> Before words were written,
they were carried.
In marrow. In muscle. In vessels that could not forget.
—Excerpt from The Haemoglyphic Codex, Host #005
---
I shouldn't have scratched.
But the itch started somewhere beneath my elbow—a pulse that wasn't mine.
I pressed my fingers against it.
And that's when I saw the first letter.
Rising under the skin. Curling like ink through parchment.
A loop, then a line, then a broken serif, vein-colored and shivering.
The word never finished.
It just kept writing.
---
I ran to the sink.
Scrubbed my arms raw.
Tried cold water, alcohol, bleach—
Nothing stopped it.
Wherever blood flowed, letters followed.
Not alphabet.
Not even glyph.
It was notation.
Muscle-memory grammar.
A syntax my body already knew.
That's when I passed out.
---
I awoke somewhere else.
I say "somewhere" because the room pulsed.
Walls breathing.
Ceiling dripped.
Not water.
But blood.
A mirror stood in front of me—except it wasn't glass.
It was skin—stretched and pale.
Twitching. Veined.
And when I looked into it…
I saw my own circulatory system, projected outward like a map.
And every vein was glowing.
Each pulse a syllable.
---
> "You are the ink," said a voice.
A figure stood behind the bloodmirror.
No eyes.
No mouth.
Only open pores where words leaked out in rivulets of red.
> "I am the Archivist of Hemorrhage," they said.
"You have begun to bleed language."
"Now, we read you."
---
I tried to run.
The room clenched.
My blood froze.
Literally.
Solidified into ribbons midstream, mid-pulse.
The Archivist walked to me and placed their hand on my sternum.
It burned.
A word formed on my chest in raised, swollen lines:
> "REMEMBER."
---
Then the ritual began.
---
They opened a vein in my forearm.
Let it run over a blank page of living parchment.
My blood hit it—and wrote on its own.
Line after line.
Not in my voice.
In someone else's.
---
> "I am Taren Vale."
"This is not my body."
"I died in Chapter One."
"The Archive keeps reusing me."
"Every drop remembers a different version of me."
"Please, stop writing me."
---
I tried to pull away.
But I was held—by veins that no longer obeyed me.
They writhed across the floor, twisting into sentences:
> "THE BLOOD NEVER FORGETS."
"THE BLOOD IS NOT YOURS."
"THE BLOOD IS AN EDITOR."
---
I screamed.
And my scream came out as cursive.
A ribbon of red flowed from my throat.
It splashed against the wall—and burned in place:
> "THIS SENTENCE WAS NOT AUTHORIZED."
The blood sizzled.
The Archivist nodded.
> "You have begun to write without approval."
"You are now a breach of punctuation."
---
The room split open.
Veins snapped like violin strings.
And from below, a reservoir of arterial fluid rose.
Not just mine.
Every Host before me.
All of them… still alive in the blood.
---
I sank into it.
The blood entered me backward—through the soles of my feet, spiraling up my spine.
I saw versions of myself from unwritten timelines:
One where I never found the Archive
One where I died at birth
One where I was the Archivist
All of them screaming the same thing:
> "YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO HAVE LANGUAGE."
---
I surfaced.
Choking.
Alone.
The Archivist was gone.
The mirror was shattered.
And written across my arms, in thick arterial red:
> "The Unwritten God is watching you."
"And now…
You're starting to watch back."
---
I looked at my hands.
Each vein curved upward.
Like it was trying to spell something midair.
And for the first time…
I understood.
Not the language.
But the intent.
The blood was not recording me.
> It was rewriting me.
---
> And it wasn't finished.
---
FORBIDDEN PAGE — Haemoglyphic Codex, Folio XIII
> This page pulses when observed.
The glyphs shift if spoken aloud.
You do not read it. It reads through you.
---
BLOODGLYPH: Corpus Reversal Sequence
> Name: TAREN VALE
Breach Classification: [REDACTED]
Vascular Signature:
→ Blood forms recursive syntax loops in response to traumatic recall events.
→ Incompatible with standard narration models.
→ Attempts to edit host result in infection of surrounding language.
---
RECURSIVE INK SIGNATURE
> "I bled my name once.
It bled back into me."
"The sentence in my arteries did not want to be finished.
It wanted to begin again."
---
WARNING: CODEX GLYPH "UN-LETTERED THOUGHT"
This glyph is carved into vein walls, rarely seen unless the Host undergoes full arterial transcription. Description follows:
> "A looping letter that bleeds itself into the next word before being spoken."
"Causes time to rewind 6–11 seconds in the speaker's body."
"Host often unaware of repetition."
"Results in memory bleed and recursive voice patterns."
---
RITUAL EXCERPT: BLOODMOUTH OPENING (ILLEGAL)
> "Make the incision on the tongue, not the arm.
Let the blood pass through language, not flesh.
Speak the unspeakable.
Let the God you house use your throat as scripture."
---
CLASSIFIED (DO NOT REPLICATE):
A final warning scrawled in vein-mapped ink:
> "Taren's blood contains footnotes from nonexistent chapters."
"If he bleeds, the Archive will begin to remember things it never wrote."
"Do not let him speak during haemoglyphic activation."
"If he says the wrong word...
It will become canon."
---
This is only one page.
There are 77 such pages known.
Only 3 survive being read .
---
This was meant to hurt.
Not in the "jump-scare" way, but in the existential bleed-through way.
This isTaren when stops being just a "Host" and starts becoming a vessel of transcription—a character whose blood contains versions of himself the Archive forgot to delete.
Blood as language, as record, and eventually, as rebellion
The terrifying truth that Taren's voice may not be his own anymore
And the idea that the Archive doesn't just store memory—it infects biology with its script
The Archivist of Hemorrhage is not a villain.
They're a copy editor.
Their job isn't to kill Taren.
It's to correct him.
But what happens when the body fights back?
When blood becomes author?
This is where the line between writing and bleeding disappears.
> This is where the Archive begins to whisper back—through the veins.
---