The Great Scriptorium of Lyra smelled of dust motes dancing in sunbeams and the slow, patient decay of paper. I was a mender of books, a surgeon of spines and pages. My life was a quiet composition of vellum, gum arabic, and the hushed turn of a folio. And from across the vast, echoing chamber, there was Rhys.
Rhys, the senior cartographer, moved through the world as if he’d charted its ley lines and knew its secret shortcuts. Light seemed to favor him, catching the gold threads in his tunic, the easy confidence in his smile. He possessed a quality the younger scribes whispered about but couldn’t name, an effortless gravity that pulled all eyes toward him. It was only later, when I found the book, that I found the word for it: *rizz*. A strange, sharp little word, like a flick of a flint, sparking.
The book was an astronomer’s forgotten almanac, *Coelum Inexploratum*, its binding frayed like an old man’s beard. As I gently separated its water-damaged pages, I found the notes. They were written in a silvery, almost invisible ink that only appeared when the light struck it just so. A delicate, looping script in the margins, a ghost of a voice.
The first legible entry was next to a chart of a lost constellation. “He pilots the star-sailer with such… *rizz*,” it read. “I am merely ballast.”
I felt a jolt of recognition that was both alien and intimate. I, too, felt like ballast in the magnificent room where Rhys worked, my own quiet diligence a leaden weight against his soaring charisma.
I became obsessed. The almanac was no longer a job; it was a confidante. I searched for more of the Stargazer’s words, as I’d begun to call her. She wrote of their journey, not one of lovers, but not one of strangers, either. “This unending *situationship*,” she lamented beside a diagram of a planetary eclipse. “To be constantly in his orbit, but never his world.”
My heart ached with understanding. Just yesterday, Rhys had paused by my workbench to admire my repair of a torn scroll. His praise was a sunburst, warming me for a fleeting moment before he moved on, leaving me in the penumbra of his wake.
The Stargazer’s notes grew more philosophical. On a page detailing the phases of a triple moon, she had scrawled, “I must find my *main character energy*. This ship is vast, but my world has become so small.”
The phrase was a key turning in a lock I hadn’t known was there. I had been content in my small world of ink and parchment, but now the Stargazer’s yearning had unsettled me. A subtle *vibe shift* had occurred in the Scriptorium’s dusty air. The silence no longer felt peaceful; it felt expectant. My patient work no longer felt like a calling; it felt like hiding.
I developed a routine. I would work on the almanac by day, and by night, I’d retreat to my small chamber, forsaking company, shunning the evening meal in the refectory. I’d just lie there, replaying the Stargazer’s words and my own non-conversations with Rhys. This must be what she meant in a later entry, when she wrote about entering her *goblin mode* era—a retreat into the self, fueled by snacks pilfered from the kitchens and the dim comfort of solitude.
Her final entries were the most desperate. “Am I *delulu*,” she wrote, the word jagged and strange, “to think one day he will see me, not as part of the crew, but as a star in my own right?”
*Delulu*. Delusional. The word was a slap. Was I? For hoping Rhys’s smiles were meant only for me? For composing sonnets in my head about the way he pushed a stray lock of dark hair from his brow?
I reached the last page of the almanac. The silvery ink was frantic, a spider’s silk caught in a gale. The Stargazer wrote of a final, desperate act—a dangerous course she had plotted, a shortcut through a nebula that would either make them legends or dust. It was a gamble to finally win his notice. The margin was empty after that. A story unfinished. My heart sank.
I ran a finger over the blank space, mourning this kindred spirit I’d never know. But my finger snagged on a slight indentation. I angled the page to the light. There, almost etched into the paper, was a different script. A stronger, cleaner hand, written in a faded brown ink I recognized as iron gall. It was below the Stargazer’s last, desperate scrawl.
It said: “I read all your notes. I waited.”
And beneath it, a name. Not the star-captain’s. A different one. *Lucien*.
Someone else had been watching her, reading her secret heart in the margins, waiting for her to see him.
At that exact moment, a shadow fell over my workbench. It was Rhys. He was holding a newly finished chart, the vellum still smelling of the sea and fresh ink. It was a map of the northern sky, constellations rendered in brilliant lapis lazuli.
“Elara,” he said, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it. He pointed to a small, unlabeled cluster of stars, faint and lovely, near the edge of the charted heavens. “I discovered a new nebula. The council requires a name.” He hesitated, his usual confidence gone. For the first time, I saw a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. “I was thinking of naming it for you. If that’s alright.”
I looked from his hopeful face to the name *Lucien* in the book. The quiet observer. The one who read the marginalia.
The Stargazer had been looking at the wrong star.
I felt a warmth spread through my chest that had nothing to do with a fleeting sunbeam. It was my own light, igniting. My *delulu* era was over. A new one was beginning. I slowly closed the ancient almanac, its secret kept safe.
“I’d like that very much,” I said, and for the first time, my voice in the great, echoing chamber did not feel small at all.
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