Pain arrived before consciousness.
It wasn't sharp. It wasn't even physical. It was the kind of pain that lingered where names are stored—the ache of having someone else pilot your soul like a stolen car and leave you with the whiplash.
Vicki blinked. Once. Twice.
Fluorescent lights above him buzzed, slightly cracked, flickering with the same energy he had: unstable, unwanted, and trying not to fall apart.
"You alive, bro?"
Raka's voice.
Concerned. Stupidly hopeful.
Vicki groaned. "Define 'alive.'"
"You're breathing and insulting people. Close enough."
Nayla's silhouette slid into view next to Raka. Her eyes scanned him like a broken code needing decryption. She didn't speak immediately—too busy reading his pulse, his expression, maybe his soul.
"You were gone for exactly one hour," she said. "Right up to the second."
Vicki coughed. His throat felt scorched.
"Felt like ten years."
"Well," Raka added, "you didn't age, but you did bleed. A lot. From like... everywhere."
"Cool. Love that for me."
He sat up slowly. Every muscle ached. His hands were shaking.
He wasn't afraid.
He was empty.
They regrouped behind the science wing. The corridor was quiet—too quiet. Outside, the sky had shifted color again. Pale grey. Smog-filtered sun. A kind of stillness that didn't feel like weather.
It felt like anticipation.
"Avici's in cooldown," Vicki muttered, rubbing his temples. "One hour on, twenty-four off."
"Sounds like a broken VPN plan," Raka joked. No one laughed.
Nayla knelt beside him and handed him water. Her hands were still trembling slightly, though her voice wasn't.
"While you were gone," she said, "we kept hearing... knocking."
"From where?"
"Below."
"Below what?"
"The school."
It started with a memory Raka couldn't forget.
"Two years ago," he said, "I helped set up the stage for the National Debate Finals. They pulled up the panels under the gym floor… and there was something there. A circle. Carved into the concrete."
Vicki's eyes sharpened. Nayla was already pulling up schematics of the building on her tablet.
"No floor plan shows anything beneath the gym," she murmured.
"That's because it's not a storage unit," Vicki said. "It's a seal."
He stood, slowly, each joint cracking like regret.
"We need to see it."
They snuck past the athletics office through a side corridor most students didn't even know existed—half maintenance, half forgotten.
The gym loomed above them: Naraya Dharma's pride and joy. Glass walls, biometric locks, oxygen-controlled atmosphere.
But beneath it?
Dust.
Dampness.
The forgotten bones of a school that remembered too much.
The crawlspace was barely lit. Raka led the way, flashlight trembling slightly in his grip. They passed old pipes, wiring that hadn't been used in decades, and one janitor's mop that had clearly died in the 90s.
Then they found it.
The floor changed—from steel panels to ancient stone.
And in the center:
A circle.
Massive. Etched deep into the foundation. Worn smooth by time and secrets.
"There it is," Raka whispered. "Told you."
Nayla knelt beside it, brushing off layers of dust. Her fingers traced the lines—not symbols she recognized, but something older. Circular. Repeating. Pulsing.
Vicki didn't need to touch it to feel it.
"The first tether," Avici whispered from somewhere deep inside. "Branded in blood. Sealed by will."
"This is where it started," Vicki said aloud.
"What is it sealing?" Nayla asked.
"Not what," he said, staring at the eye-shaped sigil in the middle.
"Who."
Then the knock came.
Once. Low. From beneath the stone.
Twice. Slower. Heavier.
Thump. Thump.
The sound didn't echo through the chamber. It pushed through them—like a heartbeat from beneath the ground. Like something old was stirring beneath the seal, reaching up.
Nayla stepped back. "That's not structural."
"Nope," Raka said. "That's someone saying 'hello.'"
The third knock never came.
Instead—there was a whisper.
Not in their ears. Not in their heads.
In the stone.
Three syllables.
"A-rva-nu."
Vicki staggered.
"That name again…"
"He was the first to betray the Blood Covenant," Avici's voice said faintly. "And now he remembers again."
"Which means what?" Nayla asked.
"Which means," Vicki said, "this seal might not hold much longer."
A pulse rippled through the floor. The sigil in the center glowed—once. Faint. Hungry.
"We need to find the next tether," Vicki said, already turning back toward the tunnel. "Before he does."
"Who's 'he'?" Raka asked.
Vicki didn't answer.
Because deep in his chest, Avici was already whispering another name.
And this one burned.
"Don't say the name again," Vicki warned.
The glow beneath the seal had already started to fade, retreating like a nervous flame. But the air? It stayed heavy. As if whatever had whispered Arvanu was still lurking below, just waiting for one of them to get curious.
Raka looked like he wanted to say it anyway, which is exactly why Nayla slapped the back of his head.
"Do you want a ghost to crawl into your lungs and rewrite your face?" she snapped.
