Chapter67: In the Ruins

*Permiton* Our plan is terrible. It’s risky and rushed, based more on instinct than certainty. Still, it’s the only one we have. I stare down at the ancient text splayed across the marble table, the brittle parchment threatening to crumble beneath my fingers. The ink has faded in places, the script so old it bleeds together like veins across stone, but I’ve read it four times through, and I keep coming back to the same haunting phrase. “Shadow that clings can be burned by light unclaimed.” Light unclaimed. Not wielded. Not conjured. Unclaimed. It’s maddening and vague. One of those half-riddles the old scholars always loved to leave behind as though ambiguity made them brilliant instead of insufferable. Without my Sight, I have no way of knowing what it really means. I stand in the ruins of what used to be a steady gift. Where once I could see clear branches of possibility, now all I get are flickers, blurred images that are dreams I forget the second I wake. I thought it was grief, at