Marked

Rain hit Ravendon before sunrise. Not soft rain but sharp, slanted drops that bounced off stone roads and blurred the glow of the street lamps. Elias Rook pulled his coat tighter as he crossed the tram bridge. He hated being late, and the Bureau never forgave lateness from junior clerks.

The Bureau of Records stood ahead like a tired giant, its stone walls stained by decades of smoke. Gas lamps flickered outside the entrance, making the rain look like it was falling through sparks. Elias pushed open the heavy door and stepped into the warm, old smell of ink, dust, and paper that had outlived empires.

Inside, the Archive Hall looked exactly as it did every morning: long rows of tables, high shelves rising into shadow, quiet clerks bent over thick books. Lamps hung from wires above, their flames trembling whenever a draft slipped through the windows.

Elias worked in the Transit and Residency Register, one of the quieter divisions. His job, on paper, was simple: make sure the city’s ledgers agreed with reality. Every person who moved into Ravendon, every worker granted a temporary pass, every merchant given a permit to stay more than three nights, each of them had a line somewhere in those books. Name. Date of entry. District assigned. Notes about why they were allowed past the gates.

The Dominion trusted the Bureau’s ledgers more than it trusted people’s memories. If a name wasn’t written in the registers, as far as the city was concerned, that person had never been there at all.

Elias hung his damp coat on the back of his chair, sat down, and opened the first ledger of the day. It was heavy enough to leave a mark on the table when he set it down. The leather cover creaked, and the familiar columns of ink stared back at him.

Name. Date. District. Notes.

He ran a fingertip down the page, comparing yesterday’s entries with the slips stacked beside him. Dockworkers from the eastern piers. A family from the hill provinces granted permission to move into the north quarter. A messenger company renewing its city passes.

Everything was ordinary.

Until he found something that wasn’t.

Halfway down the next page, a name waited for him as if it had always been there.

Marlen Graf.
Date of entry: tomorrow.

Elias stared at it. His breath caught in his throat.

Ledgers never showed future dates. The Bureau didn’t guess, didn’t predict, didn’t write anything that hadn’t already been approved by stamped paper and three signatures. The clerks of the Dominion were proud of that. They recorded the city as it was, never as it might be.

He checked the column headings again, as if they might have quietly changed in the night. They hadn’t.

Carefully, he compared the handwriting to the lines above and below. It matched the neat, narrow script of the night clerk who’d finished the previous shift. Nothing about it looked like a joke.

But there it was. Tomorrow’s date, written as calmly as today’s rain.

The lamp above his desk flickered once. Then twice.

Every lamp in the room dimmed together, the light draining away in a slow ripple, like a wave of shadow moving across the ceiling.

Heads lifted from ledgers. Pens paused. Somewhere down the hall, a clerk muttered, “Not again…”

The lamps steadied. The room settled. But Elias’s heartbeat didn’t.

He swallowed, licked his lips, and called softly, “Mira? Can you check something?”

Mira Hemsley worked two tables over in Property Deeds. She was quicker than most clerks and kinder than most supervisors, which made her dangerous to be seen talking to for too long. She walked over anyway, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“What did you break this time?” she asked, keeping her voice light.

“Nothing,” Elias said. “I just… I need you to read a line for me.”

He turned the ledger so it faced her and pointed at the name that made no sense.

Mira frowned and leaned in. Her eyes moved down the page. She blinked once.

“Elias… there’s nothing here.”

He felt the back of his neck prickle. “Right there, middle of the page. Marlen Graf. Date of entry tomorrow, West Docks district.”

“You’re pointing at empty paper,” she said. “Maybe you should ask Master Sone for a later shift. You look half asleep.”

She tapped the space with one finger. “See? Blank.”

He heard the impatience under her concern. Work to do, ledgers to clear, supervisors watching. She gave him a quick, apologetic smile and went back to her table before he could argue.

Elias turned the book toward himself again.

The name was gone.

No date. No district. No notes. Just unmarked paper between two ordinary entries.

But his chest still tightened around the memory of it. He could see the letters as clearly as if they were still there.

Slowly, he reached out and touched the space where Marlen Graf had been.

