They never let her keep the lanterns.
The Archivists said light bred weakness, that true scribes worked in the dark where memories couldn't cling. But Liora Vey was twelve years old when she stole her first shard of bottled starlight, cracking open a memory-lantern's glass with shaking hands. Its glow pooled on her desk, illuminating the forbidden thing she'd smuggled from the Archives—a scrap of parchment older than the Atrium itself.
The glyphs writhed under the light. Primordial script.
She'd promised Elara, her little sister, that she'd find the story behind their mother's disappearance. The Archivists had erased her constellation three winters past, leaving only a smudge of indigo in the sky. A mercy, they'd called it. Some memories are knives best unhanded.
But the glyphs… they itched.
Liora dipped her quill—not in common ink, but in the silver-black sludge pooling in her cupped palm. Lumen-ink. She'd siphoned it from the Archives' forbidden vaults, heedless of the way it ate through her gloves, her skin.
The first stroke ignited the parchment.
Not words. A map.
The Shattered Atrium unfurled before her, but wrong—a jagged jewel suspended in a void, its dome not fractured but bitten, as though something vast had taken a single, ravenous bite. Shadows pooled in the corners of the room, thicker than night.
"Little thief," whispered a voice like collapsing stars.
The Quill slid from her desk, bone-white and humming. She'd heard rumors—a sentient artifact sealed in the deepest vault, a relic that devoured scribes who dared wield it. But the Quill settled into her grip as though it had always belonged there.
"Show me," she breathed.
It moved.
Glyphs burned into the parchment, searing her retinas: The Atrium is a wound. The Archivists are surgeons who pick at scabs. Your kind were never meant to remember.
Blood trickled from her nose, hot and metallic. The lumen-ink was spreading, silver veins branching up her wrist. She should stop. She knew she should stop.
But Elara's face flickered in her mind—her sister, six years old and still leaving honeycakes beneath their mother's empty chair. Find her. Please.
The Quill carved faster.
When the Archivists broke down her door, Liora was laughing.
"Look!" She thrust the parchment at them, her eyes twin voids, her hair streaked white where the ink had kissed it. "The dome isn't breaking—it's hatching!"
They took her sister first.
Elara's screams echoed through the Archives as they dragged her away. Liora fought, ink-blackened fingers clawing at the Archivists' masks, but the Quill had gone silent. Cold.
"The child is corrupted," said the Archivist-Master, his voice a blade wrapped in silk. "A kindness, really. We'll make her a star. A quiet one."
They forced Liora to watch as they unraveled Elara's memories, strand by strand, weaving them into a constellation too small to hold a seven-year-old's dreams. When they finished, her sister's star was the color of forgotten laughter.
But Liora had learned the Quill's first lesson: All cages have keys. All keys are lies.
She smiled as they poured the lumen-ink down her throat.
"You missed a page," she rasped, and died with the taste of starlight on her tongue.
The next morning, the Archivist-Master found a single parchment in his sanctum.
A child's drawing: two girls holding hands beneath a cracked dome, their faces smudged. Around them, shadows bloomed like ink dropped in water.
And in the corner, a glyph only he could read.
Remember.