🜂 Morvain’s Handbook: The Discovery

by Isendra, the Lioness, Keeper of the Codex

Entry 0:

It was not curiosity that led me into the forgotten vault, but a whisper of imbalance—like the low hum that precedes a storm.

The season was shifting. The moon hung thin and waning, its light bruised by cloud and distance. Somewhere above the labyrinth, summer bent toward its final breath. I felt the pull of endings—the quiet ache that comes before the first flame of renewal.

The corridors breathed dust and remembrance. I carried only a lamp and the Codex Stone, its pulse faint and patient, as though weighing whether I could yet bear its full light without fracture.

Something called from beneath the shelves—a tremor, almost a voice. When I brushed aside the veil of shadow, I saw it: a book small enough to fit in my hand, bound in black hide that shimmered with inverted light. Its edges quivered like something alive, and the air around it tasted of metal and sorrow.

The sigil upon its cover struck through me like a bell tolling memory.
Morvain’s mark.

He had been a scholar of the Mirror Arts, a master of inversion.

But his “knowledge” was never true seeing—it was the cunning of survival, the craft of bending others to will. Trained by the Hollow King himself, Morvain mistook cleverness for truth and indulgence for freedom. He spoke of his truth as though it were universal, teaching that pleasure and persuasion were proof of power. He called it enlightenment. It was only hunger wearing a crown.

I hesitated, thinking I should not touch the book—yet something beyond it called to me, not seduction but conscience, a deeper urging to witness what wished to remain unseen.

When I opened it, the ink moved. Words rearranged themselves into serpents of reasoning, each coiling around the next. The sentences gleamed like mirrors polished to blindness. They taught the art of scattering souls, of gilding corruption until it glittered like grace.

I felt its pull—the cold brilliance that once tempted the younger me, when I knew intellect and light but was naïve to shadow. I had once envied the ease with which others surrendered to such indulgence, wished for a moment that I could be unburdened by conscience. But I had seen where that path led: exile of the spirit long before exile of the flesh. That knowledge had driven me from the Citadel.

As I read, the Codex Stone stirred. Its hum deepened, spilling light across the pages. The words hissed and twisted, then softened. Meaning began to fracture, revealing seams of confession beneath the doctrine. Each incantation became an admission; each deceit, a doorway.

Then I understood.
This was not a book of mastery.
It was a wound—Morvain’s wound—sealed in intellect and pain, a relic of the bondage that still owned him.

Yet within that wound lay revelation. To expose his secrets was to free those still bound by them.

So I began to write. Not to correct, but to reveal—to hold the mirror steady until the shadow could see itself. Thus was born the practice I later called transmutation: the alchemy of awareness through compassion.

Morvain’s Handbook remains within the Codex now—not as a threat, but as a mirror. It still whispers, and I listen—not to obey, but to understand. For even poison, when held to the light, reveals what it once tried to cure.

— Isendra, The Lioness, Keeper of the Codex

“Every shadow once believed itself light.”—Onyx Iskra