Rayon stood before the Archive's great doors—titanic slabs of obsidian inlaid with shifting glyphs that responded to thought, not touch. A single rune hovered at eye level, flickering between question and declaration: ? — .
He pressed a palm against its cool surface. It vibrated like a heartbeat, low and insistent. The question-glyph pulsed. Behind him, Correction's breath caught—metallic tang on her tongue, an echo of gates left ajar.
"What waits inside," she asked, voice distant, "is more than history."
Rayon nodded but didn't speak. He felt the fine grit of ink-dust under his fingernails and tasted rusted parchment in the air. The Archive's breath was the smell of old contracts and new betrayals.
He thought of his brother—of that torn contract fragment—and of the promise he'd made: to give words agency, not impotence.
With a soft creak, the doors parted. Beyond lay corridors of polished stone, stacked with cubbyholes that contained rolled scrolls, codices bound in glass, and ledger-trees transplanted into wooden frames. Each frame's bark pulsed with life: when touched, it shivered, projecting phantom sentences across the walls in silver glyph-ink.
As they passed, a frame trembled. Correction's fingertips brushed a seam. A projection flared: "Subject: Silence. Tag: Scribe. Status: Archived." A wisp of memory slid out—a ghost voice reading from a lost journal. It whispered about a child who died with secrets still burning in her chest.
Rayon closed his eyes. "Scribes become ghosts when stories end too soon," he whispered.
They moved deeper, where the air grew colder. Scrolls adhered to shelves like stubborn cicadas, their parchment dry and humming faintly. Torresian lanterns overhead gleamed, filaments of aetherwire thrumming in time with distant heartbeat glyphs.
A sudden echo—a page turning three halls away. Rayon raised a hand; the echo stilled. He could feel the Archive watching him.
"Rule of Glyph-Archives," he murmured: They record intent, not truth. Break the intent, and the archive bleeds fiction.
A shift in the corridor: a glyph-portal sealed itself with a snap. He studied the gold-lined seam. "They're quarantining sections," he said. "Locking away what they fear we'll find."
Correction's eyes flickered. "They hid her name in the Silent Wing."
Rayon's breath caught. The Silent Wing: where lost Tokens and unspoken Codes went to die.
They turned left at the intersection—signs pointed only with glyphs, no words. He recognized one: a half-circle with a missing spine. The gate into silence.
Ahead, an archway framed a vaulted room. In its center, a single lectern bore an open tome, pages blank but for a single line at the top: "What was never said shapes what remains." Below, the pages rippled, waiting.
Rayon stepped forward. The floor beneath him hummed. He felt the contract on his sleeve itch—a hunger to be read aloud.
He placed the torn fragment on the lectern. Instantly, the blank pages pulsed. Words streamed in silver: his brother's name, followed by a date, then an ellipsis.
A gust of chilled wind surged. Scripts scrolled through the air, spelling out memories of loss and longing. Rayon's vision blurred with tears he refused to shed.
Correction touched his arm. "Do you regret it?" she asked.
He inhaled the cold. "Regret is a closing. I need the question to stay open."
Together, they watched the tome absorb the fragment. The page glowed, then dimmed—blank again, but nothing was lost.
A distant wail echoed through the Archive, then faded.
The doors behind them closed. A new glyph hovered on the lectern's frame: ! .
Rayon offered her his hand. "We carry what wasn't said. That is our proof."
She took it, and together they departed, leaving the Archive's ghosts writing themselves into new stories.