The knocking came again—three slow, deliberate taps that echoed like the toll of a funeral bell.
Elias stood frozen in the corridor outside the Archivist's quarters. The gaslamp above flickered erratically, shadows stretching and curling along the damp stone walls like grasping fingers.
He hadn't knocked.
Neither had anyone else.
The door at the end of the hallway—a door no one was ever meant to approach, let alone touch—stood slightly ajar.
The sigils carved into its ancient wood glowed faintly now, pulsing like a heartbeat. They had always been dormant, inert, sealed by the Will of the Founders since the city's earliest memory. It was said to lead nowhere… and everywhere. A paradox in timber and ink.
And yet, someone—or something—had dared to knock.
Elias's breath clouded in the air, his fingers tightening around the spine of the journal he had stolen from the Atrament Library's restricted wing. The one bound in stitched vellum and soaked in faded ink that smelled like burnt parchment and seawater.
The journal's final entry read:
> "If you hear knocking, do not answer. If the door opens, do not look inside. If it calls your name… run."
A whisper curled through the hallway, brushing against his ear like a lover's breath.
"Elias…"
He turned, but the corridor behind him was empty—just gaslight, swirling fog, and silence.
No.
Not silence.
A sound—a slow, dragging shuffle, like cloth against stone, like something blind groping its way across memory.
The door creaked wider.
Inside was darkness—not blackness, but the type of absence that devoured light. Elias could feel it pressing against his mind, cold and heavy. It wasn't just a room—it was a passage. A corridor not built by mortal hands.
He should have run.
But the journal pulsed faintly in his grip, and from within its brittle pages, ink began to move. Lines uncoiled like serpents, forming a single phrase:
> "This is where stories are unmade."
The knocking returned again—this time, from inside his head.
Elias stepped forward.
The city held its breath.
And the door that should never open… welcomed him.