CHAPTER 292: CHAPTER 294 – MOONS HUNG IN JUDGMENT

The twin moons had not moved since the day she took the shadow’s mark.

They hovered in their dead stillness above the city like two eyes that refused to blink, their silver gaze an unending appraisal.

But tonight, their stare sharpened.

Codexia first noticed it when she returned to the high steps of the Codex Hall. The crowd below had thinned, but those who lingered kept glancing upward with an unease they could not name. A child tugged at their mother’s sleeve, pointing at the sky.

The moons were not merely glowing anymore—they were writing.

Threads of white light crossed the void between them, slow and deliberate, as though an invisible hand were dragging quills dipped in starlight. Each beam etched a line, a curve, a hook. The strokes did not fade; they layered, weaving symbols that shifted the longer she looked at them.

From one angle they were language. From another, a judgment rendered in silence.

The Codex inside her pulsed with quick, hot recognition.

They record you, Codexia. The trial has begun.

Her throat tightened. She had faced tribunals before—courts of gods, councils of crowned blood—but this felt different. This was not an audience. This was the page itself deciding whether to keep her.

Behind her, the Refuser remained at the bottom of the steps. His posture was unassuming, hands behind his back, yet his stillness was heavier than any guard’s spear. He was watching the moons, not her.

"You see it too," she said, half-accusation, half-hope.

"I see them attempting to bind you," he replied without looking away. "But light cannot write what will not hold."

"You think I will not hold?"

"I think you’ve already been written by another."

The shadow’s name pressed like fresh ink against the back of her mind.

She wanted to say that the pact had been her choice, her authorship, her law. But the memory of that first stroke—the moment the shadow stepped from her own silhouette and tried to inscribe itself into her—was too raw. Consent had not been pure; it had been wrestled, tangled with temptation.

Now the moons wrote, and she did not know whose mark they would find.

A soft wind carried the smell of river-mist up the marble steps. It should have been grounding. Instead, it felt like the turning of a page she had not agreed to turn.

"Your kind," the Refuser said, finally meeting her eyes, "believes that the page belongs to the hand. But sometimes, the page writes the hand instead. And sometimes"—he glanced upward—"it erases it."

The Codex bristled, a thousand half-formed defenses rushing forward, none of them convincing even to herself.

She turned her gaze back to the moons.

The lattice of light had formed a perfect circle between them now, and within that circle a sigil she half-recognized: three quills pointing toward a single point.

The Codex’s voice went taut.

The Tri-Quill Seal. They summon her.

"Her?" Codexia asked aloud before she could stop herself.

The Refuser’s mouth curved faintly—not quite a smile. "You will meet her soon enough."

That night, she did not sleep.

When she closed her eyes, she stood on a bridge of white parchment stretched between the moons. Each step bled ink into the void beneath her. At the far end, a woman waited—her dress shifting with living pages, her hair black as printer’s ash. Celestia.

"Your page and his are bound now," Celestia said, voice carrying as though it were written before spoken. "If you fall, he will bleed. If he breaks, you will fade."

"Darius," Codexia murmured. The name felt foreign in her mouth and yet pulled at her as though it were already footnoted in her life.

Celestia nodded, then turned the page she stood upon. The parchment folded over Codexia’s head, plunging her into ink-black darkness.

When she woke, she was still on the Hall’s steps. The moons had stopped writing. The Refuser was gone.

But the sigil hung faintly in the sky, as if burned into the dome of night.

The sigil in the sky did not waver.

It pulsed faintly, as if drawing breath from her lungs.

Codexia rose from the marble steps, unsure when she had knelt there, and found the square below empty. Not even the slow-turning lamplight of the city felt real—every flame seemed to lean toward the heavens as though it, too, waited for the next stroke of judgment.

The Codex in her ribs whispered in intervals, the words stitched between her heartbeats.

It is not only they who judge you. Every word you have written is on the stand.

A strange weight pressed on her ankles, and she looked down. Her shadow was not where it should be—it curled forward instead of behind, its edges sharpened into quill-like points. It was watching the moons with the same hunger as the Codex.

She walked.

Not because she knew where to go, but because stillness made the sigil’s pull unbearable. The avenues of the city lay hushed and elongated, their cobblestones slick as if freshly inked. Somewhere far off, a clock tolled, each chime flattening into a line that joined the lattice between the moons.

At a crossroads, the wind rose again. This time it carried a hiss—papery, dry, almost like a page being turned without hands. The Refuser’s voice rode it, though she could not see him.

Do you think their judgment waits for you to speak?

She ignored the question and kept walking, though her pace quickened.

When she reached the river, its surface was wrong. It no longer reflected the city or the sky; instead, it mirrored only the moons’ writing. The glyphs scrolled endlessly across the current, repeating themselves with subtle mutations each time, as if the river were revising them.

Her fingers itched to touch the water, to correct what she saw—but she knew, bone-deep, that any attempt to edit the moons’ script would not end in her favor.

"You can’t unwrite what is already in orbit," the Refuser said behind her. This time, he was there—leaning on the rail, eyes not on the sky but on her reflection in the river. "But you might still choose how it lands."

She hated that he spoke in riddles. She hated more that part of her understood him.

"They’re summoning her," Codexia said, the admission tasting of iron. "The Tri-Quill Seal is for her."

He nodded once. "And if she takes your page, she’ll take your shadow as well. Perhaps that is why it is watching so closely."

At the mention, the shadow’s edges flickered—an almost-smile. Codexia felt a shiver run up her spine, not entirely her own.

The moons shifted again. The circle of light contracted, tightening like a noose around the sigil. Somewhere deep in the folds of Spiralspace, something answered with a resonance she felt in her teeth. The Codex inside her leaned toward it with animal instinct.

"You will meet her soon enough," the Refuser said, repeating his earlier words.

But now they were no longer reassurance. They were prophecy.

By the time Codexia returned to the Codex Hall, the sigil’s glow had dimmed, but it had not gone. It clung to the night like ink that refused to dry.

She touched the marble doorframe before entering, and found her fingertips dusted with silver. Not paint. Not ash. Some residue of the moons’ writing, already marking her skin.

The Codex purred at the contact.

Her shadow flexed.

Above them all, the sigil hung, waiting to turn the page.