The desert wind carried dust and echoes—whispers of things long buried beneath stone and time.
Calistius stood before the red cliffs of Petra, the ancient Nabataean city carved into flesh-colored rock. Once a trade hub of spices and starlight, now a graveyard of language. Beside him, Aline of Thrace held the Manuscript of Dreams like a newborn—fragile but powerful, alive but unpredictable.
They had journeyed for eleven days under aliases, cloaked in the robes of Eastern pilgrims. Word had already spread that the Church had branded Calistius a heretic, and worse—a speaker.
That made him a target not only for Rome, but for every theological order that feared the return of the Primordial Tongue.
Petra – The Tomb of El-Hazir
They stopped before a lesser-known structure—a square tomb marked not by Nabataean symbols, but by a symbol that mirrored the glyph in Calistius's chest.
Ze-Em. The Revealer.
The locals called this tomb El-Hazir, but the scroll referred to it as Kever ha-Boker—"The Grave of the Morning." Aline handed Calistius a dagger. He hesitated.
"Why blood?" he asked.
"Because words this old were never written in ink."
He sliced his palm, letting crimson drip onto the stone. It drank the blood like a thirsty beast. The sandstone trembled, cracked, and the door unsealed with a sigh that sounded like a buried name.
Inside, the walls shimmered with carvings—not images, but phonetic equations—symbols from multiple ancient languages spiraling into one another: Sumerian cuneiform merging with Hebrew, then Phoenician, then proto-Aramaic.
Aline lit a small lantern.
"This isn't just a tomb," she whispered. "It's a linguistic engine."
Flashback: The True Eden
As Calistius passed through the archway, the manuscript glowed in his satchel. A new verse appeared on the parchment, ink forming on its own:
"Eden was not a place, but a pattern."
"The First Garden was a field of pure resonance, where thought became form and speech created stars."
"Adam did not sin by eating. He erred by forgetting the Word."
A vision overwhelmed Calistius.
He saw a garden with no trees—only sound. Waves of harmonic language spiraled through the air like living ribbons. Angels, not with wings but mouths of flame, circled above. Adam stood naked, speaking animals into form, each with a syllable. Eve touched his lips—stealing a syllable she was not meant to know.
And when she spoke it, everything fell silent.
Aline's Secret
In the heart of the tomb, Aline knelt before a pedestal holding a crystalline disk—a Phonospheric Lens.
"This is one of seven," she said. "Constructed by the original Theologians of Ur to stabilize the Primordial Syllables. Each lens holds a syllable—encoded in light and sound. This one holds Vor-A."
"The Commander of Time," Calistius breathed.
But Aline didn't answer. She was trembling.
"You should know something," she said, her voice cracking. "I'm not entirely of this time."
Calistius stared.
"I died in 94 A.D. in Thessalonica, burned for heresy. But the glyph in my body—Thô-Ma, the Awakener—was never meant to die with me."
"You're... resurrected?"
"No. Preserved—spoken back into being."
She removed her glove. Her hand shimmered, transparent for a moment. Language, not flesh, held her together.
Meanwhile, in Rome – The Rite of Silencing
Cardinal Augustus di Serpente knelt before the Ark of Letters beneath the Sistine Crypt. Around him, monks whispered the Litany of Unmaking, an ancient rite used only three times in history.
Once, in 529 A.D. to erase the Library of Alexandria's final texts.
Again, in 1119, to silence the last member of the Custodes who betrayed the Codex.
And now, to erase Calistius from all memory.
A voice thundered from the relic:
"Et verbum fiat vacuum."
Let the Word become void.
They would wipe his name not just from records, but from minds.
Not killing him—uncreating him.
Back in Petra – The Glyph of Time
As Aline held the lens, the symbols etched into its surface responded to her voice. Calistius recited the syllable: Vor-A. Light erupted from the disk—white and gold—spinning around them.
Suddenly, time fractured.
He saw flashes—future, past, alternate presents:
A tower of scholars speaking syllables to calm a storm in 14th-century Prague. A child in modern-day Jerusalem whispering a word and healing the blind. The Vatican collapsing under a wave of divine fire sparked by a single spoken sentence.
Then—silence.
The glyph etched itself into Calistius's shoulder.
Five syllables now stirred within his body.
Two remained.
Final Lines
As they emerged from the tomb, Calistius looked to the stars. The manuscript pulsed once, then rested.
"What happens when I speak all seven?" he asked.
Aline's voice was steady, but her eyes carried centuries of warning.
"Then you don't become a man of God."
"You become what God was before He spoke."