The door's scream died as quickly as it began. Elara pressed her back to the cold vault wall, glass shards digging into her palm. The Quill lay motionless on the floor, its bone surface dull and innocent.
Footsteps echoed beyond the door. Too light to be Kaelis.
She grabbed the Quill, ignoring the burn in her blistered hand, and crept toward the sound. The vault's narrow corridors twisted like a serpent's spine, their walls lined with memory-urns that pulsed faintly. She could never decide if they sounded more like heartbeats or distant laughter.
The intruder stood at the intersection of three halls, his silhouette haloed by the faint glow of a star-chart clutched in his left hand. A prosthetic arm—smooth, metallic, threaded with veins of blue light—hung at his side. Elara froze. She'd heard stories of the star-cartographers who mapped the Atrium's fractures, but none had ever breached the Archives.
"You missed a shard," the man said without turning. His voice was rough, as though he'd swallowed stardust. "Third shelf, behind the urn labeled *Requiem for a Drowned City*. Your sister's work, I presume?"
Elara's throat tightened. "Who are you?"
"Arian." He turned, revealing a face younger than his voice—early thirties, perhaps, with eyes the color of storm-lit seawater. The star-chart in his hand flared as their gazes met. "And you're running out of time. Kaelis has six Archivists converging on the east stairwell."
The Quill vibrated in her grip. *Trust him*, it seemed to whisper, though its voice had vanished with the shattered orb.
"Why help me?"
Arian's prosthetic fingers flexed, the blue veins brightening. "Let's call it professional curiosity. Your sister's final map… it's not just about the dome." He stepped closer, close enough that she caught the scent of burnt ozone clinging to his coat. "She found the First Library. The one that existed before the Archivists rewrote history."
Elara's pulse roared. Liora had whispered of such a place in their childhood—a labyrinth of living books that remembered every unwritten truth.
"Prove it," she said.
Arian lifted his star-chart. The lines shifted under her gaze, resolving into a familiar pattern—the birthmark on Liora's wrist, a spiral of three interconnected circles. A design Elara had drawn in the margins of her notebooks since childhood.
"Your sister left markers," he said. "This one's etched into the floor of a brothel in the lower wards. Care to see?"
The decision crystallized before she could second-guess it. Elara nodded.
They moved through the Archives' underbelly, Arian navigating with unsettling precision. He paused twice—once to avoid a patrol of Archivists whose lanterns oozed black smoke, once to press his ear to a wall and murmur, "The stones here sing of your seventh birthday. You cried when they took your storybook."
Elara said nothing. She remembered.
The brothel stood in the Ashen Quarter, where the dome's fractures cast permanent twilight. Arian kicked open a rusted grate leading to the cellar. The birthmark spiral glowed faintly on the damp floor, illuminated by luminescent fungi crawling up the walls.
"Place your hand on it," Arian instructed. "And don't let go of the Quill."
The spiral burned cold. For three heartbeats, nothing. Then—
The vision struck like a falling star.
Liora at sixteen, kneeling in this same cellar, the Quill carving symbols into her arm as she wept. "They'll come for you," she told the vision-Elara, her voice layered with echoes. "Follow the cracks in the sky. Follow the god in the Quill."
The scene shifted—a vast chamber beneath the Atrium, its walls lined with books bound in human skin. Liora stood before a pedestal, holding a key made of frozen light. "It's not a cage," she whispered. "It's an egg."
Elara wrenched her hand free, gasping. The cellar walls bled shadow, the fungi's glow now pulsing in time with Arian's prosthetic veins.
"What was that?" she demanded.
"A memory even the Archivists couldn't erase." Arian crouched, tracing the fading spiral. "Your sister hid them in places they'd never think to look. Brothels. Taverns. The nests of sky-rats in the dome's upper ribs."
The Quill jerked in Elara's hand, dragging her toward the eastern wall. She resisted, but the artifact's strength surprised her. Stone crumbled under its tip, revealing a hidden alcove.
Inside lay a child's woolen glove, moth-eaten and stained with old blood. Elara's blood. She'd lost it the day Liora died.
Beneath the glove sat a glass vial filled with swirling black smoke.
"Don't—" Arian began.
Elara unstoppered it.
The smoke congealed into words above her palm: *The Archivists made you forget. You held the Quill first. You started the fracture.*
Footsteps thundered above them. Arian cursed, hauling her toward the grate. "They're here. Move!"
But Elara lingered, staring at the smoke-words now burning themselves into her skin. The truth struck like Kaelis's palm across her cheek—the visions hadn't shown Liora's memories.
They'd shown hers.
The first Archivists burst through the cellar door as the Quill erupted in light. Arian's shout tangled with the sound of shattering stone. Elara's last coherent thought before the world dissolved was that the Archivists' lanterns weren't smoking.
They were screaming.
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