PROLOGUE: THE FIRST LINK

The attic smelled of burnt sage and mildew. Moonlight streamed through a crack in the boarded-up window, slicing across the trembling needle in Aira’s seven-year-old hand. Her mother, Rina, knelt beside her, the glowing glyphs coiled around her forearms—Church-made chains, precise and cruel in their elegance.“Steady,” Rina whispered.Her voice was frayed at the edges, like rope holding too much weight. The botched healing glyph on her chest pulsed faintly, a failed Church remedy that was turning her lungs to rot.Aira’s breath hitched. The needle hovered over her bare forearm, a drop of indigo ink trembling at its tip. “What if I mess it up?”“Then you’ll learn.” Rina pressed a damp cloth to her own forehead, her skin slick with fever sweat. “But you won’t. Breathe. Let the needle listen.”The ink was Church-sanctioned, stolen from a monk’s satchel two nights prior. Aira had watched her mother cough blood into the gutter as she palmed it, her whisper fierce: “They don’t deserve to hoard this.”Now, the vial glowed between them, its contents swirling like liquid twilight.“Begin with the anchor point,” Rina said, guiding Aira’s hand to the soft flesh beneath her wrist. “A simple chain. One link. Just one.”The needle bit.Aira hissed. The pain was sharper than she’d imagined, burrowing into bone. But she didn’t flinch. She etched the first line, her hand shaking, the ink seeping into her skin like a whispered secret.Rina nodded. “Good. Now the curve. Slowly.”The chain’s loop warped, bleeding into a jagged hook.“No.” Rina’s grip tightened. “The Church’s glyphs demand perfection. One flaw, and the ink turns traitor.” She gestured to her own chest, the corrupted glyph festering there. “You saw what happens.”Aira’s throat tightened. She’d seen. She’d heard—her mother’s screams echoing through their tenement as the glyph devoured her from within.“Start over.”“But there’s barely enough—“It’s precious. I know.” Rina’s voice softened. “But so is your life. Again.”Three hours later, the chain gleamed on Aira’s wrist—a single, flawless link. The ink hummed beneath her skin, a low, resonant frequency that made the hairs on her neck rise.“Activate it,” Rina said.Aira pressed her thumb to the chain.The world shifted.For a heartbeat, she felt it—the energy, raw and electric, channeling through the glyph into her veins. The attic sharpened: dust motes frozen in moonlight, her mother’s labored breaths echoing like drumbeats, the sour tang of infection thickening the air.Then it faded, leaving her gasping.“What… what was that?”Rina’s eyes glittered. “A Church chain. Western glyphwork—for focus. Their scribes need steady hands for perfection.” She coughed, blood speckling her palm. “But you? You’ll use it to break their chains.”Aira stared at the glyph. “How?”Rina slumped against the wall, her strength spent. “You’ll learn. And when you do, you’ll rewrite every rule they’ve carved into our bones.”That night, Aira dreamt of ink.Not the Church’s indigo, but something older—a liquid starscape swirling in a vial. It sang to her in a language of storms and silence, its voice weaving through her new tattoo.The vial opened. The stars poured into her hands.She didn’t run. She reached.

