Chapter 11: The Scroll of the Unmaker
Sleep was a lie.
Sammy sat bolt upright in her bed, the silken sheets tangled around her legs like shackles. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw it: the bruise-purple rotflame crawling, the silent, screaming dissolution, the hexaprison’s chilling glow. And Mia’s face. Not the monster’s, but the woman’s afterwards—exhausted, confused, admitting she was a fault line in a human skin.
It simply unmakes what should not be.
The words from the scroll were etched behind her eyelids. She threw off the covers. The room was too quiet, too still. The palace around her felt like a held breath.
She dressed in simple trousers and a tunic, pulling a dark hooded cloak over her fiery hair. No guards. Not for this. She moved through the sleeping corridors like a ghost, her soft boots making no sound on the cold stone. Her destination wasn’t the black cells. Not yet. She needed context. She needed history that wasn’t written by a traitorous archivist.
The Royal Library was a different beast than the Scriptorium. Where Vex’s domain was a curated prison of secrets, the library was a sprawling, chaotic jungle of knowledge. It smelled of dust, drying ink, and the faint, sweet decay of vellum. Moonlight filtered through high, arched windows, painting silver stripes on endless rows of shelves that vanished into shadow.
Sammy lit a single candle from a sconce and walked into the throat of the quiet. The rustle of her cloak was an intrusion. She didn’t know where to start. ‘Beings of contradiction’? ‘The Veil between worlds’? It was the stuff of old wives’ tales and children’s ghost stories.
But Vex hadn’t been a superstitious old wife. She’d been a ruthlessly logical cataloguer of power. And she’d filed Mia as ‘anomalous.’
For hours, Sammy wandered. She pulled down bestiaries, their pages illuminated with gilded dragons and wyverns. She skimmed philosophical treatises on the nature of magic. She found nothing. Just old myths about spirits and demons, none of which fit the chilling, specific physicality of Mia—the white hair, the stormy eyes, the rotflame.
Her shoulders ached. Dust coated her throat. Her candle burned low, the wax pooling on the reading desk she’d claimed in a secluded alcove. Despair began to curl its fingers around her. Maybe it was just a unique, terrible magic. A one-off. A mistake.
Then her eyes caught the tapestry.
It was huge, covering a vast section of the eastern wall, depicting Eldarov’s founding. The usual heroics: King Andor the First slaying the Great Wurm, raising the first stones of the citadel. But in the lower left corner, nearly hidden in the woven undergrowth of a forest, was a smaller, subtler scene. A figure, barely more than a stitch of white thread, standing apart from the celebrating crowds. The weaver had given it eyes of grey silk.
Sammy’s heart thumped once, hard. She walked to the tapestry, running her fingers over the centuries-old wool. The figure was deliberate. An afterthought, perhaps, but a purposeful one. She lifted the heavy edge of the tapestry. Behind it was plain stone wall… except for a single, faint line.
A seam.
She set her candle down. Her fingers traced the line, finding a nearly imperceptible depression. She pushed. With a soft, grating sigh of stone on stone, a section of the wall swung inward, no larger than a bread box. Inside was a chest, small and unadorned, made of the same black ironwood as the Scriptorium’s shelves.
Her hands trembled as she lifted it out. It wasn’t locked. The lid opened with a creak of protest.
Inside, resting on a bed of desiccated lavender, was a single scroll. The parchment was brittle, so old it felt like it might crumble to ash at her touch. She unrolled it with infinite care on the desk, using two paperweights to hold its ends.
The script was archaic, the ink faded to the color of old blood. She had to squint, her nose almost touching the page.
…the account of Elara, Sentinel of the Eastern Watch, regarding the Incident at the Black Sands…
It wasn’t a history. It was a report.
Sammy read, her breath tight in her chest.
The phenomenon exhibited capabilities outside known categorization. It did not conjure. It negated. A contingent of Keth’rani spell-breakers attempted a standard magical suppression. Their shields were not breached; they were unmade, unraveling from the inside as if their own power turned against them. The effect was described as a ‘consuming flame’ that left no heat, only decay and auditory echoes of the victims’ final moments.
