The Voice in the Dust

The library was heavy with silence. Dust motes drifted in shafts of light from high windows, settling on shelves that leaned like tired sentinels. Each of Nie Li’s steps sounded too loud against the stone floor, as though the walls themselves disapproved of his presence.

Then the Voice came again. Not sound. Not thought. Presence.

“Child of dust.”

Nie Li flinched, heat stabbing through his chest where the mark still lingered. His hands jerked up, as if to fend off a blow no one else could see. “Stop calling me that,” he hissed.

“Not whose?”

The words were not the Voice’s. They came from behind him.

He spun.

A woman in plain scholar’s robes stood watching him, a bundle of scrolls under her arm. The librarian. Her eyes, sharp as cold steel, had caught him half-raised in his strange gesture, muttering to shadows.

“What are you doing, boy?” she asked, not unkind, but with the authority of one who lived among rules and relics. “Classes have not ended. Yet here you wander, gesturing like one possessed. Explain yourself.”

Nie Li’s throat tightened. In his mind, the Voice pressed again, steady as stone:

“Forward.”

He wanted to spit out the truth — that something older than the heavens was clawing at his marrow, that it would not leave him be. But if he said that, he would be hauled before the elders as mad, or branded with a mark no child of the city could bear.

So he bowed stiffly. “Forgive me, Master Librarian. Instructor Shen’s words weighed heavy. I came to breathe where silence keeps its own counsel.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And what thoughts demand such a posture? Your hands were raised like one caught between prayer and defense. What were you thinking?”

Nie Li forced a crooked smile. That I was arguing with a god or demon I cannot name.
Instead he said, “An old verse, half-remembered. I let the motions stray from my mind to my hands.”

She studied him for a moment longer, then shook her head. “Strange child. Do not disturb the relics. And keep your mutterings soft — the books listen better to silence.”

She turned, her steps fading into the labyrinth.

Only when she was gone did Nie Li let his breath escape, ragged.

“Child of dust,” the Voice pressed again, unmoved.

Nie Li’s jaw clenched. “You nearly exposed me. Do you mean to have me dragged out, branded as a lunatic?”

“Walk.”

The command was iron. His eyes lifted unwillingly — and there it was.

A corridor stretched ahead, long and narrow, lined with shelves. At its far end, sunlight blazed through a tall window. Before it, raised on a pedestal, lay a codex, its leather blackened and cracked like dry bone. The sun had gnawed at its edges for generations, bleaching half its pages white.

Nie Li’s heart lurched. Kong Ming’s Codex.

Every child knew the story: the notebook of the heretic emperor, seized when the Spirit Host Army broke his power. Preserved not in reverence, but as a warning. A relic displayed so all would remember rebellion’s end.

The Voice stirred again.

“Take it.”

Nie Li stiffened. His gaze dropped at once to the base of the pedestal, where faint glyphs glimmered, nearly lost in the light. His stomach turned. “It is alarmed,” he whispered. “If I touch it, the librarian will know. I’ll be seized for theft, perhaps worse.”

The Voice did not relent.

“It is not power. It is remembrance.”

The word struck him like a bell in his chest. Remembrance…

He crouched, peering closer at the glyphs. The lines were shallow, uneven. Not the interlocking sigils of soul weapons. Not the layered wards that sealed ancestral armors. Old. Weak. Decorative.

He exhaled through his teeth. “A warning seal. Meant to keep children reverent. To make the timid hesitate before daring to reach beyond their station.”

Yet even as he said it, memory intruded. In his past life he had seen true wards spring like tigers from stone — a single wrong step had cost men their lives. His stomach twisted. Unless I am wrong. Unless these patterns still hold their teeth…

His gaze lingered on the faint light of the glyphs. The sun itself had worn them thin. Their glow wavered like breath on cold glass, faint and sickly. A seal not renewed in centuries.

If it flared, he would be dragged before the librarian in chains, shamed as a thief, cast out of the very halls he needed to save.

His hands shook. His jaw locked. But if it is remembrance, then it was never truly theirs to guard.

Slowly, defiant, he reached. His fingers brushed cracked leather.

No flare. No alarm. Only silence.

Nie Li drew the Codex from its pedestal and carried it to a narrow table beneath a side window. Sunlight fell across the wood as he opened it with unsteady hands.

The parchment creaked like brittle bone. Blank pages stared back at him, their ink devoured by centuries.

His laugh was low, bitter. “So this is what I risk disgrace for? Ash and silence.”

But then the air shifted. Dust stirred, hanging in golden shafts of light as if waiting. The smell of dry parchment thickened. The pages rippled faintly, though no wind stirred.

Not new ink forming — old ink remembering. Faded lines deepened. Forgotten strokes returned, black against yellowed parchment. Words swam back into being. Hei Jin script shimmered faintly across the page, glowing like embers rekindled after a long night.

Nie Li’s throat closed. “Hei Jin…”

In his past life he had seen scraps, dismissed as nonsense, fragments destroyed by fire and decree. But here it was whole. Waiting.

The Voice returned, heavy as stone, unshaken by doubt.

“Sit, child of dust.
Remember what the world buried.
Remember what I sealed.”

Nie Li sank onto the bench, heart pounding, breath harsh. His defiance felt brittle, as brittle as the Codex itself.

This was not a weapon.
Not treasure.
Not victory.

It was memory.
And memory had begun to burn.