The glyph didn't move.
It simply was, etched into the soaked paper like a scar that never healed properly. Vincer stared at it in silence, hands frozen, brain stalled in the sacred pause between revelation and denial.
> This was not a symbol you discovered.
It was a symbol that discovered you.
He had last seen it thirteen years ago, branded into the tongue of a dying archivist who'd whispered an apology in a language no one alive spoke anymore. That archivist had died before Vincer could ask what he meant. But his final breath had painted the air with the same mark now etched into the notebook:
> 𐍂
There was no name for this glyph. Not in any known Lexicon. It wasn't one of the 12. It was the rejected 13th—the Unletter.
And yet, here it was again.
---
THE 13 LEXICONS
Every practitioner of Occultum knew the Lexicons. Even those who didn't survive long enough to pronounce them all correctly. But most believed there were only 12.
That belief, like most beliefs, was cultivated.
Engineered.
The Lexicons were not languages in the traditional sense. They were fundamental cognitive architectures—each one a method of perceiving and editing reality. One did not merely speak Lexicons. One thought in them, dreamed in them, bled in them.
Each Lexicon had a glyph. A function. A sacrament. And a cost.
Here is what the world officially knows:
---
Lexicon I: KAZURA
Glyph: ᚲ
Nature: Truth spoken aloud becomes binding.
Sacrament: Sacrifice of one's voice for 3 days.
Application: Word-Binders, Contract Mages, Truth Architects.
---
Lexicon II: MARTH
Glyph: 𓂀
Nature: Sound resonates across alternate possibilities.
Sacrament: Deafening oneself in one ear permanently.
Application: Echomancers, Wound Singers, Vibrational Shapers.
---
Lexicon III: SELVINE
Glyph: ♄
Nature: Emotional resonance leaves physical effects on the body.
Sacrament: Relive your deepest memory in front of 12 strangers.
Application: Sentimental Alchemists, Pain Harvesters.
---
Lexicon IV: VORRHEIM
Glyph: ⊗
Nature: Blood remembers futures not yet lived.
Sacrament: Carve a name into yourself you've never heard before.
Application: Chronoseers, Threadcutters.
---
Lexicon V: AGAZIEL
Glyph: ✦
Nature: Stars are the visible bruises of heaven's thoughts.
Sacrament: Burn your astrological chart and never look at the sky again.
Application: Starbinders, Astral Diviners.
---
…and so on, up to XII: BREVMA, the Lexicon of Dream Collapse.
But Lexicon XIII was unofficial. A cursed footnote even the Hollow Choir refused to chant.
> It had no sacrament.
Because it wasn't meant to be spoken.
It was the Lexicon of Absence.
Of the Word Removed.
---
THE FORBIDDEN LEXICON: THE UNLETTER
Symbol: 𐍂
Name: Unknown. Often called the "Word That Was Cut From Creation."
Theory: It existed before the others.
Function: Not to shape reality, but to erase its anchor.
Some theorized it was used in "The First Severance", the occult cataclysm that fractured the memory of time into disconnected epochs. Every religion, myth, and timeline had gaps, eras that seemed overwritten or fractured.
Those gaps weren't accidents. They were written with the 13th glyph.
And Vincer had written it.
In his own hand.
---
THE SEVERANCES
There are seven recorded Severances in occult history.
Each was an event that should have been impossible—not because they defied science, but because they should not exist in memory. And yet, practitioners remember them in dreams, deja vu, and the wrong names of familiar things.
1. The First Severance – The moment time was made linear.
2. The Second Severance – The Year Nought, when the Crimson Index rewrote calendars globally, removing 1884.
3. The Third Severance – When five cities vanished overnight, and their names were given to newborn stars.
4. The Fourth Severance – The splitting of the Veiled Eye into three factions, after one member read a word that never existed.
5. The Fifth Severance – Unknown. Hinted in broken glyphs.
6. The Sixth Severance – The creation of Asemir, which never had a founding date, only an "opening."
7. The Seventh Severance – Still happening. Now.
---
Vincer leaned back against the cold wall under the bridge, staring at the glyph.
Why had the glyph appeared now?
He pulled a strip of aetherglass film from his bag and rolled it over the paper. Aetherglass captured etheric residue—psychic echoes, future possibility trails, and hidden meaning.
The film glowed.
Words began to appear around the glyph, invisible to the naked eye. Phrases half-formed. Scrambled.
"She knows the price of your origin."
"Do not read aloud what dreams forget."
"Her eye is open beneath the Archive."
"The Finger of the Choir points west."
"You are not the first Vincer Dagon."
He froze.
The last one wasn't a warning.
It was a fact.
---
THE NAMES THAT RETURN
Vincer Dagon.
It was a name he found on a gravestone. Not his. Not anyone's.
Just a slab in the middle of a courtyard that didn't exist the next day. The stone read:
> Vincer Dagon – Seeker. Burned. Returned.
He had taken the name because it was the only one that felt like it remembered him.
But now… he began to question if the name was assigned.
---
THE ECHO ARCHIVE (True Nature)
It was never a building.
It was a collective memory stored in a dreaming entity beneath reality. A thought so massive it broke into pieces, and those fragments became dreams, urban myths, ghost streets, unspoken rituals, and songs stuck in your head with no known origin.
The Archive was the mind of something that once woke up... and then chose to fall back asleep.
Because when it was awake, reality tried to reshape itself to match its thoughts.
Entire species were imagined—and died—within seconds.
It began dreaming again out of mercy.
But someone was trying to wake it up again.
And they were using the 13th Lexicon to do it.
---
A PAST THAT ISN'T DEAD
> "You are not the first Vincer Dagon."
The voice came from behind him.
He turned.
The woman from the House of Unbirth stood in the shadows, silver veins pulsing faintly.
"You were a name before you were a man," she said. "A role. One that returns when the Archive quivers."
Vincer didn't speak.
"Tell me," she continued, "do your dreams remember the Tower of Aethros?"
His mind split for a moment. Visions poured through: a tower of hollowed bone, suspended in inverted gravity, filled with doors that open into lives he didn't live.
"…I've seen it," he whispered.
"You've died there. Four times."
---
End of Chapter 2 Preview
The woman drew a silver circle in the air with her fingertip.
"Then you must find the Book of Unbegun Things. It holds your missing pages."
She stepped back into the fog and vanished.
Behind her, the glyph on his notebook burned into ash, leaving only the number:
> [5]