History is what survives forgetting. Magic is what was erased.

Alric Velas was once an apprentice archivist of the Obscurati Order, trained to categorize forbidden texts and seal away dangerous truths. But when he discovers a page that should not exist—a page that speaks—he becomes infected with knowledge that cannot be forgotten.

Branded by an ancient glyph and bound to a sentient, lying book named Noxa, Alric is cast out of the archive and erased from the Order’s records. Now nameless and hunted, he descends into the ruins of a world built on lost memory.

In the city’s abandoned districts, echoes of forgotten wars walk the streets. Cults fight over relics no one remembers creating. And beneath it all, the Thousand-Faced Archive—a living network of vanished gods and truths—begins to stir.

Alric must uncover the pathways of cognitive magic, where rituals are performed with memories, and the price of power is identity itself. But the deeper he recalls, the more he becomes what he never wanted to be:

A myth. A mistake. A rewritten man.

The alley stank of wet ink, old garbage, and rusted pipewater.


Alric stumbled into it like a man reborn wrong. The wall behind him—an uneven brick arch veined with copper tubes—sealed itself with a hiss, leaving no trace of the glowing recall gate he'd passed through.


He was outside the Archive for the first time in nearly a year.


Above, the heavy roofs of the Sunken Quarter leaned inward like gossiping old women. Chimneys wept soot. Iron drainage chains ticked against stone. Rain slicked the cobbles. There were no lights—no glyph-globes or memory beacons. Just oily puddles and broken doorways.


But the world felt... wrong. Quieter. Like something fundamental had been cut loose.


His left arm still burned beneath the sleeve. The mark—Noxa's glyph—was no longer shifting. It had stabilized. Now it resembled a spiral etched in broken script, like a child's attempt to redraw a god's name.


A tattered banner hung over the alley mouth, half-torn by time.


ABANDONED – CENSUS ERASED BY ORDER OF CITY SCRIPTURE


This place wasn't just ignored—it had been deleted.


No patrols. No archivists. No rites of preservation. Just a slum built atop forgotten brick and smudged memory.


> "Where better for a man no longer written?"


Not absent—he could still feel it, coiled somewhere behind his eyes—but it had gone still. Dormant. Satisfied, maybe. Or waiting.


He leaned against a rust-stained wall and slid down to the wet ground. The adrenaline crash hit him like a wave.


He had no plan. No allies. No sanctuary.


Across the alley, half-hidden in a shadowed doorway, someone was watching.


Just a pair of eyes—sharp, narrow, alert.


Chapter 5 - Part V – “Ink in the Gutters”