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CHAPTER 1: SYNTAX AND SMOKE

The alley stank of ink and rot, the sacred and the spoiled. Aira’s fingertips trembled as she adjusted the brass loupes over her eyes, the lenses magnifying the jagged lines of the tattoo she was etching into the smuggler’s forearm.She hadn’t wanted this job. But the Church's mark on her name left her with little choice.The inkwell beside her pulsed with light, its glowing blue mist rising into the night, too bright. She clenched her jaw. The monastery’s patrols would spot the glow three blocks away.“Steady,” she hissed, more to herself than her client. The smuggler’s breath caught as the needle pierced his skin. The symbols had to be flawless: a single misplaced stroke, and the man’s desire for unerring aim could result in paralysis.Smugglers paid well—enough to keep her fed, hidden, breathing. But it wasn’t just for coin or survival. Every glyph she inked was an act of defiance. A reclamation. A quiet war. The Church had taken everything. She wasn’t done taking it back.The ink, thick and iridescent, like liquid starlight, coiled under her needle, resisting. It always resisted. Like it was alive.A clatter echoed down the alley. Aira froze. She felt the tremor in his arm where she braced him — breath shallow, pulse visible at his throat. Too fast. She glanced at the inkwell. The glow had deepened to violet.She just needed to finish the job and vanish before the glow gave her away.Shit. The energy was unstable tonight, pulling from a universe where storms crackled like living things. Only the ink could open a path for power to flow from other dimensions.The smuggler’s skin burned beneath her fingers. She’d have to compensate—add a modifier glyph near the radial artery before the energy backlash seared his nerves.Please let this hold.“You said this would work,” the smuggler growled, his free hand twitching toward the dagger at his hip. He was broad, scar-slashed, with a glyph of strength on his neck — it shimmered erratically, unreliable.“It will,” she said, showing no doubt. Her own tattoos itched beneath her sleeves, the old scars along her collarbone humming in dissonance with the fresh ink. She’d learned the hard way that the Church’s blessed syntax was a trap. Her mother’s face flickered in her memory, skin blistered black, eyes milky with pain, after a botched healing glyph. Aira had been eight when she’d vowed to rewrite the language. To fix it.The needle bit again. The smuggler’s skin hissed where the ink met blood, tendrils of smoke curling upward. Aira’s loupes fogged. Too much energy. She swiped her sleeve across her face and squinted. The glyphs were warping, the crystalline pigment fracturing into prismatic shards under his skin. Eastern syntax, smuggled from the war-torn Kaelian Isles, clashed with the base Western alphabet. Eastern syntax was always more fluid, less rigid—but mixing it with Western glyphs? Like oil in flame. A dialectic cocktail waiting to ignite.“Almost there,” she whispered. Her own pulse echoed the smuggler’s now. Only a few more strokes.A shout shattered the silence. Torchlight flooded the alley. Monastery robes, crimson and gold, swarmed the entrance. The smuggler swore and lurched, elbow knocking the inkwell. Aira’s needle skidded, slicing a rogue line through the glyph.“No—!”The ink ignited.Fire erupted from the man’s arm, not orange but green, reeking of sulfur and burnt copper. He screamed, thrashing as the flames devoured his sleeve. Aira scrambled back, the inkwell shattering at her feet. Crystalline pigment splattered the stones, each droplet glowing with light from another world.“Heretic!” The nearest monk spat, blade flashing. His tattoos writhed like serpents beneath his cowl, glyphs shaped to punish, not heal. “The Church decrees—”Aira slammed her forearms together. The air crackled. Her hidden tattoos flared awake, glyphs forged in stolen ink channeling energy from a dozen worlds. Light bent around her, refracting in sharp, impossible angles, like glass fracturing under pressure. The monk’s blade passed through her as if she were smoke. He stumbled forward, wide-eyed as she stepped past him.She ran. The city blurred into streaks of light and shadow. Her vision fractured as she fled, the world splitting into prismatic shards. The refraction glyph had taken too much from her. She ducked through a sewer grate, her breath ragged. The sewers hissed with the echo of distant footsteps. Aira pressed herself against the damp brick wall, her tattoos writhing like caged serpents under her sleeves. Her veins flashed ominously, streaks of violet and gold, Eastern storms warring with Western chains.But then, a whimper. Aira froze. Not the skitter of rats. Human.She followed the sound around a bend. A woman crouched, her arms wrapped around a child. The boy’s breath came in shallow rasps, his skin mottled with the same blackened veins Aira had seen on her mother in her final hours. A Church-issued healing glyph glowed faintly on his chest, flawed, its syntax smudged by an amateur hand. The woman’s fingers trembled as she attempted to adjust it, whispering a prayer to the Patriarch.“Stop,” Aira snapped. “That glyph’s unstable. It’ll kill him.”The woman flinched, clutching the boy tighter. “The monks blessed it,” the woman whispered. “It’s all we could afford.”Aira’s throat tightened. The boy’s eyes — fevered, pleading — were her own, once. She’d begged like that. The monks had refused. “The faithful do not question the ink’s will.”Above, shouts echoed. Inquisitors. They’d tracked her this far.You can’t stop for this, Aira told herself. Not now. Not again. This isn’t your fight.The boy coughed, ink-black spittle flecking his lips.The woman grabbed Aira’s wrist. “Please. They’re hunting you, I know, but… he’s all I have.” Her voice cracked. She wasn’t begging Aira anymore, but the air. Any god listening.Aira’s tattoos seared. Memories erupted: her mother’s hand going limp, the stench of burning flesh, the monks standing silent as judges. Helpless. She’d been so helpless. But not this time.“Lie him down,” Aira hissed.“What?”“Now.”The woman hesitated, then obeyed. Aira knelt, rolling up her sleeves. Her tattoos pulsed, volatile, dialects clashing beneath her skin. She’d need to improvise, again. Her inkwell and needle were gone—lost in the alley. She pulled a spare vial of ink from her pocket, uncorked it, and inserted an index finger, wetting her fingertip with ink.“This will hurt,” she warned.The boy’s tattoo was a botched Western script, its loops too tight. Aira touched her fingertip to his chest, her Eastern storm-scripts flaring. Lightning arced between her fingertip and the boy’s chest, scorching the old glyph away. The boy screamed. The mother lunged, but Aira snarled, “Hold him!”Her hands shook as she summoned the ink’s power. She didn’t have the right syntax, the right tools, only rage and regret. She wetted her finger again, and etched a hybrid glyph over the boy’s heart, blending Eastern resilience with Western precision. The ink resisted, but she forced it deeper, pressing it in with her finger.The boy gasped. His chest glowed—not the Church’s cold blue, but a warm, solar gold. The hybrid glyph held.The woman wept, clutching her son. “Thank you, thank you—”
Above, a grate screeched open. Torchlight flooded the tunnel. Aira turned to flee, but the woman caught her wrist.“You could’ve left us,” she said softly.Aira wrenched free. “Yeah, well, I’m an idiot.”She ran, the echoes of the woman’s gratitude clinging to her like smoke.
In the tunnels below the city, where the echoes of old rebellions still clung to the walls, her footsteps rang against the stone—too fast, too loud. Her tattoos pulsed beneath her sleeves, no longer defiant—just wrong.Not just wrong. Corrupted.She pressed her palm to her arm, where the glyphs had begun to fray. The pain had followed her since Kaelia. Since the first time she broke the syntax.She’d pushed too far, rewritten the rules too many times.Now the rules were rewriting her.“I can fix it,” she whispered into the dark. “I have to.”But the ink had stopped whispering.
Now it warned.And this time, it was warning her.

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about the author

E. Kaelian writes cinematic, emotionally-charged speculative fiction that blends fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery. Spliced Light is their debut novel—a dark, lyrical story about ink, identity, and the fractures between worlds.

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