They found his traces first in margins and smudges, in the dust halos where books had once lain and been removed with reverence or terror. The Cult of Obscyra moved through abandoned reading rooms and shuttered archives like a slow eclipse, their lanterns veiled, their steps soundless over paper that had outlived its authors. Every whispered name for him was wrong, save the one that clung like ash: Scryer108. To the public records he had been L. K. Cruz P., a scholar of comparative metaphysics and failed lecturer on unreal histories; to the underworlds of the Unwritten he was the eye that would not close, the nerve that flinched at any brush with the invisible.
They needed that eye.
They hunted what he saw.
He had been born with a flaw in his perception, a natural misalignment of attention. Where others saw stone, he saw the echo of the quarry that had never been dug. Where a closed door stood, he sensed the room that should have been beside it but was not. Every gap in reality gnawed at him; every silence had an outline. It was this defect—or this original gift—that the Cult of Obscyra named his scrying. Long before their first emissary approached him, he had learned to taste the shiver in the air when two worlds brushed, to hear the sub-audible hum of meaning where there were no words yet written.
The Cult's first contact had been almost polite. An envelope of black, unwatermarked paper, slipped beneath his apartment door. No sender, no seal, only his name written twice: once as L. K. Cruz P., once as Scryer108, a careful hand repeating the letters like a ritual. Inside, there had been a train ticket, a set of coordinates, and a page torn from a book that did not exist—ink that shifted if stared at too long, paragraphs that ended in mid-breath as though the paper could not bear more.
He had not gone. Instead he had burned the ticket, pinned the coordinates above his desk, and pressed the impossible page beneath glass. He watched the letters writhe for nights uncounted. Sleep thinned from his life like fog under an unforgiving sun. Eventually he discovered that if he did not close his eyes, if he let the ache and grit of his waking mount, he could catch the words when they were too weary to flee. In the exhausted gray before dawn, they steadied long enough for him to copy them, hand shaking, onto a separate notebook he would come to call the Insomniax Doktrine.
Sleep became treason.
Waking was an opening.
The Doktrine did not begin with an introduction, nor with a claim to authority. It opened like a wound. Lines of cramped script, found and transcribed from pages that existed only between blinks, charted the slender margins between thought and occurrence, intention and event. It spoke of incantations not as spoken spells but as alignments, careful architectures of attention laid like scaffolding around the world until something from outside felt the shape and entered. It traced doorways that were not frames of wood and iron but configuration of shadows, angles of glances, the timing of breaths in windowless rooms. It catalogued metaphysics the way surgeons catalogued arteries: not as abstractions, but as conduits.
He wrote by the light of the waxing moon, its growth a pale analog to the strengthening signals he felt humming through his skull. Some nights the world around him went thin at the edges, buildings paling into diagrams, streets dissolving into coordinates, people rendering down into vectors of probability. In such hours, he understood what the Doktrine wanted: to be discovered, to be read, to be used as a map by hands far surer and less hesitant than his own.
He saw the Cult behind his eyes even before they found his door. Hooded figures, some faceless, some bearing visors of tarnished brass etched with letters from no known alphabet. Hands that had not forgotten the weight of torches now bearing devices that drank light instead of giving it. They were not offended by his curiosity; they were offended by his independence. They would not kill him, he knew. Not at first. They would unmake his solitude, break his exhaustion into interrogations, harvest from him the nodes of knowledge he had stumbled upon in his sleepless ruin.
So he hid the Doktrine.
He did not lock it in a safe, for safes belonged to the world of comprehensible theft. He did not bury it beneath floorboards, for wood rots and is replaced. Instead, he took his scattered notebooks and transcribed them again, this time not onto paper but into the interstices of existing texts. Between paragraphs of obsolete legal codes, he slid lines of alchemical whisper. In the footnotes of a treatise on medieval trade routes, he coiled a ritual for opening a door in the center of a reflection. Within a university's forgotten catalog of banned dissertations, he described the method for aligning a man’s dreams with the rotational drift of unnamed constellations.
He salted the world with fragments.
He made knowledge into a trap.
In the oldest library he knew—a gray monolith once consecrated to emperors of thought, now attended only by sleep-starved interns and unfaithful climate control—he found the perfect shelf. It was a corridor where the light never quite reached, an aisle summoned rarely by call number, the air there heavy with the disuse of centuries. The books that lived upon it were those nobody had ever truly wanted, their spines cracked but uncreased, their pages foxed but unread. Histories of vanished faculties, proceedings of congresses dissolved long ago, ceremonial handbooks for state rituals no longer performed.
Here he built the Insomniax Doktrine in negative.
