The bells began before the sky lightened, long and low, resonating through cold stone and colder bone. Cal opened his eyes to the ceiling of carved basalt above his cot, its grooves swirling like frozen waves. The sound didn't startle him; he had already been half-awake, in that grey hush where dreams dissolve into the waiting day.
Cal rose, feet meeting chilled stone, and dressed with practiced stillness. The robe scratched at his skin, never soft, never familiar. He tied the cord around his waist, brushed the hair from his face, and slipped out into the corridor where breath fogged in front of lips like spirit escaping flesh.
They moved like ghosts down the hall, a procession of quiet figures. The Church did not believe in grandeur for the young; that was reserved for the upper clergy, men who had long since learned to crush ego beneath ritual. Pages were to be shadows. Extensions of the stone itself. Witnesses and recorders, never participants.
The Vigil took place in the Chapel of Sight. It was long and narrow, with walls of slate and stained glass that filtered in whatever thin light the sun offered. At its head stood the Eye of Moar, a massive carving of a radiant eye, faceless and unblinking, set into a wall of white stone so pale it glowed like ash.
They knelt on bare stone. Their knees had long since calloused. Cal closed his eyes and began the Seven Lines of Sight:
I am seen. I see. I see the seen. I see the unseen. I see the shadow beneath the seen. I see the light within the unseen. I see Moar.
The prayer was as automatic as breathing, yet some part of him still listened to the words, turned them over like stones in a riverbed. What did it mean, really, to see? To be seen by something so distant and unrelenting? The priests said clarity was a form of mercy. Cal wasn't sure if mercy was the right word. He had yet to find anything merciful in this place.
After the Vigil came the chores. Polishing, sweeping, cleansing the brass fittings of the altar with stiff brushes. Cal's fingers were red by the end, knuckles cracked from the winter air and abrasive soaps. A priest passed without acknowledging him. That, too, was expected. A good page was invisible.
The meal bell sounded. They filed into the refectory, where long wooden tables sat beneath low-hanging iron lamps. Steam rose from bowls of broth and cracked grain. They sat, hands folded, and waited until the head cleric murmured the opening phrase. Then they ate—slow, silent, chewing as though the act itself was sacred.
Cal tasted nothing. Hunger was rarely absent, but even when food filled the space in his gut, it never reached his ribs. It simply disappeared into the grey sameness of the day. He glanced at the boys around him, noting who had new bruises, who avoided eye contact, who bowed their heads a little too fervently. There was always something happening beneath the surface here. Like rot beneath plaster.
Lessons began in the Hall of Clarity, where stone columns held up a domed ceiling painted with scenes of the Origin. Moar descending as light into the world, splitting heresy from order, casting down the Dark Ones into the shadow realms. The paintings were beautiful in the way a wound might be beautiful—artful and precise, but always speaking of pain.
Brother Halwen led doctrine today. He was thin and pale, voice soft as dust. He spoke of vigilance, of the danger of voices that speak too sweetly.
"The true danger is not the shout," he said, pacing slowly. "It is the whisper. Heresy does not arrive on a storm. It grows in corners. In hesitation. In doubt."
Cal wrote the words down, but not for memorization. He liked the way they sounded—measured, weighty. He wondered if Brother Halwen believed them. He wondered if anyone here truly did.
The chapel bells rang again for midday prayer. The same chant, the same eye watching from its crystal throne. But this time Cal's fingers brushed the ring he kept on a thin chain beneath his robes. Cold. Still cold, even pressed to his chest all morning.
He wondered—not for the first time—what it meant to wear something made by the hand of someone forgotten. The elf. The storm. The music. He could still remember the way the melody had bent around the snow, not resisting it, but weaving through it like thread. It hadn't felt like a dream. It had felt like memory.
The scriptorium brought silence again, but of a different kind. The scratch of quills on vellum. The breath of boys leaning close to candlelight. Pages copying scripture line by line until their fingers ached and their necks froze in place.
Cal's sheet held the Lament of Orakiel, a passage about a man who had seen too clearly and lost the will to live. He read the lines aloud in his mind:
He begged to be blind again, but the Dark had touched him, and blindness was no longer his to choose.
The ink dried slowly. He pressed sand into the wet edges and shook it off, wondering if Orakiel had ever asked to be seen. Or if it had simply happened, and the seeing had broken him.
There were no answers here, only repetition.
The afternoon passed in a grey blur of task and obedience. Cal delivered a sealed scroll to the Chamber of Silence, where only the high priests were allowed. He was not permitted to look up. He looked up anyway. The walls were black. The ceiling was mirrored. He saw himself reflected, pale and small, as if the church were trying to remind him of his place.
Evening came, and with it the last meal—salted lentils, flatbread, cold water. He ate without hunger, already full of questions he couldn't voice. Afterward, he was allowed a moment to write his thoughts in a small parchment journal.
"The wind was loud today. Or maybe it was trying to say something. I watched the snow fall outside the high window and thought of the music again. It didn't sound like anything I've ever heard in this place. It sounded like someone remembering something important. Like loss, maybe. But not hopeless. Is that normal?"
He folded the page and slipped it into the folds of his cot.
The final ritual was the Quiet Candle. One by one, the boys approached the single lit candle in the middle of the chamber and whispered one truth they had learned that day. When it was Cal's turn, he knelt before it and whispered:
"I think the silence hides more than it reveals."
The candle flickered. He rose.
Back in his cot, the room filled with the hissing of winds. Cal stared up at the carvings in the ceiling again. His hand rested on his chest, fingers curled around the ring.
He did not know what it meant. Not yet. But he felt its coldness as something alive.
In a place that worshipped silence, he had heard a song.
That had to mean something.