THE UNREVEALED

The Impossible symbol

POV: Zara Lay

I woke up at five in the morning because my wrist hurt.

Not badly.

Not the sharp specific pain of a cut or a burn.

Something duller, a deep, low ache, like a bruise settling in.

I lay still for a moment listening to my brother's alarm go off two rooms away and then immediately stop, which meant he'd hit snooze and would hit it three more times before actually moving.

Then I pulled back my sleeve.

The marks had grown.

Yesterday they'd run from my pulse point to the inside of my elbow.

Now they reached my shoulder.

Same quality, that faint gold-white glow, quieter in the morning light than it had been under the lamp, almost easy to miss if you weren't looking.

I was looking.

The symbols covered the full length of my inner arm in neat rows, each one precise, each one distinct, none of them resembling any alphabet I'd ever seen.

I counted them.

Forty-seven.

I pulled my sleeve down and went to make tea.

The window in my room was repaired.

I don't know when, I'd fallen asleep sometime around four with the lamp on and my notebook in my lap, and when I woke the glass was whole, the curtain was straight, and the only evidence that anything had happened was the faint smell of cold air that didn't quite belong.

My mother hadn't mentioned it at breakfast.

My brother hadn't noticed.

Neither of them had asked about the window or the cold or the noise of shattering glass in the middle of the night.

The Veil, I supposed.

Or Drakar.

Probably both.

I filed that under things to be alarmed about later and caught the bus to school.

The library opened at seven forty-five.

I was waiting outside at seven forty-three.

Mrs. Okafor, the librarian, gave me the particular look she reserved for students who voluntarily arrived before the first bell.

It wasn't unkind.

It was the look of someone quietly revising their opinion of another person, and not in a negative direction.

"Reference section?" I asked

.

"Ancient history is along the back wall," she said.

"Linguistics is the second shelf from the left."

I hadn't mentioned what I was looking for.

I took both sections.

I spent first period at a table in the back corner with eight books open around me and my notebook, the one with his face in it, the one I'd been writing in since Monday propped against a dictionary for support.

I'd sketched three of the symbols from my arm as precisely as I could manage.

I wasn't working from the arm itself; long sleeves, and I wasn't about to roll them up in a school library at eight in the morning.

I knew what I was looking for.

I'd spent enough time with my own notebooks to understand what it felt like when a symbol meant something when a shape carried information rather than decoration.

These weren't decorative.

They were structured.

There was grammar in them, or something that functioned like grammar, a repeating logic in the spacing and the arrangement.

I just needed to find what language they belonged to.

I worked through the ancient scripts systematically.

Sumerian, Linear A, Linear B, Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, early Aramaic.

I checked the fringe texts too.

The ones shelved at the end with cracked spines, the kind that got donated and accepted out of obligation rather than academic merit.

Symbols supposedly found in ruins too old to date.

Inscriptions that mainstream archaeology had classified as decorative and moved on from.

Nothing matched.

I was on my third cup of water from the library fountain and my second round of the same six books when I found it.

A footnote.

Appendix C: Documented Lost Scripts, in a volume called The Archaeology of Erased Cultures which sounded dramatic but had been written by an academic at a university I'd never heard of and published in a run of four hundred copies, judging by how surprised the book seemed to be that anyone had opened it.

The footnote referenced a language catalogued once, by a single archaeologist, in a site discovered in 1987 and subsequently destroyed in a fire before full documentation could be completed.

The archaeologist's name was Dr. Elias Vann.

He'd described the script as unlike any known writing system, self-organizing, he'd written, as if the symbols arranged themselves according to the reader rather than the writer.

There were three example characters reproduced in the footnote.

Three characters.

I had forty-seven on my arm.

But those three

I stopped breathing for a moment, which is the clearest sign I've learned to trust.

My body understood before my brain caught up.

Those three were exact.

Not similar, not reminiscent.

Exact down to the particular angle of each stroke, the proportions, the specific way the lines terminated.

As if someone had pressed my arm against the page and traced.

The language had a name in Dr. Vann's notes.

The First Tongue.

Spoken and written:

only by those who created the Veil.

I sat back in my chair.

Forty-seven symbols.

A language belonging to the creators of the Veil.

Written on my arm by the Veil itself, the night a creature with no face walked through the shape of my locked door.

I thought about what Drakar had said.

You are the breach.

I looked at the footnote again.

One line beneath the language's name, almost an afterthought, the kind of detail that got buried because the person writing it hadn't understood what they were documenting:

Dr. Vann noted that the symbols, when photographed, did not appear on film.

They were visible only to the eye of the observer present.

I closed the book.

Rolled up my left sleeve.

Held my arm under the fluorescent library light and looked at forty-seven symbols that no camera would catch, written in a language destroyed before I was born, belonging to the people who built the thing currently using my nervous system as a reporting tool.

My thinking silence lasted longer than usual.

Then I rolled my sleeve down, gathered my notes, and walked to first period like a person who had not just found evidence that her life had been fundamentally altered before she'd finished her GCSEs.

I was going to need to talk to Drakar.