Rin stared at the stone in his palm, unmoving.
It no longer glowed, yet the lingering warmth in his skin told him it hadn't been a trick of the light. The pulsing rhythm that had echoed his heartbeat was gone, but something else lingered—like static clinging to thought. Faint. Persistent.
He sat back down, the wooden chair creaking beneath him. The stone remained in his open palm, inert. Ordinary, now. Or pretending to be.
He narrowed his eyes, then slowly turned it over.
There were markings on the underside. Faint carvings, shallow yet precise, as though etched by something far sharper than a blade. He hadn't noticed them before.
Rin leaned closer. The symbols weren't English, nor Japanese. Not Latin either. They curled and bent in ways that looked almost familiar—like he should recognize them. But he didn't. The symbols were strange, foreign—utterly alien.
His mind couldn't place them. They were almost too perfect, like something made by another world entirely. And yet, for some reason, the more he stared, the more they seemed... almost intuitive.
He reached for his phone and quickly searched for anything that might explain it. When the page failed to load, he cursed under his breath. He tried again. The screen blinked off.
Great, he thought. Of course, it wouldn't work.
Rin sat still for a moment, a sense of unease crawling up his spine. He turned back to the stone, his fingers lingering on its cool surface, and tried to shake off the feeling.
He didn't know why, but he couldn't stop looking at it.
Then, something unusual happened.
The symbols on the stone began to shimmer—faint, barely perceptible, but undeniably there. Like the light was caught in the carvings themselves. And then, in an instant, they seemed to shift.
The stone had become more than just an object. The lines on its surface weren't just random markings—they formed words. Words he couldn't understand, but they were there. No, not just there—present.
He frowned, staring at the strange, curved letters. He couldn't read them. They weren't anything he recognized. Some part of him knew that. His mind struggled to grasp it, but it couldn't—there was no way he'd seen anything like this before.
The letters glimmered again, and the words stayed clear, locked in place, as if they were imprinted on his very thoughts.
κόσμος κάμπτεται που ψυχή συντρίβεται.
θύρα νοίγεται ταν οδεὶς βλέπει.
δεσμὸς γιγνώσκει πρότερον σο.
"What is this language?"
Rin's heart skipped. He had no idea what it meant. No idea how the symbols had even appeared. His mind tried to make sense of it, but it felt like trying to catch smoke with bare hands. The words seemed to buzz in his head,
What... He thought, trying to make sense of it. But no, the words didn't fit. He didn't know this language. It wasn't anything he recognized.
A strange weight settled over him, like the words were a key to something. But to what?
He placed the stone back down on his desk, his fingers still tingling from contact. He sat back, his head spinning as he tried to process what had just happened. The room felt different now. Something had changed. But he couldn't understand why.
The stone lay in his palm, still cold. Still lifeless. And yet, Rin couldn't shake the feeling that whatever it was... it was only the beginning.