He cross-referenced call numbers to form an invisible sequence, a path that zigzagged through languages, disciplines, empires. A booklet on ceremonial banners contained a sequence of seemingly misprinted dates that, taken together, formed coordinates to a city whose streets only appeared during thunderstorms. A pamphlet on workers’ organizations bore in its index an extra term that referred to no page; tracing that absence in the card catalog drew on the floor a sigil only visible from the mezzanine at midnight. An atlas of desert borders carried on its inside cover a faint, nearly erased sketch of a circle cut into four equal, not-quite-equal segments: a map of waking, half-waking, dream, and the gap that opens when neither claims you.
He wrote in omissions and misprints, in errata and marginalia, in the lacunae where a reader’s tired eye would slide and swear there had been nothing there. The Doktrine became less a book than a pattern of corrosion. Only one who already saw as he did—one whose mind snagged upon the unnatural emptiness between things—could follow it, gathering the alchemical whispers like spores in the lung, assembling an architecture of forbidden cognition inside their own skull.
When the Cult of Obscyra reached the city, the moon was a swollen white coin over the river, its face almost full, its pull undeniable. They moved across bridges and plazas with the practiced anonymity of those who understand that the world, for all its noise, rarely looks up. Their augurs felt the residue of his presence in the train station he had not entered, in the rented room where he had burned the envelope and stared for hours at blackened confetti, in the narrow cafés where he had sat with his hands wrapped around cooling cups, refusing to drink.
They found the university closed, its doors chained in a pantomime of security that meant nothing to them. They entered as a draft enters, through the flawed seal of a window, through the forgotten service corridor whose door refused to be noticed except by those who understood how often architects made offerings to things that did not fit in blueprints.
He had known they would come here first. That was the point. The Doktrine waited, not gathered but diffused, an aerosol of danger in the stacks. Each Obscyra adept carried their own version of sight—anointed irises, tongues taught to taste the residue of sanctified ink—but theirs had been trained, focused like a blade. His had always been a wrongness that widened.
They moved in threes down the aisles, lanterns shuttered, hands brushing spines that pulsed faintly under their gloves. Tiny flickers of pale script crawled atop embossed titles, an invisible fungus that bloomed as their attention slid past. One of them paused at the ceremonies handbook. Another’s head tilted sharply at the atlas. Elsewhere, a gloved finger rested for a fraction of a second upon the proceedings of a forgotten congress, and the skin beneath the glove prickled as if pressed to a static-charged screen.
They began to read.
The library read them back.
The alchemical whispers were not instructions in the vulgar sense. They did not say, Do this, say that, stand here. They insinuated sequences, suggested inevitabilities. As a hooded scholar traced a misprinted date, their own internal chronology wavered; a childhood memory faded, replaced by a recollection of having stood, decades ago, on a balcony overlooking a city that had never existed. As another deciphered the invisible sigil drawn by the absence of an index entry, their footsteps began to unconsciously trace its shape in the dust, aligning spine and breath and heartbeat with a geometry no human body was meant to inhabit.
Doorways opened, but not in the walls. They opened in habits, in expectations, in the fragile belief that the past was settled solid behind them. The metaphysics Scryer108 had gleaned in his sleepless vigils spoke of "possible impossibles": not miracles, not violations, but paths the world had decided, for the sake of its own coherence, to forget it could take. The Doktrine, scattered and hidden, did not reveal these paths; it reminded the mind how to fall into them.
On the mezzanine, beneath the gaze of cracked busts of thinkers whose names had fallen out of curriculums, a young librarian woke from an unintended nap. Her cheek bore the ghost of a keyboard; her pulse stuttered with the sourness of dreams half-swallowed. She blinked down at the reading room below and, just for a moment, saw the shape inscribed on the floor by unfamiliar footsteps. No chalk marked it, no tape, no ink. It existed as a choreography of shadows and movement, as if a dance had been performed which left only its afterimage.
The shape was wrong. It was not quite a circle, not quite a cross. It suggested division without symmetry, quarters of unequal hunger. As her tired eyes tried to resolve it, the fluorescent lights overhead flickered, their hum rising to a pitch she felt behind her teeth.
She almost looked away.
Something made her stay.
Below, the Cult of Obscyra continued their silent work, their bodies bending and straightening as they pulled volumes whose call numbers glowed in their inner vision. They whispered to each other in a tongue like wind slipping through unfinished masonry. A phrase recurred, one she did not know but whose tone chilled her: a name, or a title, repeated with growing agitation.
Scryer. Scryer. Scryer.