She swallowed, her mouth dry.
Physical description: female-presenting humanoid. Stark white hair. Pale complexion, akin to alabaster or bone. Eyes the colour of a tempest-grey sky, reportedly shifting in hue with emotional or thaumic distress. Movements are preternaturally fluid, suggesting either extreme martial training or a non-human relationship with kinetic energy.
A cold sweat broke out on the back of Sammy’s neck. She read faster.
It engaged with our forces only when engaged. It showed no aggression toward the civilian refugees from the border villages. When questioned, it claimed to have ‘awoken’ in the epicenter of the battlefield with no memory of origin or purpose. It expressed… confusion. And fear.
Conclusion: This entity, termed ‘The Unmaker’ by surviving witnesses, is not a malevolent force in intent, but is a walking cataclysm in function. It is a living contradiction, a void that feeds on structured magic and, potentially, life force. It possesses no memory, which may be a blessing or a failsafe. It does not seek to dominate. It simply… unmakes that which it perceives as a threat or an aberration. Its appearance may be tied to a thinning of the metaphysical Veil, though this is conjecture. Recommend extreme caution. Do not approach. Do not attempt containment with standard means. Observation only, from maximum distance.
The final line was not written in the same ink. It was sharper, darker, added later.
Asset retrieval team lost. No contact. Presumed unmade. File sealed under Royal Decree Andor VII. Knowledge is containment.
Sammy sat back, the scroll seeming to vibrate in the still air. The candle guttered, nearly out.
“It simply unmakes what should not be,” she whispered, echoing the scroll’s terrible phrase.
Every piece fit. The waking on a battlefield. The hollow-men. The rotflame. The hexaprison. Mia’s desperate confession. She wasn’t just a powerful amnesiac. She was a geological event in a human shape. A walking ‘no.’
The quiet of the library became oppressive, the shadows between the shelves now feeling like hiding places for the very concepts the scroll described. Sammy carefully, reverently, re-rolled the parchment and placed it back in its box. She returned the box to its niche and swung the stone door shut. The tapestry fell back into place, hiding centuries of sanctioned silence.
She blew out the spent candle. In the sudden moonlight, she felt unbearably small. Her parents were murdered. Her archivist was a traitor who grew assassins in vats. And the only person standing between her and that conspiracy was a classified existential hazard.
She left the library, her mind racing. Observation only. From maximum distance. That was the wise decree of her ancestor. But King Andor VII hadn’t been a 23-year-old woman with a knife at her back and a crown of lies on her head. He hadn’t needed an ally.
Sammy found herself not at her chambers, but standing outside the door to the guest wing where Mia was housed. A lone royal guard stood at attention, his eyes forward. He nodded to her.
“Has she stirred?” Sammy asked, her voice low.
“No, Your Majesty. Quiet as a tomb all night.”
Sammy placed her hand on the cold oak of the door. She thought of the fear in Mia’s eyes when she spoke of waking up. The utter loneliness of it. A weapon with no handler. A disaster that didn’t want to be.
She pushed the door open.
The room was dark. Mia was not in the bed. She was sitting on the floor in a patch of moonlight by the window, her back against the wall, knees drawn up. She wore only a simple linen shift. Her white hair was loose, a cascade of silver in the gloom. She looked up as Sammy entered. Her grey eyes were clear, watchful, but the shadows under them were deep.
“You look like hell,” Mia said. Her voice was rough with lack of sleep.
“I was reading,” Sammy said, closing the door behind her. She leaned against it, the solidness of it the only thing keeping her upright.
“Find anything good?”
“A bedtime story.” Sammy slid down the door until she was also sitting on the floor, facing Mia across the expanse of the darkened room. The space between them felt charged, like the moment before a lightning strike. “It was about a thing that wakes up not knowing what it is. A thing that unravels other things. They called it ‘The Unmaker.’”
Mia went very, very still. The moonlight seemed to bleach her even paler. “And?”
