I bleed something that wasn't blood last night.
It wasn't ink either. Not exactly.
It came out of me slow and thick, like grief.
Black, shimmering. Refracted light like an oil slick.
When it touched the porcelain of the sink, it spelled out a word.
> "Begin."
That's all. One word. Written in something that came from inside me.
I didn't remember swallowing anything strange. I didn't remember dreaming.
But I woke up with a sentence etched into the back of my hand—and a voice in my throat that wasn't mine.
---
My name is Taren Vale.
But the name Eloquian keeps surfacing, like a dead thing bobbing to the top of my mind.
The glyphs under my skin glow faintly now when I breathe.
I'm starting to suspect breathing is a form of writing.
I left the apartment before dawn.
Something was pulling me—no, summoning me.
Down a street I didn't know existed.
Past buildings that weren't there yesterday.
The alley split in two.
Left: rotting signs, a dead cat, normal decay.
Right: A glowing symbol carved into a bricked-over door.
> A ribcage.
Split open.
Inside it, an eye blinking sideways.
I touched the symbol.
The wall... exhaled.
Then the bricks rearranged themselves like typeface.
And behind them was a narrow hallway that smelled like binding glue and grave dirt.
---
The room at the end was small, impossibly so.
Yet it contained hundreds of bones—stacked, hanging, fused into shelves.
In the center stood a man in surgeon's robes.
Eyes bandaged. Spine exposed. Hands black with ink.
He turned as if he'd been waiting for me.
> "Eloquian," he rasped.
> "You arrived thirteen entries late."
I opened my mouth to speak, but my voice—the real one—got stuck beneath my tongue.
So the other voice spoke instead. The one that wasn't me.
> "I require context."
The man nodded.
> "Of course. This is the Indexing Room of Misfiled Hosts. I am Scribe-Healer 37. My role is to observe early sentence formation and treat linguistic mutations before they breach the shelf walls."
> "You've breached," he added. "You're leaking semiotic marrow."
He pointed to the black fluid dripping from my hands.
> "You are becoming… grammar."
---
I wanted to scream.
Instead, I asked, "What do you mean I'm grammar?"
He stepped closer. I saw that the glyphs on his robes rearranged as he moved—like subtitles changing with emotion.
> "You were never a boy named Taren," he said.
"That was a pronoun. Temporary. Placeholder. You are a sentence-in-progress."
He pressed a hand to my chest.
It burned.
> "You are the Archive's attempt to rewrite its own origin."
---
I staggered back.
My ribs hurt.
Because they were moving.
No—aligning.
Shifting into a more readable shape.
> "This isn't happening," I whispered.
> "It is," he replied. "And soon, others will read you. Unless you bind yourself properly."
He handed me a small, sharp quill.
It was made of tooth enamel. Human. Old.
> "Carve your first sentence into the memory-wall," he said.
"But leave out the subject. Let the Archive assign you one."
---
I stared at the wall.
It was bone.
A massive femur stretched horizontally like a canvas.
Already covered in thousands of lines—each one a sentence written by another host.
Some made no sense.
> "It dreamed the wrong voice into glass."
"The third eye opens into a locked drawer."
"Here lies a verb with too many names."
I touched the quill to the surface.
And wrote:
> "___________ was born from an unfinished paragraph."
Immediately, the glyphs glowed.
And the Archive answered.
A word bled itself into the blank.
> "Eloquian."
The moment it did, I heard pages turning somewhere behind the walls.
The sound of something being shelved.
---
The Scribe-Healer clapped once.
> "Your file is now active," he said.
"You'll begin to remember things you didn't live. Do not try to correct them. That would be... dangerous."
I turned.
> "Correct how?"
> "You'll be shown memories from previous hosts. Callum. Aeryn. Hosts with no names. They are fragments of a sentence that never ended. But beware."
> "Some memories don't want to be remembered."
> "They want to be read aloud."
---
I didn't understand.
Until the lights dimmed.
And the wall behind me opened like a mouth.
Inside: darkness.
Then a single book floated forward, bound in pale skin.
> "This was your preface," said the Scribe-Healer.
"The rest… is stored here."
I took the book.
And the second I touched it—
It screamed.
Not out loud.
In my head.
A memory poured into me.
Not mine.
---
> I was a girl named Minara.
I died writing a word no one could define.
That word is still in my mouth.
It has teeth.
If you read it, you become it.
I am sorry.
I am sorry.
I am—
I dropped the book.
My hand was bleeding.
And the glyphs under my skin were now repeating her name—scrolling like subtitles under my flesh.
---
"Is this what I am?" I asked the Scribe-Healer.
> "You are every wrong word given form."
> "You are the Archive's apology, carved into a body."
> "And your sentence has only begun."
---
The room dissolved around me.
Or maybe I was the one dissolving.
I heard the Archive speak again—soft this time. Intimate.
> "Every story begins with a mistake."
> "You are mine."
---
I woke on the floor of my apartment.
No blood. No book.
But on the mirror:
> "CHAPTER 2: ACCEPTED."
And below that:
> "Next entry: Definition Breach."
---
My skin itches now.
Like something inside me is trying to push through.
Not a parasite.
Not a memory.
But a punctuation mark.
A period.
No… a comma.
Because I'm not done yet.
The sentence is still going.
And the Archive?
It's still watching.
Still editing.
---
■■■■
This is where the Archive stops being theoretical.
It's not just a space anymore. It's a system—and Taren (or… Eloquian) isn't discovering it. He's being processed by it.
Where the first followed a boy trying to survive memory collapse, this follows a mind becoming collapsible by design.
The moment Taren wrote his first sentence, the Archive accepted him.
But did it accept him as a narrator?
A writer?
Or a story?
You're starting to see now:
This is not about a new Archivist.
This is about being the next page.
And someone—or something—is already reading all of aloud.
---
Prophecy Fragment: "Definition Breach"
Found carved into a femur with no body attached, located deep inside an abandoned lexicon vault.
> When the next host learns its meaning,
the meaning will learn it back.
> When it seeks its origin,
it will be shelved in reverse.
> And when it tries to define what it is—
That definition will escape.
It will walk.
It will breathe.
It will correct others.
---
> Beware the Definition Breach.
It is not just a word.
It is a former reader.
---