Scriptum Obscura

1894

The candle gutters low as Isolda Ferin moved through the lower stacks of the Sorrellian Library. Her boots clicked softly on the stone, yet the sound didn’t echo. The air has thickened, as if listening. She paused before the last shelf. Her hands, ink stained and trembling, clutched a glass jar. Inside: darkness, not pigment, not oil, but something alive. Words congealed. A thousand unwritten things. She kneeled. The ground accepts her with a sigh. Whispers spiral upwards as she pries open the jar’s seal.

“To forget a thing is to feed it,” she murmured.

Then the flame extinguished.

(The Library Basement-Present Day)

It was the kind of rain that seemed to rot the bones of the world. A cold, unceasing drizzle clung to the university's stone walls like mildew, and Julian Darragh had not slept in thirty-six hours. He descended the narrow steps to the library's basement, technically off-limits, but the door had never locked properly and the night librarian never looked up from her crossword puzzles. The archives smelled of old ink, candle smoke, and something less identifiable, something metallic and a little sweet. Julian told himself it was just the paper glue. He was supposed to be finishing his dissertation on Renaissance marginalia. Instead, he found himself in the farthest alcove, behind a shelf labeled, “Donated Ephemera-Unsorted.” That’s where he found it. A glass jar. No label. No dust. It was just there. It was filled to the brim with black ink, so dark it seemed to drink the light around it. When he picked it up, the air grew noticeably colder.

Back in his flat, Julian couldn’t stop looking at it. The ink did not move when tilted. It didn’t bubble or shimmer. But it pulsed, not visually, but conceptually, like it had a heartbeat just below perception. By candlelight, Julian dipped an old calligraphy pen into it. He had meant to write just a single work. Something academic. Scriptorium, perhaps. But what emerged from his hand was something else entirely. A single word that he did not recognize:

“Draemont.”

The moment it hit the paper, his candle extinguished. A whisper, inaudible but unmistakable, passed through the room. When Julian relit the flame, the word was gone. Not smudged, not erased. The page was blank.

He returned to the jar night after night. He began keeping a separate journal, distinct from his thesis work. A place to record what he remembered of the vanished words. Each night, his hand wrote phrases in a language he didn’t know. Sometimes they were symbols, other times entire passages, like fragments of a dream someone else had dreamt. As soon as the ink dried, the page turned blank. As time passed Julian grew pale, thinner, his fingernails were always stained dark with ink. He stopped attending lectures. Professors left notes, his roommate moved out, he didn’t notice.

(Isolda)

Julian found her in an 1890s ledger: Isolda Ferin, Scholar of Translinguistics and Forbidden Rhetoric. Deceased, 1894. No thesis on record.

But her name kept surfacing. In footnotes, margins, maginalia that shouldn’t be there. A letter fell from a binding, addressed to the future to the future reader.

“To the one who finds the ink again: beware. The language beneath speaks with no mercy. It does not lie, but it hungers.”

A woodcut showed her surrounded by blindfolded scholars. In her hand: the jar.

From Julian’s journal dated;

March 12th

There’s something old in the ink. Not rot, something aware. I dip the pen and feel it watching me. It isn’t sinister exactly, but…expectant. Like I’ve agreed to something I didn’t realize I signed.

March 15th

I dream in spirals now. Words that peel apart like skin. Woke this morning with a single name burned into my mind: “Isolda Ferin.” The ink has not erased it. For once, it stayed.

Julian found her name again in the university’s oldest faculty ledgers.

March 18th

She was here. She used the same ink. The margins of her lecture notes aren’t notes at all, they’re seals. I found one tucked behind the cover of an old copy of Horace. The text surrounding it warped, like it was rejecting being read. The librarians never notice….of course they didn’t.

March 21st

The ink does not want to be contained. It’s leaking from the jar’s seam now. It stains the table no matter how I clean it. I hear it whisper when I sleep, not in my ears, but in my bones. It wants me to write, and I obey.

The ink didn’t write, it unwrote. He began to test it. First a withered houseplant. Then a lock. Then, a memory.

March 25th

Erased a childhood song I used to hum without thinking. It’s gone, no melody remains. The absence feels like a bruise behind my eyes.

March 27th

I tired to tell Anna (my sister?) about the ink. She looked at me blankly. Then said, “I don’t have a brother.”

March 29th

I’m scared. But if fear is a word, maybe I can unwrite that too.

Amara Liddell, a teacher’s assistant in comparative linguistics, noticed the changes. Julian’s absence. The ink on his sleeves. She cornered him in the stacks. He gave evasive answers. Amara took a page from his notebook when he wasn’t looking. She returned it the next day. Eyes hollow.

"It wrote on its own," she whispered. "And now I can’t remember my mother’s voice."

Julian burned the page. The smell lingered for hours. There was a door in the library basement. Not literal, not made of wood, but old, spectral, carved from the seams between language and silence.

April 1st

I saw it at last. The wall that isn’t a wall. I wrote upon it with no ink and watched it bleed truth. The glyph beneath the jar pulses like a heartbeat. One more word and it will open.

They found his room vacant, bed made. No trace of his belongings and the window had been left open. Only a single sheet of paper on his desk.

Blank.

Except for one word at the bottom, still glistening like freshly shed ink:

“Draemont.”

Postscripts- April 10th

The night librarian, shelving old tomes, finds the journal again. She reads aloud words unseen by others.

Handwritten Journal Fragment-Unfound by Others

Language is a cage.

Grammar, its bars

Every sentence a ward

I found the silence between symbols, and inside it, her voice

She is not gone. She was only unwritten.

She smiles.

“Welcome back, Isolda.”