---
---
The skies did not calm.
If anything, they cracked wider — streaks of light bleeding from fractures in the upper atmosphere, like something watching from the other side of the sky.
EXIN didn't look up.
He was looking down.
Where the construct had fallen, a spiral staircase had emerged — bone-white, impossibly clean.
No dust touched it.
No time aged it.
It descended into the ground like a needle piercing memory.
---
> "One ruin after another," he muttered.
"But this one smells like something older… something afraid."
He stepped onto the first stair.
A pulse answered.
Not of mana.
Of recorded silence.
---
The deeper he went, the less the world followed.
No sound.
No smell.
Not even thought seemed to carry far.
Here, truth wasn't spoken — it was archived.
And soon… he reached it:
A hall of bones.
---
Not skeletons.
Not remains.
Scrolls.
Thousands of them.
Each carved into long, curled spines, bound by sinew, marked in the forgotten tongue of the first world.
The Bone Archive.
---
EXIN ran his fingers along one. A memory opened in his mind — not his own.
> A god falling in love with a mortal.
A world dying so that child could live.
A tower built from the ribs of a regretful titan.
Each scroll was a confession.
A failure.
A truth someone didn't want to carry — so they carved it into the bones of their ancestors instead.
---
And then he saw it.
In the center of the hall.
Not a scroll.
A throne — woven from his bones.
Spine. Ribs. Skull.
Laid out like a sculpture of remembrance.
Someone had built a god out of the parts he'd discarded.
---
He stepped closer.
A name was etched into the skull's crown.
> "EXIN // TRUTHSEVERED"
> "Truth severed… from what?" he asked aloud.
A voice answered — low, female, and gentle.
> "From the part of you that still wanted to be forgiven."
He turned.
A woman stood there.
Wearing robes stitched from memory.
Eyes filled with sorrow.
Hair drifting as if underwater.
> "Who are you?"
> "I am the one who made the Archive."
"I am the one who watched you fall."
"I am the one who could not save you."
---
She stepped forward.
In her hand was a bone-knife, humming softly.
> "This was yours," she said.
> "You used it to carve your last memory. The one you never let yourself see."
She held it out.
> "Are you ready to remember the thing that shattered you?"
---
EXIN stared at the blade.
It glowed with old blood.
With forbidden truth.
With intention.
He took it.
And for the first time…
He didn't resist what came next.
---
The Archive exploded in his vision.
Memory surged—
A battlefield.
His mother.
A scream he never answered.
A sister he left behind.
A lie he told himself: "I'll come back for them."
---
> But he never did.
And now…
He remembered.
And the sixth mark burned itself across his arm:
🜂 The Mark of Broken Return
> A wound that never healed.
A gate to memory that cuts both ways.
Power:
EXIN can reopen any memory — his or another's — and drag the truth out of it, weaponized.
But each time he does… he must relive the cost.
---
He gasped, falling to one knee.
The woman knelt beside him.
> "You've remembered enough for today."
"The last mark… waits where all things end."
EXIN stood.
Eyes clearer.
Voice steady.
> "Then I'll walk there."
> "Even if the path is made of everything I broke."
---
The Archive sealed behind him.
The staircase vanished.
And above ground…
The sky finally screamed.
---