Coren Vale didn't mean to find the book.
He wasn't the curious type. He wasn't brave. If anything, he was forgettable—a low-tier Archivist's Assistant with the spine of a damp rag and the ambition of a lazy cat. He showed up on time, kept his quills sharp, and avoided eye contact with people who mattered. That was his whole routine. That was his safety.
But that night, something… shifted.
The Archivum was nearly empty. A storm had rolled in over Viremore's spires, low and growling, the kind of night where even rats kept their heads down. Most of the senior scribes had returned to their homes early. The halls were lit by just a few flickering oil lamps, casting long shadows across the mosaic floor tiles.
Coren should've left.
Instead, he found himself wandering deeper.
Maybe it was the silence. Maybe it was the wine he'd stolen from the back pantry. Or maybe it was the way the lamps kept fluttering behind him, one after another, as if something was following. He told himself it was a breeze.
He was lying. He knew it. And still, he walked.
That's when he found the seam.
There shouldn't have been a seam. He knew these halls like the lines on his palm. This corner—this dead-end near the forgotten tax ledgers of Lord Brelthorn's era—was a brick wall. Just a wall.
But tonight, it had a gap. Thin. Clean. Like something had moved.
Coren leaned in.
The bricks were warm.
He pressed a hand to the wall. There was a soft click—not mechanical, not entirely—and the bricks parted inward, folding into a low arch.
Beyond it was a chamber he'd never seen.
He stepped in.
The air smelled of dust and iron. A shallow room, no windows, no shelves. Just a single pedestal at its center, wrapped in chains as thick as his wrist. They coiled around a single object.
A book.
It wasn't large. Old, yes—but not tattered. Its cover was a pale leather, smooth and seamless, too pristine for something buried in this tomb of a room. Across its front, no title—just a spiral of etched sigils, burned into the skin.
He didn't recognize the symbols.
They looked wrong. They moved a little if he stared too long, like they weren't meant for human eyes.
He should've run. He knew that.
Instead, he reached out.
The moment his fingers brushed the surface, the chains groaned. A cold snapped through the air. Every lamp in the Archivum died in a breath. And from the book, something leapt—liquid, fire-bright, alive.
The spiral flowed off the cover and into him.
It didn't settle gently.
It carved itself into his palm.
Coren screamed. Dropped to the ground. His vision went white, then red, then something worse. The pain wasn't sharp—it was deep. Like someone was writing inside his blood. Inside his soul.
The last thing he heard before getting swallowed by darkness was a voice—not around him, but inside him:
"You are remembered."
---
He woke in bed.
The shutters were drawn. The room smelled like wet parchment, old candlewax, and something... metallic.
He sat up too quickly. The world tilted.
His hand ached. Wrapped in bandages. He didn't remember doing that. Didn't remember getting home. Everything between the room and here was a smear of nightmares and cold.
On the floor was his notebook.
Coren reached for it, cautiously. It looked normal—until he opened it.
Every page had been filled.
Not with words. Not with notes. But the same symbol. The spiral, drawn over and over. Dozens of times. Hundreds. The ink was his. The handwriting was his.
But he didn't remember a single stroke.
He pulled the bandage from his palm.
The mark was still there.
Not a wound. Not a scab. Just a perfect black spiral, carved into his flesh like it had always been there.
He stared at it for too long.
The room tilted again.
He stumbled to his desk and pulled the utility blade from its drawer. The kind he used for trimming quills.
His hand shook. He pressed the blade to the edge of the mark.
"I wouldn't."
He froze.
The voice wasn't in the room. It wasn't in his ears. It was beneath thought. Inside his spine.
"Who said that?" he whispered.
Silence.
He looked again at his hand.
The mark pulsed. Once. The shadows in the corners of the room deepened just slightly. And then—
A flicker.
A glimpse.
A black sea beneath a sky of screaming stars. A cathedral made of bone and brass. A thousand doors, each one locked from the inside.
It was gone in an instant.
He dropped the knife.
"What the hell is this?" he whispered.
"A key. A chain. A path."
The voice whispered again. Calm. Cold.
"Why me?" he said. "Why me?"
No answer.
He looked down at the floor.
Something was scribbled in chalk near his bed, lines jagged and desperate.
"The First Sigil is opened. Truth will follow."
His breath caught.
He hadn't written that.
He was sure he hadn't.
---
That night, he didn't sleep.
Viremore's rooftops were lost in fog. The city whispered through the bricks—pipes groaning, wind tapping like fingertips on glass. He'd heard it all a thousand nights before.
But tonight, it meant something.
The sigil on his palm beat like a second heart.
Sometimes, faintly, he thought he heard... whispers. Not words. Just shapes of thoughts curled up in the corners of the dark.
He sat in silence. The notebook still open on his desk. The spiral on every page watching him, though it had no eyes.
He didn't know what he was.
But something in the dark did.
And it was watching.
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Author here! Writing this down just to inform you that archivist is like a place or a person which or who houses archives. It's basically a library but I wanted to make it seen a bit more profound so I searched the most appropriate word and decided on it. Alright enough for now. Author out!