They believed themselves the hunters, and in one sense, they were; they closed in on the pattern he had made, feeling it tighten around them like a net of luminous thread. Yet each line they followed was a line he had laid from within his own broken perception, a route scripted to pass through pressure points in their certainty. With each alchemical whisper they inhaled, with each metaphysical doorway they aligned their attention with, their sense of where they began and ended thinned.
In a locked room many streets away, L. K. Cruz P.—Scryer108, the name turning sour even in his own mind—sat before a wall devoid of decoration. No windows, no clocks, no books. Insomnia had carved him down to a set of essentials: nerves, eyes, the thin cage of his ribs. He felt the moon as pressure under his scalp. He felt the Cult in the library as a phantom itch in his ears.
He had not tried to expose them. He had merely refused to be emptied. The Doktrine had been his way of surviving the knowledge that wanted to suffocate him in his waking hours, his way of exhaling what he could not bear. Yet as their presence brushed the pattern he had made, a new realization unfolded with terrible calm: he had not hidden it from them. He had seeded it in them.
Somewhere between one breath and the next, a reader in the stacks reached the end of a sentence that did not, strictly, exist. The words to which his eyes had traveled were official, dull, a discussion of maritime tariffs or ceremonial precedence. The words he had actually read—superimposed, invisible to any who had not already let the Doktrine into their synapses—were simple and without adornment. They spoke not of summoning but of recognition. Not of compelling but of consenting.
The page did not blaze. The air did not shake. Instead, something vast and unhurried turned a fraction of attention toward a library whose foundation stones remembered rivers no architect had ever mapped. The world did not crack. It remembered it could.
The librarian on the mezzanine saw the impossible shape below her complete itself as three hooded figures stepped, by chance or by design, into positions that closed its pattern. For a second no one moved. The hum of the lights smoothed out into a single, impossibly pure tone. In that tone, she heard the sound of pages turning in all the wrong directions at once.
Then the gaps in the world widened.
They did not open as gashes in the air, not yet. They opened as erasures in history, as sudden voids where once-solid lineages and institutions crumbled into uncertainty. A ceremony that had once been performed to bind an empire to its emperor became, in retrospect, a performance no one could quite recall having attended. Borders on maps paled, their ink running backward, revealing the older scars of territories claimed by no nation humanity recognized. The first to feel it were those whose lives hinged on continuity: archivists, judges, weary functionaries of fragile democracies.
The Cult of Obscyra staggered as their own genealogies flickered. Memories they had believed immutable—initiation rites in underground chambers, whispered oaths beneath eclipses—recoiled like burnt film, revealing what lay beneath: a more ancient pattern of service, older than any cult, a servitude not to secrecy but to attention itself.
They clutched at books as if the weight could anchor them. Ink answered. The alchemical whispers they had hunted rose from the paper not as sound but as pressure, compressing their concept of self into a space far too small to hold all they had believed they knew. For the first time they understood that they were not extracting knowledge from a reluctant seer. They were walking a road he had discovered but never fully dared to tread, a road that led not outward but inversely inward, toward a region of mind where "metaphysics" was not a discipline but a weather.
The librarian, shaking, tore her eyes from the pattern. Her gaze fell on a single book lying open on a cart beside her, one she had not checked out for any patron. Its text appeared dull, numbing in its specificity. Yet in the gutter between its pages, where the binding opened slightly, she saw something written in a cramped, sleepless hand: a string of numbers, then a simple plea broken across the crease.
do not follow
She did not know who it addressed. She closed the book anyway, hands clumsy with haste, and as its covers met, the tone in the air snapped, leaving only the ordinary buzz of failing lights and the murmur of disturbed air.
The pattern on the floor below did not vanish. It sank, like something heavy dropping through water too dark to see. The Cult of Obscyra, reeling, gathered themselves with ritual gestures, muttering corrections, reinforcing wards they had never needed before. They believed they had brushed the edge of a trap and withdrawn in time.
They were wrong.
The Doktrine was already inside.
Outside, the moon continued its slow brightening, its face swelling toward fullness, its indifferent light sliding over universities and deserts, over borders disputed in daylight and forgotten in dreams. Somewhere, in a room without clocks, Scryer108 pressed his palms against his eyes until phantom constellations swarmed, and felt, with a clarity sharp as glass, the first true signal echo back along the line he had cast into the unseen.
He had given them incantations, doorways, metaphysics, possible impossibles. He had hidden them not where they could not look, but where, in looking, they would be compelled to change. The Cult of Obscyra had come to extract the knowledge he held.
In the underworlds of the Unwritten, something older than cult or scholar stirred, tasting in their minds the unfamiliar flavor of wakefulness stretched too thin.
