Embermarked | Chapter One

They called it an obsession.

Raelynn preferred the word devotion.

Stories always made more sense to her than people ever did. Myths didn’t pretend to be logical. They didn’t apologize for magic, prophecy, or gods who interfered in mortal lives. They simply were.

Her classmates laughed when they saw her crossing campus with her arms full of mythology texts instead of economics case studies or political science binders. They called it impractical. Unhealthy. A distraction from the “real world.”

But the real world had never once looked back at her the way stories did. So she let them laugh.

The main floor of the university library buzzed with life—bright lights, whispered conversations, the shuffle of backpacks and coffee cups. But downstairs, in the forgotten belly of the building, the air shifted. Cooler. Thicker. As though the past lingered here, pressed between pages that had survived wars, fires, and time itself.

Raelynn preferred it down here. The scent of old paper wrapped around her like something familiar. Safe.

A lone grad student hunched at the far end of the room, earbuds in, typing furiously as if racing a deadline. The librarian barely glanced up from her crossword. No one paid attention to the girl drifting between the stacks like she belonged more to the shadows than the present.

Adjusting the strap of her worn messenger bag, Raelynn stepped into one of the dim aisles. The overhead light flickered.

She paused. It wasn’t unusual. This level had always been temperamental. But the flicker came again—longer this time. The soft hum of electricity wavered, dipped, then steadied.

She should have been upstairs, working on her essay or skimming another dry history text. Instead, her fingers itched to open something older, stranger, infinitely more alive than any assigned reading.

Her hand brushed the spines along the shelves, lingering on leather-bound volumes with cracked edges and faded gold lettering. One by one, she added to the stack forming in her arms, cradling the books against her chest as she carried them to the table.

Setting them down carefully, the soft thud of leather and paper echoing in the quiet, then drew out a chair and sat. After a brief pause, she chose one at random, leaning over the table as she opened it and let her curiosity decide the rest. She opened Folktales from across the world first. Tracing the inked letters with her finger, she murmured soft observations, as if the book might respond.

Her phone buzzed. Raelynn glanced at it and saw Tessa’s name flashing. She swiped to answer, keeping one finger in the middle of the page.

“Hey,” she said quietly, eyes still scanning the text.

“Hey! Are you still at the library?” Tessa asked, laughter threading through the line. In the background, Ryan, by the sound of it, yelled a cheerful, muffled, “Tell her I said hi!”

“Yeah… just, uh…” Raelynn traced a line of ink with her fingertip, distracted. “…lost in the stacks, I guess.”

“I figured,” Tessa said. “I’m out with Ryan, I was going to ask if you wanted to join us, we are going to the theatre but I know I won’t be able to pull you away from your stories. Don’t get so absorbed you forget to take a break or—”

“Or breathe?” Raelynn offered dryly, eyes still scanning. “Don’t worry, I’ll manage.”

“Okay,” Tessa said, “we’ll be home after you get back. Try not to read yourself into a trance, okay?”

Raelynn smiled faintly. “I’ll try.” She ended the call and slipped the phone into her pocket. Her eyes returned to the pages.

The clock ticked past midnight.

She read until the words blurred. Gods throwing lightning. Mortals swallowed by oceans. Heroes failing. Each story curled around her like a familiar lullaby. She brushed her hair back, yawning, and reached for another book at random from the pile she’d stacked at her side.

This one was older, so old the leather cracked when she opened it. The spine creaked, brittle as bone, and a faint scent of dust and ink wafted up.

Her eyes skimmed the first page. On it, a handwritten note had been scrawled. The ink had browned with age, but the words pulsed with a strange clarity:

The marked will know these words, and these words will know the marked.

Raelynn frowned. She flipped a few more pages, but most of the text was an archaic script she couldn’t decipher. The illustrations stopped her breath: doorways carved into mountainsides, figures stepping into starfields, a hand reaching out of a book toward the reader.

Her chest tightened. She loved myths, but she had never seen anything like this.

Near the beginning of the book, a page had been torn in half. The ragged edge ran straight through a block of text, leaving only the beginning:

When the veil is thinnest and stormlight breaks the sky…

The rest was missing.

Raelynn traced the edge with her fingertip, her skin prickling. She leaned closer, the lamp casting her shadow across the table. 

The words in front of her blurred. The faded ink wavered, shimmering faintly, like heat rising from pavement on a summer day.

The floor seemed to tilt.

Raelynn’s stomach lurched, a sudden weightless drop, as if the chair beneath her had vanished and she were tipping forward into open space. Her grip tightened on the edge of the table, knuckles whitening. She squeezed her eyes shut, breathing through the dizziness, waiting for the world to right itself again.

When she opened them, the words were still shimmering.

Her breath caught.

The pen clattered from her fingers, the sharp sound snapping through the hush of the library.

She snapped the book shut, pulse hammering. The sound echoed through the empty room, loud enough to make the grad student glance up briefly before returning to his laptop.

Her hands shook and she forced them flat on the table. “I’m overtired. That’s all. I’ve been awake too long.”

She reopened the book. The page looked perfectly ordinary now. The same fragments, the same ink, nothing unusual at all.

“See?” she whispered. “Just exhaustion.”

The storm outside deepened as thunder rattled faintly across the sky. The draft brushed her cheek again, stronger this time, tugging at the loose pages of her notebook. It was as if the air itself was leaning closer.

Raelynn stuffed her notes into her bag and pushed back her chair, the scrape against the floor disturbing the peace. She needed to get out of here. Get coffee or sleep—something, anything, to drag her back into the realm of normal.

But when she stood, the lights flickered. Once, then twice, before steadying.

The grad student didn’t react. Neither did the librarian at the desk. Maybe they hadn’t noticed. Maybe it was just a storm surge. And yet her gaze was pulled toward the book again, as though it were a magnet and she were a metal shard.

The cover was blank except for the faintest embossing of a circle, half-worn away by time. She’d flipped past it earlier without thought. Now it seemed to pulse faintly, as though it held its own heartbeat.

Raelynn slung her bag over her shoulder and made her way up from the basement, her footsteps echoing a little too loudly as she climbed the stairs and moved steadily through the aisles above. The shelves stood silent and watchful as she passed, the hush of the library settling around her. When she finally reached the doors and pushed them open, they sighed apart, and cool night air rushed in to meet her.

Only when she reached the steps outside did she pause, breath unsteady, heart beating a little too fast. She pressed a hand to her chest and let out a slow breath, willing it to steady. She was tired. That was all. Too many late nights, too much caffeine, not enough sleep.

With that thought clutched tightly in her mind, Raelynn turned away and headed down the steps, determined not to look back.