The moon hung like a cracked coin over Scriptorium City, casting pale light across the copper domes and whispering alleys. On the northern side of the city's central spire lay the Archivist's Crescent, a curved, walled quarter sealed off from most of the population. This was not the domain of priests or generals or scholars. This was where stories were locked away. Where scrolls deemed dangerous, unstable, or forbidden were buried rather than burned.
Finn crouched in the shadow of a rain barrel, eyes fixed on the outer gate of the Crescent. He wore a darker coat now, stitched with ash-colored thread and lined with quiet pockets. In one hand, he held a single wax cylinder, the kind used by the gatekeepers to store heatlight. The warmth from its glass was just enough to keep his fingertips from going numb.
Two guards paced the narrow causeway, each armed with hooked halberds and lanterns fitted with red filters. Red was bad. Red could see through glamours. Finn didn't use glamours himself, but he didn't like being seen, not by any light.
He waited for the second turn. Everything in the Crescent followed a pattern. The guards changed posts every seventy-eight breaths. The lamplighter passed through precisely three minutes before the bells struck the half-hour. The inner gate opened for exactly twenty seconds when the archivist's nightshift began.
Finn had watched it all, twice. He didn't believe in chances. He believed in timing.
When the last bell rang from the Temple of Names, he moved.
He crossed the gravel path in silence, stepping only on the mortar between stones. The gate opened as expected, creaking just wide enough. He slipped through like a knife into cloth.
Inside, the air shifted. It pressed against his ears, thick and muffled, as if the very sound had been stilled. The buildings were older than any in the city proper, round stone towers marked with sigils from dead languages. Rope bridges and narrow walkways connected them high above the ground, like veins between stone organs.
He moved low along the outer ring, beneath lanterns that pulsed with cold blue light. Statues watched him pass. One was missing its head. Another wept ink from its eyes.
The Archive of Broken Threads stood at the far end of the compound. It was wrapped in black iron ivy, its face a solid door shaped like a closed eye. Finn paused before it. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small wax medallion, copied from an original seal Gutter had once shown him. He pressed it to the eye and whispered, "Let me in."
The door shivered. A sound like breath passed through the crack. Then it opened.
He stepped inside.
The air smelled of dust, parchment, and old decisions. Scrolls lined the walls in tall glass chambers, each sealed with colored thread and tagged with names written in a bony script. Some cases pulsed faintly. Others were dead. In a distant alcove, a scroll hummed with an angry glow, wrapped in chains.
Finn moved quickly. He knew where to look. Section 42-Delta, middle row, left of the central spiral scriptorium.
His boots made no sound on the black marble floor. He passed names he didn't recognize, some scratched out, others marked with warnings. One scroll sat in a pool of brine. Another had cracked its glass from within.
He found it.
VELERIS, FINN. STATUS: EXCISED. THREAD: ACTIVE.
The case was open.
The scroll was gone.
He froze. Not with fear, not exactly. With calculation. Someone had taken it before him. Someone had known.
A sound behind him. Not footsteps. Not exactly. The hush of cloth. The idea of a movement.
Finn turned.
A figure stood between the shelves. Gray robes. Mask like polished silver. No eyes. No mouth. Just the reflection of the room, distorted.
"Looking for this?" the figure asked, holding up a scroll wrapped in black thread.
Finn's stomach turned. The voice was not normal. It bent around his ears like a sentence already said.
"Who are you?" he asked, hand already shifting toward the blade at his hip.
The figure took a step forward. Not threatening. Not friendly. "I am what happens when fate watches back."
Finn didn't move. "Why do you have that?"
"Because you weren't supposed to."
"It's mine."
"Is it?"
"It has my name."
"So does your grave."
That hit something in him. Not anger. Something colder. A silence that formed in the pit of his chest.
The figure lowered the scroll slightly. "You want it. I know. You need it to feel real. To feel written. But the truth is, Veleris, your page was torn. What you hold now is not a guide. It is a gamble."
"Give it to me."
The figure opened its hand. The scroll dropped.
Finn caught it before it hit the ground.
Warm.
It felt like holding a thought still being formed.
When he looked up again, the figure was gone.
Not vanished in a puff, just... not there anymore. No sound. No exit.
He stood in the silence of the Archive, the scroll in his hand. He unwrapped the thread slowly. The parchment unrolled like breath, smooth and clean. At the top, his name. Beneath it, the usual marker.
Then the first line:
You shouldn't be here.
Finn left before dawn.
The Archive did not stop him.
The city was quieter than usual. No dogs barked. No carts groaned. The mist hung lower than normal, veiling corners and curling around lanterns. He kept to the rooftops, scroll pressed flat between the layers of his coat. He felt it even when he didn't touch it. Like a second pulse.
When he returned to the crawlspace he called home, he didn't light a candle. He sat in the dark. The scroll sat across his lap, silent.
He didn't sleep.
He didn't eat.
At some point, he read the next line.
The tower falls in seven days.
There was no tower mentioned. No date. Just that. Just certainty.
Finn closed the scroll.
The silence around him had changed.
It felt less like solitude and more like company.
He didn't know who had written those words. He didn't know if it was his future or someone else's past.
But he had stolen it. And whatever came next, it would be his.
The scroll whispered again.
And this time, he listened.