There were no scrolls in the village.
No ink, no parchment. Just dirt, ash, and forgotten walls. The only "books" were the lines carved into old hands and the stories etched into silence.
But Arion had lived in a world where knowledge ruled, where ideas became skyscrapers and empires. He had lived once in pages and formulas, surrounded by whiteboards and touchscreen projections.
Now, his chalk was a bone splinter.
His paper—air and memory.
---
Every day after chores, after the clanging of empty pots and the wheezing of the forge fires, Arion would slip behind the butcher's shed, where soot clung to the walls and nobody came looking for broken boys.
There, he drew.
Not to be seen.
Not to be remembered by others.
But to not forget himself.
---
He began with the Circle of Retention—a simple diagram he remembered from his early education.
A wheel divided into eight sections: observe, question, connect, diagram, test, repeat, record, teach.
He scratched it into soot with his fingertip.
Then erased it with a breath.
Then redrew it again, slower.
He murmured the steps aloud, committing them not to page, but to practice.
Then came the structures—bracing angles for stronger mud walls, airflow tunnels beneath stoves, lever systems using rocks and vines.
He couldn't build them all yet.
But he could remember.
And that memory—he practiced like a martial form.
---
Some children watched him once.
Saw him muttering to shadows, drawing invisible shapes into the smoke of cookfires.
They called him names.
Mocked his "air writing."
But the old beggar Kelan only laughed when Arion told him.
"They laughed at fire once too. Before someone taught it to stay in a lamp."
---
By the third week, Arion's mind was no longer a scattered archive of two lifetimes.
It was becoming a library.
Fire techniques in one section—efficiency, heat retention, alternative fuels.
Shelter logic in another—ventilation angles, bracing strategies, collapsible supports.
And now: food.
Or rather, the lack of it.
His body was changing—bones lengthening, hunger increasing. The pit in his stomach never left.
Neither did the aching silence in the village.
---
The people were growing thinner.
The elders said it was a "lean season."
Arion remembered it differently.
"Food shortage is a logistics failure first. A drought second."
No one was measuring yields.
No one counted mouths to feed.
The village rotated fields by habit, not reason. Planted what they had, not what grew best. Stored by instinct, not records.
He needed to fix that.
But he couldn't do it openly—not yet.
So he did the only thing he could.
He drew a new book.
Not in ink.
Not in fire.
But in air and hunger.
---
He drew seed diagrams in the dirt with his toe.
He whispered about crop cycles to his sister while they scavenged roots.
He mimed irrigation layouts with sticks and pebbles when alone.
And each time, he wiped them away—because knowledge here was dangerous if it came from the wrong mouth.
But the ideas stayed.
They stayed because he had written them in the oldest place left to him:
His mind.
---
Soon, he would test these books—not in schools, but in soil.
But first, he needed to understand the real depth of the problem.
He needed to see the hunger.
To feel it.
And he would.
Because in the next days to come, empty bowls would speak louder than scrolls.