The red archive alarm throbbed like a heartbeat, slow and steady, each pulse washing across the stone floor in a dim crimson wave.
Alric tore off the glove on his left hand. The mark burned beneath the skin, a shifting glyph that looked more like a moving scar than ink. It wasn't stable. Its lines curved and unfolded, curling back into itself like a thought trying to remember itself.
"Noxa," he whispered aloud, tasting the name.
No answer.
But something… deep in his spine… hummed. It wasn't a voice. Not like speech. It was a pressure, like a breath on the nape of his mind. A waiting.
He shoved the black box back into the drawer and slid it shut, wiping the surface with a scrap of cloth. It wouldn't matter—his presence here would already be recorded. He was tagged. The red light continued pulsing.
Then footsteps.
Measured, deliberate, and heavier than any acolyte.
Alric turned—and stopped breathing.
The man at the far end of the corridor was tall, sharp-shouldered, clad in the black robes of a Master Archivist. A golden thread ran down the hem, etched in prayer-script. His face was carved from discipline, clean-shaven, lit by torch-glow.
Master Sevrin.
His voice was calm and cold, like iron dipped in ink.
"You weren't assigned to Sublevel 19, Initiate Velas."
Initiate. Not "Alric." Not even "Scholar."
Not a good sign.
Alric didn't answer. His heart was a metronome, ticking too fast.
Sevrin took a single step forward.
"You accessed a sealed Null drawer. What did you find?"
"It… it was misfiled," Alric said evenly, eyes scanning for exits. "There was no label. No signature. I thought it was misclassified Class A."
"You thought?"
Sevrin took another step.
"Thinking is not your task. Archiving is. You read the page, didn't you?"
Alric didn't answer. The symbol on his arm twitched.
Then came another voice—not Sevrin's, not his own.
A soft, silk-thin whisper in the center of his skull, as if memory itself had learned to talk:
"He will erase you."
Alric flinched.
"You will not be punished. You will be undone."
Sevrin tilted his head.
"Did it speak to you?"
Alric stepped back. The world seemed to tilt slightly. The whisper again:
"Say nothing. Let me in."
The mark on his skin pulsed—once.
Alric swallowed hard. "I don't know what it was."
"It is a parasite," Sevrin said flatly. "A cognitive infestation. You are no longer useful. The Order thanks you for your service."
Three more figures emerged from the shadows.
Grey-hooded, masked. Erasure squad. Their gloves were white, ceremonial. Their hands moved together in a practiced ritual pattern—forming the glyph of forgetting.
"Open me," the voice in Alric's skull murmured, gentler now. "You are already mine."
They stepped forward.
Alric did the only thing he could.
He ran.
He sprinted down the corridor past the mirrored column, twisting through the narrow corridor of Map-Scars. Behind him, a glyph exploded—blinding white light, the start of a memory purge.
He ducked under a collapsing bookshelf, slid over scattered scroll cases, and skidded into a dark stairwell that should've been sealed.
Only it wasn't.
A single metal ring on the wall had been pried open—an old escape conduit for banned volumes.
Alric yanked the lever.
The wall groaned.
"Deeper," said Noxa.
"What's down there?" Alric gasped aloud.
"The truth. And the way out."
The stone door opened.
Beyond it: total black.
He didn't hesitate.