Page 37 of The Scars of War
The sketchbook is on the coffee table, neatly stacked on top of a fashion magazine I don’t read. I grab it and flip through. Blank pages. Every single one. No spirals. No sigils. No eyes watching from beneath the paper. No image of my face twisted in pleasure under a hand I didn’t draw. Just white.
My breath sticks in my throat as I stand. The hardwood is cold under my feet, too smooth, like it’s been wiped clean. I walk to the bathroom. The mirror’s spotless. No steam rings. No streaks of sweat. No lipstick smear where I leaned in, gasping.
And my reflection? It doesn’t flinch. No tangled hair. No bruises. No bloodshot eyes. Just me. Perfect. Polished.
Wrong.
I open the cabinet and freeze. There is new toothpaste… its unopened, and a completely different brand. One I didn’t buy. One I’d never use. There’s a new loofah onthe hook too. The cheap kind. Still in its packaging. Someone’s been here. Or worse, someone’s been fixing me?
I don’t remember sleeping. I don’t remember folding laundry or taking a shower or resetting my entire fucking life. Someone did. Because the apartment looks like I never broke. Like I never bled. Like I never let Riven use me and in turn, used him right back.
I shove through the front door and spill out onto the street. And stop. She’s there. Across the street. Standing in the sun. Me. Hair wild. Lips bare. A white tank tucked into black jeans. That’s not what I’m wearing. It’s not me. But it is.
She looks right at me. Tilts her head like she’s amused, smiles, and then walks into a building I’ve never been inside. The city continues to move as if none of this is happening.
Two versions of me coexisting in this moment. I feel like I’ve been in two worlds, both dark with suffering. Has it always been this way, or am I just becoming more self-aware? Or is this reality about to burn to the ground?
I don’t call him. I don’t have to. I know he will find me.
I make it two blocks before I feel it, the heat at my back, the press of a presence I’d know in the dark. I glance over my shoulder, and there he is. Not skulking in alleys and not hiding in shadows. He’s stalking across the street like he owns the fucking asphalt.
Black coat open. Shirt unbuttoned just enough to flash a scar I’ve seen up close and personal. No hesitation. No subtlety. Just that razor-sharp focus he wears like armor, all aimed at me.
He doesn’t stop when he reaches me. Just falls into step beside me like it’s already decided. “I didn’t tell you before,” I say. “I’ve seen her. In the mirror. In my dreams. And now? In the street. She looks like me, but she’s not. And this time, she smiled.” Riven doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink. Something behind his eye’s shifts.
“Then we’re out of time.”
He leads me straight to a high-rise I’ve never noticed before, polished steel, faceless. The kind of place you pass a hundred times and never see. There’s no lobby. No lights. Just a door that opens the second he presses his palm to the glass.
A voice inside me says this is a bad idea. I ignore it. The elevator doesn’t move up. It drops. So fast my stomach lurches. There are no buttons. No floor numbers. No music. Just silence and steel and the quiet hum of something I’m not sure is mechanical. Riven doesn’t speak. He’s standing perfectly still. Like if he moves, something will wake up.
When the doors open, the air is colder and stale. Like stepping into a crypt that remembers every secret ever buried. A hush so deep it presses against my skin, ancient and waiting.
The walls are stone, dark and damp, and veined with gold that pulses faintly under the surface. The floor creaks underfoot like it's holding something in. Riven leads the way, and I follow him down a corridor lined with artifacts behind glass.
A crown, broken down the middle. A blade carved from bone. A bell with no clapper. Everything hums. Everything knows. We stop at the end of the hall. A blackened iron door. No handle. Just a burn mark at its center, shaped like a closed eye. “This is where the warnings are kept,” he says, voice low. I look up at him.
“I thought this was about prophecy.”
“It is. Prophecies are just threats dressed as fate.” He presses his hand to the eye. It opens.
Inside is a small chamber. Bare stone. One pedestal. One scroll, coiled and bound with something that isn’t rope. It looks like sinew. Maybe wire. Maybe both. Riven doesn’t touch it. He waits. I step forward.
The scroll pulses once, like it knows me. I pick it up, and my skin burns on contact. It isn’t pain, but recognition. Like some part of me buried too deep just woke the fuck up. I unroll it. The language isn’t one I know…but I understand every word. War. Death. Pestilence. Famine. Symbols I’ve seen before. Twisted. Elegant. Familiar.
I trace each one with my eyes, and my chest tightens. These aren’t just drawings I’ve imagined in passing. These are the exact shapes I’ve etched in charcoal, scratched into margins, bled into the corners of my sketchbook without knowing what they were. “They’re real,” I whisper. “I’ve drawn them. I thought they were…just mine.”
Riven steps closer, voice low and sharp. “They’re older than language. Each one is a mark. A binding. A warning.”He points to the first…a jagged, branching shape, sharp like cracked bone and spear tips. “War. That one’s mine. A sigil carved into the first weapon ever raised in anger.” The second glows faintly. A broken circle, halo-like, but split down the middle with something leaking through. “Pestilence,” he says. “Elias’. It represents spread and corruption, not just of the body, but of thought. Contagion in its purest form.” Next, an hourglass shape cracked at the waist. Bleeding shadow from the center. “Death. Vale,” he says, and I hear the tension in his voice. “His mark isn’t about endings. It’s about what lingersafter.” The fourth is delicate. Deceptively simple. A curved stalk wrapped in thorns like a piece of wheat sharpened to draw blood. “Famine,” he murmurs. “That one belongs to Niko. It’s not hunger. It’swithholding.The slow ache of need that goes unanswered.”
And then the fifth. The almost-circle. The one with edges like teeth. Half-erased but still watching. “And this?” I ask, throat dry. He doesn’t answer right away. Just stares at it. At me. Finally, he speaks.“That one doesn’t have a name.”
“You knowwhat it is?”
He nods once, slow. “We call it Oblivion. Not because that’s what it is called...but because that is what it brings.”
“And you think that’s me?”
“I think it’s waking up,” he says.