The ink didn’t smear, because there wasn’t any ink left to smear—but the paper rippled under his fingertip.

It was a tiny movement, no more than a shiver, but he felt it. The faint lines hidden in the fibers twisted for half a second, drawing themselves into a small symbol on the page.

A circle with a gap at the top.
Three short lines rising from the gap like rays.
One straight line cutting down through the center.

The symbol shone with a dull, colorless light, as if the lamp above had bent down and climbed inside it. Then it sank into the paper and vanished, leaving the page as blank as before.

Elias jerked his hand back. His fingertip burned, like he’d touched a kettle fresh off the stove.

He closed the ledger quickly, as if shutting it would trap whatever he’d just seen. His heart thudded so hard he was sure the clerk at the next table could hear it.

“Rook!” Master Sone’s voice cut across the hall. “Group C ledgers go to the back shelves, not your desk.”

“Yes, sir,” Elias called, his voice a little too high.

He picked up the heavy book, cradling it with both hands. As he walked between the shelves, the lamps above him flickered again—only above him this time, following his steps like nervous eyes.

A faint crackle followed the flicker. Not loud, but real.

He stopped.

The light steadied.

He took another step.

The lamps dimmed and brightened again, in time with his movement.

Elias forced himself to keep walking, teeth clenched, until he reached the return desk. He slid the ledger onto the pile and stepped away from the aisle as if it might drop out from under him.

Mira watched him from her table. “You’re acting strange,” she said quietly when he passed by.

“I know,” he whispered back. “I feel strange.”

He tried to work through the rest of his shift. Names blurred together. Dates slipped past without meaning. Every time he dipped his pen into the inkwell, he half expected the ink to twist into that same impossible symbol.

People in Ravendon told stories about “Marked Ones” sometimes, when the street lamps burned lower than usual or when the news-sheets hinted at trouble in the higher districts. Most laughed it off. Some swore they’d seen things they couldn’t explain. Only those in the upper circles, the people Elias never met and never expected to, spoke of such things with any seriousness.

Still, something about the symbol felt familiar, like a shape he’d seen in the corner of his eye a hundred times but never truly noticed until now.

When the bell finally rang to mark the end of the shift, the clerks closed their ledgers with tired hands. Elias packed his bag more slowly than usual. On his way out, he found himself drifting back to the return desk.

The ledger he’d carried earlier sat near the bottom of the stack. He pulled it free, ignoring the small frown from the clerk on duty, and opened it to the page he knew too well.

The line where Marlen Graf had been written was still blank, but the paper was different now—slightly darker, as if bruised from the inside. When he stared at it without blinking, he thought he could see the faint outline of that circle-and-line symbol, only visible at the edge of his vision.

The lamp above him went completely dark.

The rest of the hall stayed lit.

He felt every eye turn toward him.

Then the lamp flared back to life, brighter than before. Light spilled over the ledger, over his hands, over the widened eyes of the clerk at the desk.

Master Sone glared from across the hall. “If that lamp keeps acting up, Rook, I’ll move your seat tomorrow. I won’t have equipment failing over your head every week.”

“Yes, sir,” Elias said, closing the ledger with care.

He left the Bureau and stepped into the evening rain. The street outside was a shining blur of tram rails, carriage wheels, and reflected lamps. Elias started toward the tram stop, walking under the small metal roofs that jutted out from shopfronts to stay dry.

Ravendon at night felt different from Ravendon in the morning - quieter, as if the city were listening. Smoke from the factories drifted low over the rooftops. Somewhere in the distance, a bell struck the hour.

Elias rubbed his wrist, trying to shake off the tight, nervous feeling in his stomach.

A sharp sting cut across his skin.

He stopped under a street lamp and pushed his sleeve up.

A mark glowed faintly there, fresh and red, sinking slowly into his skin as if it had always belonged to him.

A broken circle.
Three tiny upward rays.
A straight line slicing down its middle.

The same symbol from the ledger.

Elias stared at it while the tram’s bell rang again in the distance.

His pulse hammered in his ears.

He knew one thing with sudden, cold certainty:

Whatever had happened in the Archive that morning… wasn’t finished with him yet.