Wren Whitlock's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Wren Whitlock wrote the sentence she had promised herself she would not write. Her quill moved before her hand could stop it. The ink read: The curse is winning. She felt the words settle into her wrist like a splinter pushed deeper. She snapped the page from the desk, held it to the candle, and watched it curl to ash. Three years of burning pages, and the fae bargain still tightened whenever she tried to study it alone. Her loft smelled of smoke and old paper. Manuscripts leaned in stacks taller than she was. Scrolls hung from the rafters on twine. She had built this place to hold every book that might name her curse, and none of them had. She pushed her spectacles up her nose and opened the relic on her desk. It was a flat slab of dark metal, edged with grooves that glowed faint teal and pink. She had bought it from a rag-picker who swore it came from a scribe like her, one who had failed. Its markings shifted when she stared. She had been trying for a week to read them. Each attempt left her fingers stiffer, her handwriting more binding. Study alone, and the curse fed. She knew this. She kept going anyway. A knock rattled the trapdoor in her floor. She shoved the relic under a cloth. "Whitlock. Open. I brought tea and I have not slept in six days." She lifted the door. Cornelius Tickworth climbed up, apron heavy with gears, eyes ringed red. He was the clockmaker two lanes over, the only other cursed soul she had ever met. His fae bargain kept him awake. Hers kept her honest. They had nodded at each other in the market for a year before either admitted why. He set a kettle on her stove and pointed at the cloth. "That's the thing you wrote me about." "It's killing me slowly," Wren said. The words left her mouth and hung true in the air. She flinched. Cornelius did not. He pulled the cloth off and studied the grooves. "I can't read fae. But I can read patterns. Clocks are patterns." He traced one line with a shaking finger. "This repeats every seventh mark. Yours does too, I bet. Write something. Small." She hesitated. Then she dipped her quill and wrote: My name is Wren. The relic's grooves pulsed on the seventh stroke. Cornelius exhaled. "You've been reading it like a book. It's a lock. You need a second hand on it." Wren stared at him. Her chest loosened for the first time in months. "You'd help me." "I don't sleep," he said. "I have time." She closed the relic and slid it toward the middle of the desk, between them. The next page she wrote, she did not burn. She folded it and handed it to him.