The quill had become a living thing beneath Kaelion's ribs - a splinter of hungry darkness that gnawed at his flesh with every heartbeat. By the third day of its relentless insistence, his skin had taken on the appearance of old parchment stretched too thin over bone, the veins beneath visible as inked calligraphy tracing forbidden words across his body. Each breath came labored now, the air between his teeth tasting of burnt copper and the ozone-scent that lingered after divine retribution.
The monastery emerged from the haze like a half-remembered nightmare. One moment there was only the endless gray of the ashen wastes, the next - the obsidian spires stood before him, their jagged peaks clawing at a sky the color of a fresh bruise. Kaelion's void-touched eye pulsed in its socket, revealing what mortal sight could not perceive:
The gates were not stone but compressed anguish given form, their surfaces shifting with the ghostly impressions of faces frozen mid-scream. The path leading forward was paved with teeth, each one inscribed with a single glowing rune that squirmed like a dying insect when his shadow passed over them. Most disturbing were the silver threads - countless filaments of shimmering light crisscrossing the air itself, identical to those he'd seen stitching closed the mouths of the Silent Judges.
When he pressed his marked palm to the gate, the flesh there split open to reveal the embedded eye blinking awake. The doors parted with a sound like tearing muscle, revealing a corridor where the walls pulsed with a slow, rhythmic contraction. Bookshelves built from interlocked human hands lined the passage, their skeletal fingers clutching scrolls that wept thick black tears onto the floor. The liquid moved against gravity, forming spiraling patterns that resolved into words before dissolving again.
The archivist waited in a chamber of floating ink. She sat perfectly still amidst hundreds of suspended droplets, her form draped in robes stitched together from what Kaelion realized were the last words of the dead. Each silver thread holding the fabric together pulsed with the same eerie light as those controlling the Judges. As he approached, she turned her head - though her eyes remained sewn shut with threads that bit deep into the flesh of her eyelids.
"You're late, little scribe," she said, her voice a dissonant chorus that scraped against his eardrums. There was the rasp of an old woman, the lilt of a child, and beneath it all something vast and humming, like the vibration of a plucked godstring.
The black quill at Kaelion's belt shuddered violently before tearing free of its bindings to land in her outstretched palm. Where it touched her skin, the flesh split willingly, allowing the nib to carve its message directly into her bones,
He will forget the price before he pays it.
Kaelion's missing finger throbbed in time with the words. "What have you done?" he demanded, his voice rougher than he intended. The air here clung to his throat, thick with the scent of myrrh and something darker beneath - like meat left to rot in sacred oil.
The archivist smiled, her stitches straining. "Nothing yet. Everything soon." She gestured to the floating ink droplets that surrounded them. "Time is currency here. Each drop is a moment stolen from those who sought answers. Some paid seconds. Others... centuries."
She led him to a desk that seemed grown rather than built - the flattened torso of a Judge, its ribcage hollowed out to hold instruments of terrible precision. A scalpel forged from a broken vow glinted in the low light, its edge singing faintly of betrayal. An inkwell of liquid silence bubbled sluggishly, its surface reflecting nothing. Most disturbing was the quill - its shaft carved from a fingerbone, weeping black tears that fell in perfect hexagons before vanishing before they hit the desk.
"The well remembers what the world forgets," the archivist murmured, her fingers dancing above the instruments without touching. "Ask your questions. But remember -" Her head tilted at an impossible angle. "- here, even questions leave scars."
The well was not water but memory given form.
Kaelion stood at its edge, staring into a blackness so complete it seemed to stare back. His reflection did not mimic him - instead, a hollow-eyed version of himself gazed up, its lips moving soundlessly as its hands worked to stitch its own mouth shut with threads of glistening ink.
"Don't trust the reflections," the archivist whispered from behind him, though when he turned she stood much closer than before, her breath smelling of spoiled parchment. "They're hungrier than the dark."
The steps appeared only when he committed to descending - vertebrae of some colossal being, each one carved with scenes of torment that shifted when viewed from different angles. The water (if it could be called that) resisted his intrusion, first as thickened ink, then as grasping hands that plucked at his clothes and hair. By the time he reached the chamber below, his lungs burned with the need to scream, but the silence here was a law, not an absence.
The First Lie floated at the heart of it all.
A single syllable etched into the ribs of a dead god, pulsing with stolen light. Kaelion reached for it, his fingers trembling not from fear but from the terrible certainty that this moment had been written long before his birth.
Contact shattered him.
His right eye dissolved in a burst of ink and agony, reforming as a shifting rune that saw the silver strings binding reality itself. The vision nearly broke his mind - countless filaments stretching upward to unseen hands, each one vibrating with divine will. His bones resonated with the syllable's power, fine cracks spreading through his being like fault lines in drying clay.
Worst of all was what the Godforge Core's black light revealed beneath the well.
A thousand scribes fused together at the wrists, their mouths sewn shut with their own hair. They wrote endlessly on floating parchment, their words forming the very laws that kept them imprisoned. One looked up as Kaelion's presence disturbed the waters.
His sister's face stared back, her eyes twin voids. She pressed a finger to her stitched lips, then pointed upward - not toward the surface, but to the silver threads controlling the archivist above.
The truth struck with the force of divine retribution. This was no archive. It was a trap. The archivist wasn't merely a keeper of secrets - she was the first Arcanthus experiment, the prototype for the Silent Judges. And she'd been waiting for him.
Kaelion surfaced screaming in perfect silence. The syllable burned in his throat like swallowed lightning, its weight cracking two molars. The archivist loomed over him, her stitches now glowing with the same silver as the controlling threads.
"Did you enjoy the view?" she crooned, her voice shedding its human harmonics. "The Pantheon learned from their mistakes with you. They built better cages this time."
The costs manifested without mercy.
First went his father's voice - not just the memory of its sound, but the very capacity to comprehend any word the man had ever spoken. Next, the concept of "home" unraveled, leaving only a yawning absence where comfort once lived. Last and most cruel, the colors fled his dreams, reducing his nights to monochrome prisons.
When the archivist pressed the Judge-skin book into his shaking hands, its pages remained blank until his blood touched them. The words that surfaced told a different story than he'd been led to believe - his sister's final act hadn't been betrayal, but sacrifice. She had planted a flaw in the Pantheon's design.
Outside, the stars had realigned themselves into configurations that matched the new tattoos sprawling across Kaelion's collarbones - a celestial map pointing toward something even the gods feared.