"No—but like, what if it's a password?"
"Then let me guess—you were gonna say it louder?"
"Well yeah, echo helps with voice recognition."
Vicki groaned and wiped sweat from his brow. He was still pale—flesh drained from having played vessel to a god-warrior for an hour—but his eyes were focused now. Alert.
And they were staring at the circle.
More specifically, at a symbol just outside the main ring. It had been hidden beneath layers of grime—Nayla had scraped it clear while everyone was arguing about passwords and lung-ghosts.
It was a glyph. Not glowing. Not active. But it hummed with old energy.
Vicki knelt beside it, tracing the shape with his finger.
"This isn't part of the seal," he murmured. "It's... a link. A coordinate."
"Coordinate to what?" Nayla asked, crouching beside him.
"A place."
He looked up.
"A hidden room."
They didn't waste time.
Vicki was already moving—pain in his bones, yes, but something inside him tugged harder. Like a compass buried in his ribs was pulling toward something it used to know.
They exited the maintenance crawlspace and re-entered the polished halls of Naraya Dharma International.
And the contrast was jarring.
Just an hour ago, they were fighting in distortion hell. Now they were walking past smartboards displaying math problems, interactive bulletin boards, and kids discussing biology like the world wasn't rotting at the edges.
"It's insane," Raka whispered. "Nobody sees it. Not the sigils, not the whispers, not even the flickering lights."
"They're inside the illusion," Vicki replied.
"Like... Truman Show?"
"Worse. The curriculum is part of the illusion."
They passed Room 3-14.
Vicki stopped.
So did the compass in his chest.
"Here," he said.
"Here?" Nayla echoed, staring at the plain classroom door. "That's... calculus."
"No. It's above it."
He pointed up.
There was a vent just above the ceiling tile. Too small for a person. But maybe just big enough for—
"A vertical shaft," he muttered. "I saw it in Avici's memory. Old air ducts, predating the school's renovation."
"You're saying there's something above this room?" Nayla asked.
"I'm saying there's a second floor that isn't on the blueprint."
Getting up there took some... creativity.
Raka boosted Vicki onto the lockers. Nayla stacked three chairs on top of a vending machine. There was some arguing. A lot of swearing. And a moment where Raka may or may not have cried.
But eventually, they popped the vent grate and squeezed through.
It was tight. Dusty. The kind of crawlspace where air went to die.
But after several minutes of elbows, knees, and whispering "ow" a hundred times, they found it.
A hatch.
Metal. Rusted. With the same eye-shaped sigil carved into the center.
Nayla hesitated. "It's not locked."
"Because it wants to be found," Vicki muttered.
"I hate when doors have feelings," Raka added.
They opened it.
It didn't squeak.
It sighed.
The room was silent.
Stone walls. No lights. No windows.
Only shelves—ancient, crooked things loaded with scrolls, binders, and memory tapes. Dust clung to everything, except the floor... which was spotless.
As if something—or someone—had walked here recently.
In the middle of the room stood a podium. On it: a single book, bound in dark crimson leather.
Vicki stepped forward.
"This is it," he whispered. "This is the Whisper Archive."
Nayla circled the perimeter, scanning the shelves.
"These records aren't digital. They're encoded in linguistic glyphs—some kind of mixed rune structure. The kind that can only be read if you already know the memory."
"So, encrypted by... belief?" Raka offered.
"Not belief. Burden."
Vicki opened the book on the podium.
Pages flipped themselves.
They stopped.
And stared.
"PROJECT: CLASS XI-C"
Year: Unknown.
Format: Ritual Embedding.
Result: Partial Containment."
There were no names.
No teachers.
No founders.
Only a paragraph burned into the center of the page, written in ink that shimmered slightly under breath.
"To remember is to reopen. To forget is to feed. The class shall serve as a lock. Should any vessel reject the forgetting, the breach will widen. The chain is thirteen. The key is one."
"What the hell does that mean?" Raka breathed.
"It means we're not in a cursed class by accident," Vicki said. "We are the curse."
He turned the next page.
Blank.
Then, slowly... a line began to appear.
Drawn by unseen ink.
Word by word, letter by letter.
"Someone is watching."
The lights—if you could call the ambient glow that—flickered.
And something shifted in the corner of the room.
A figure.
Tall. Motionless.
Wrapped in funeral robes.
Its eyes? Sewn shut with golden thread.
But somehow, it was looking directly at them.
"Guys," Raka whispered. "That's not in the Dewey Decimal system."
The figure raised one hand.
And the book snapped shut.
No one moved.
The figure in the corner remained motionless—arms at its side, robes hanging like ancient drapes soaked in silence.
No face. No voice. Only the sound of stitched eyelids trembling from breathless tension.
"Vicki," Raka whispered. "Can ghosts blink?"
"I don't know."
