lantern.

The Cipher Choir rehearses beyond the next arch, voices stacked in inverted chords that make the ear hunt for a sun that never arrives. Your blood cools to that key. Past the choir, the Quiet Market shivers awake: perfumers blending courage, scriveners bottling testimony, a mask‑wright laying a final lacquer of night on a face that will allow its wearer to be honest by being mistaken. Honesty is safer in shadow; daylight is too proud of its definitions.

A drowned bell tolls from the Blackwater Cistern, one stroke that arrives twice. The second stroke is not echo; it is the bell rung in a nearby future. Your pupils widen to the polite size for receiving confidences. A corridor of not‑light opens where there was wall, the kind of door that only appears for those who are willing to be held accountable for walking through it.

You lay your palm against the obsidian rail. Cold travels your bones without malice, the way law travels a city. On the skin over your heart, an old sigil stirs, a promise to keep the names of the guilty and the innocent separate even when they share a spine. Your shadow leans forward, eager to go where you are about to send it. It will not leave you. It will simply arrive in the room an apology before you do.

When everything remembers you, will you remember yourself?

Blue fire lowers its flame, and the first choice writes itself in smoke across the mouth of a door that wasn’t.