The Fading Scripture of Brother Aris

Fiction

The Scriptorium smelled of cold stone and burnt myrrh. Brother Aris lay on the basalt plinth, his breathing shallow, his chest rising in a slow, erratic rhythm. He was eighty four years old. The skin of his torso was a map of translucent parchment, traced with the blue threads of failing veins. Elian knelt beside him with a pot of iron-gall ink and a bundle of vellum. He waited for the incense to take hold. As the smoke thickened, Aris entered the ritual trance, his eyes rolling back to reveal only the whites. Slowly, the skin of his ribs began to shimmer. Pigment, dormant for decades, rose to the surface like oil in water. The scripture appeared in a deep, obsidian violet, the letters swirling in a precise, cursive script that defied the natural contours of the muscle. Elian began to write. He copied the first line of the Third Canto: 'The wind does not carry the seed, it carries the memory of the forest.' As Elian reached the second stanza, he noticed a tremor in the ink. A word, 'eternal', began to blur. The edges of the letters softened, turning a pale grey, then a ghostly white. The pigment did not fade like a bleached cloth; it evaporated. It rose from the skin in a fine, iridescent mist that vanished into the air of the room. Aris gasped, a sudden, sharp intake of breath. He shifted his weight, and a whole sentence on his left flank dissolved. The ink retreated into the pores, leaving behind a blank patch of sallow skin. Elian pressed his pen harder into the vellum, his hand shaking. He recognized the pattern. The scripture was tied to the monk's consciousness. As Aris lost the memory of the words, the ink lost its grip on the flesh. The biological manuscript was being erased by the onset of dementia. 'Stay,' Elian whispered, though the ritual forbade speaking to the Sleeper. 'Stay with the text.' He moved to the final chapter, the one concerning the Great Silence. The ink here was already fragmented. Vowels were missing. Consonants hung like broken teeth on the curve of Aris's hip. Elian scrambled to piece together the meaning, filling the gaps with his own knowledge of the liturgy, but the ink was fleeing faster now. By the time the incense burned down to a nub of ash, the last paragraph had vanished. Elian looked down at his vellum. He had captured the structure, but the core of the final revelation was a void. He looked at Brother Aris, who was waking from the trance. The monk blinked, his eyes cloudy and vacant. He looked at the vellum, then at his own bare chest, and smiled as if he had forgotten why he was lying on a slab of stone in a cold room.