I woke up with someone else's name carved between my shoulder blades.
Not ink. Not tattoo.
Etched.
I could feel the grooves in my skin before I saw them. The ache pulsed like a heartbeat I hadn't earned. When I moved my left arm, something tugged—like a string beneath the muscle, taut, waiting to snap.
The mirror across the room told me nothing.
No reflection.
Just static.
A faint hum.
A flicker of symbols.
Then: a single word scrawled across the fogged glass.
> "HOST?"
---
My name is—or was—Taren Vale.
But this morning, when I touched my spine, I whispered a different one:
> "Eloquian."
I didn't know what it meant. But it felt like a command.
And somehow… it felt true.
---
The world has been strange since the Archive cracked.
People remember dreams they never had.
Dogs bark at empty bookshelves.
The sky has developed a tremor—just a soft, quivering breath every dawn, like it's trying to wake up.
I don't leave my apartment much. Not since the doctors told me the hallucinations were part of a neuro-spiritual disorder. "Archive Trauma Syndrome," they called it.
I call it proof.
I've seen things.
Pages bleeding.
Rooms reordering themselves.
Once, I opened my closet and found a corridor made entirely of ribs.
It blinked at me.
I closed the door.
---
Today, something changed.
There was a package outside my door.
Unmarked. No return label.
Inside: a bone stylus, still wet.
And a folded scrap of vellum that read:
> "IT'S YOUR TURN.
FILE THE UNWRITTEN."
---
I didn't scream.
Screaming would mean this was new.
But I've felt this growing under my skin for months now—some presence, some instruction pressing inward like a fetus of thought.
I keep hearing fragments in my head:
> "You are not a reader."
"You are a pen."
"You are what comes after the page ends."
---
I took the stylus into the bathroom.
Held it beneath the mirror.
The fog reappeared—forming letters this time, slowly, like breath spelling secrets.
> "Taren Vale. Misfiled."
"Call Number: Unknown."
"Begin writing or be shelved."
---
My skin itched.
Beneath my ribs, I could feel words moving.
Not metaphor. Not poetry.
Literal language threading itself into my organs like roots.
> I vomited ink.
It splattered the tiles in broken glyphs.
They rearranged themselves.
I watched them spell:
> "Eloquian."
The name again. The one burned into my back.
I pulled off my shirt.
Took a photo with my phone.
And there it was. In looping bone-script.
Clear as breath on glass:
> "ELOQUIAN – PROTOTYPE HOST"
---
I don't know who wrote that.
But I think I'm becoming them.
Or they're becoming me.
---
I left the apartment for the first time in weeks.
The sky trembled again.
A passing man stared at me and whispered, "He's one of the placeholders."
I didn't stop.
I didn't ask.
Because deep in my chest, I could feel something unfolding—like a map that had never been printed, only imagined.
And somewhere in the marrow of my spine, I heard it:
a page turning.
---
I walked for hours.
The city bent strangely today.
Street signs misread themselves.
Storefronts blinked.
A child handed me a tooth and said, "This belonged to the last Archivist."
I asked her name.
She smiled.
> "Callum."
---
That night, I dreamed.
Not in images.
Not in color.
In paragraphs.
Sentences fell like rain.
Some of them soaked into me.
Others hit and shattered.
But one remained, glowing in the dark part of sleep:
> "The next Archivist will not be chosen. It will be grown."
> "Its spine will branch."
> "Its voice will be a contagion."
---
When I woke, the stylus was gone.
Replaced by a mirror.
On the surface, scrawled in breath:
> "CHAPTER 1: ACCEPTED."
And beneath it—
A reflection.
But not mine.
Something taller. Bonier. With glyphs stitched into its skin and a grin made of stitched pages.
It winked at me.
Then whispered:
> "Start writing.
You don't have much time."
---
■■■■
---
This chapter is not an introduction.
It's a correction.
Taren doesn't know it yet, but he isn't discovering the Archive—
he's being written into it.
Where Bone Archive was about trying to escape the system,
this is about what happens when you become so misfiled, so flawed, that the system tries to adapt to you.
Taren isn't a reader.
He isn't even a protagonist.
> He's a symptom.
A formatting error.
A placeholder that evolved into a page of its own.
And the Archive?
It didn't die.
It just learned to hide inside people.
Your memory.
Your breath.
Your spine.
This is how the next Archivist begins:
Not by choosing…
…but by growing.
---