"Because it's blinking."
"I still don't know."
"Okay cool. So we die confused."
Nayla didn't speak. She was already calculating options: escape paths, defensive formations, possibly turning the book into a Molotov cocktail.
And then—
The light went out.
Not just flickered. Not dimmed.
Gone.
Total darkness. Absolute. The kind of pitch-black that made you question if your eyes still existed.
Then—
A voice.
Smooth. Unhurried.
Ageless.
"You broke into a dead man's library."
It wasn't the robed figure. It came from behind them.
From everywhere.
"You read what was never meant to be remembered. And now the debt of knowing has come to collect."
The lights returned—only not the ones from before. They weren't fluorescent. They were candles, now flickering from ornate sconces that hadn't existed seconds ago.
And the archive had changed.
Where once there were crooked bookshelves, now there were elegant mahogany cases, polished and precise. A table in the center now bore not a book—but a ledger.
And seated beside it:
A man in a black three-piece suit.
No dust on him.
No age on him.
He sat like the room obeyed his spine. His skin was pale. Too pale. His eyes? A dark violet that suggested galaxies where gods used to bleed.
And in his hands: a silver pen, twirling like a dancer.
"Welcome," he said, smiling faintly. "To the Whisper Archive. You may call me Anata Dharma."
Dead silence.
Raka opened his mouth, closed it.
Then did it again.
"Is this... is this like a full service library or more of a blood sacrifice kinda thing?"
"Both," Anata replied pleasantly. "Depending on what you're here to buy."
Nayla stepped forward, spine straight.
"You're the informant. The one who sent Vicki messages."
"Correct. And you're the three anomalies who broke the chain."
"You know what we are?"
"I know what you're not," Anata said. "You're not forgettable. And in Class XI-C, that's a liability."
He closed the ledger and gestured to the seat across from him.
"Please. Sit. Before the archive reverts and devours your sense of self."
Vicki sat.
He didn't know why. He didn't even realize he had moved.
But something about Anata's voice felt... pre-ordained.
"You're not human," Vicki said softly.
"That's flattering," Anata replied. "But inaccurate. I'm not monstrous. Merely... unburdened by mortality."
"You run The Undertaker," Nayla cut in.
"Among other ventures," he replied, folding his hands. "But I'm not here to sell coffins."
"Then why are you here?"
Anata leaned forward.
"Because you read something that requires payment."
He tapped the ledger.
"The Whisper Archive is a living system. It breathes in secrets. And every time it exhales... someone must pay for the air."
Vicki swallowed.
"We didn't agree to anything."
"You read the page. That's enough. Ignorance is protection. Curiosity is consent."
"So what's the price?"
Anata smiled.
"A memory."
"Whose?"
"Yours. One each. A single name you remember—will be forgotten."
"And if we say no?"
The candles flickered. The air thickened.
"Then the archive will take a name of its choosing. And it will not be kind."
"That's blackmail," Nayla spat.
"No," Anata said. "That's economics."
Silence.
Raka looked at Vicki. Then Nayla.
Then back to Anata.
"Fine," he said. "Take mine. I've got some dumb ones."
"Very well."
Anata reached into the ledger. Not wrote—reached.
His fingers vanished into the page like ink becoming skin.
And when he pulled back—Raka gasped.
His eyes glazed for a moment.
"Wait... who's...?"
He turned to Vicki.
"I was gonna say something but... it's gone."
Anata looked at Nayla.
"Your turn."
She clenched her jaw.
"Take the memory of my first exam score in fifth grade."
"Wise choice. Pride is the most delicious of meals."
She blinked. Just once.
"It's gone. Weird."
Then he looked at Vicki.
"And you, Vessel of Avici. Your tax, please."
Vicki hesitated.
"Can I choose a name that already hurts?"
"You may."
He closed his eyes.
And whispered.
"Naila."
A pause.
Then the ledger closed with a soft snap.
The candles vanished.
The room returned to normal—dusty, crooked, cold.
Anata Dharma stood. His suit somehow untouched by the shift in dimension.
"You now have access to deeper layers of the Archive," he said. "Congratulations."
"Wait," Vicki called. "Why help us?"
Anata smiled.
"Because the game is finally interesting."
He turned.
And just before fading into the wall like a shadow unhooked from light, he added:
"The second seal sleeps beneath the reflection. And not all who sleep wish to wake."
Then he was gone.
Raka sat down hard on the floor.
"Did we just pay a death librarian with trauma?"
"Basically," Vicki said.
"Cool. I need a nap. Or holy water. Maybe both."
Nayla turned to Vicki.
"Second seal. What do you think he meant?"
Vicki didn't answer.
Because inside his head, Avici was already whispering again.
"The reflection... the mirror pool beneath the art wing. That's where it waits."
Vicki stood.
Eyes burning.
"We go tonight."