“And it was described. White hair. Pale skin. Eyes like a storm.” Sammy’s voice was steady, though her hands were clenched in her lap. “It was seen centuries ago. At a place called the Black Sands. It unmade a squad of elite spell-breakers. Then it just… stood there. Confused. They decided to leave it alone. The last team they sent to get a closer look… the file says ‘presumed unmade.’”
Mia didn’t deny it. She didn’t look away. She just absorbed the words, her expression flattening into something resigned. “So. Now you know.”
“I don’t know anything,” Sammy shot back, a flare of frustration cutting through her fear. “I know what a scroll written by scared people centuries ago says. I don’t know you. The you that saved my life in the garden. The you that gets annoyed when the stew is too salty. The you who is sitting on my floor looking like you haven’t slept in a decade.”
“Maybe they’re the same thing,” Mia whispered. She looked down at her own hands, turning them over in the moonlight. “The Unmaker and the woman who likes stew.”
“Are they?”
Mia was silent for a long time. The only sound was the distant, rhythmic tread of a guard in the courtyard below.
“I don’t want to be,” Mia said finally, the words so soft they were almost lost. “When I saw those hollow-men… I felt nothing. No anger. No fear. Just a… a recognition. Like seeing a weed. And I knew exactly how to pull it. It was instinct. It was easy.” She lifted her gaze, and her eyes were wide with a horror that had nothing to do with outside threats. “That should scare me more than it scares you. But it just feels… familiar.”
Sammy hugged her knees to her chest. “The scroll said you’re not malevolent in intent. That you only unmake threats.”
“The scroll didn’t know me,” Mia said. “What if my instinct is wrong? What if one day I look at a crying child, or a stubborn old farmer, or… or you… and my stupid, broken wiring says ‘threat’? What then?”
It was the question Sammy had been avoiding. The true terror at the core of it all. Not that Mia was powerful, but that she was a loaded gun with a broken safety, held together by fraying threads of a personality she didn’t understand.
“I don’t know,” Sammy answered honestly.
The simplicity of the admission seemed to hang between them. There was no reassurance to offer. No false promise.
“Why are you here, Sammy?” Mia asked. “You have the scroll. You have the truth. You should have me chained in the darkest pit under the mountain, surrounded by as much ‘anti-magic’ as your scholars can devise. Or you should have me executed while I’m tired and sitting on your floor.”
Sammy stared at the pattern of moonlight on the rug. She thought of her father’s laugh. Her mother’s hand on her forehead when she was sick. The cold, smug look on Vex’s face. The hollow, empty silence of the throne room since they’d gone.
“Because I’m tired of being alone,” Sammy said, the truth ripped from a raw place. “And because you’re the only one who hasn’t looked at me and seen either a puppet to control or a obstacle to remove. You looked at me and saw a person who needed help. A fiction, you called it.” She looked up, meeting Mia’s stormy eyes. “It’s the only fiction I’ve got left.”
Mia held her gaze. The tempest in her irises swirled, slow and uncertain.
“So what do we do?” Mia asked.
Sammy took a deep breath, the decision solidifying as she spoke it. “We use it. We use you. Not the Unmaker. You. Your instincts, your power, your… your contradiction. We take apart Vex’s conspiracy. We find out who really killed my parents. And along the way…” She stood up, her legs stiff. “…we find out who you are, and why you’re here. Not from a scroll. From the source.”
Mia unfolded herself from the floor. She stood, a slender, pale figure in the moonlight, looking younger than her years. “And if the source is a void?”
“Then we’ll fill it with something better,” Sammy said, and despite everything, she almost believed it. She walked to the door. “Dawn’s in a few hours. We start with Vex. Be ready.”
She left Mia standing in the silver light, a question mark carved from bone and shadow. In her own room, Sammy didn’t try to sleep. She sat at her desk, the image of the scroll burning in her mind.
Knowledge is containment, her ancestor had written.
But Sammy was past containment. She was in the cage with the cataclysm, and the only way out was forward, into the dark.