---
Kael'ith didn't remember running.
He only remembered the cold.
The Archivum had changed.
What had once been a forgotten vault now felt alive—not with presence, but with memory. The kind that sticks to stone like dried blood and whispers your name even when you haven't spoken it.
The shelves groaned as he passed, the scrolls rustled without wind, and the walls now bore names. Thousands of them, carved in languages no longer spoken.
And beneath them, always beneath them… the mark.
∴
That same twisting sigil now etched into Kael'ith's arm.
---
He descended deeper—he didn't know why.
The Archivum was not designed for descent.
And yet, stairs had appeared.
Stone steps leading underground, into a place even the city above had forgotten. Each step flickered, barely solid, like a memory resisting being remembered.
At the bottom, a corridor.
A single torch burned black with inverted flame.
He approached.
The wall ahead bore a word—not carved, but written in pulsing ink:
"FIRST FORGOTTEN."
Below it, a lock.
Not mechanical.
A symbolic seal—shaped like the mark on his arm.
He touched it.
It opened.
---
The room beyond was circular, lined with metal shelves filled not with books—but with sealed bottles of ink. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Some faintly glowing. Others shaking as if alive.
One had already burst.
Its contents had spilled across the floor like oil… and stood upright.
Kael'ith froze.
The thing was formless—but not shapeless. A humanoid silhouette of dripping ink, limbs stretching and recoiling like they hadn't decided how many arms to use.
Its head turned toward him.
It had no face—just a single unblinking eye at the center of its chest.
It screamed without a mouth.
Kael'ith stepped back. The mark on his arm flared in response—burning cold.
"W̷͚̑R̵͈͆I̸͎̋T̷̺̽E̷͎͌ ̷̘̋M̶̺͗E̷̙͊—"
The voice was inside his skull. The thing lunged.
---
Instinct took over. He grabbed the quill—he hadn't even realized it had returned to his hand. Its tip glowed again, but the ink wasn't black.
It was red.
He wrote a word in the air.
"Erase."
The moment the symbol was completed, it vanished—and so did the creature.
No shriek.
No resistance.
Just gone.
Like a word scratched off a page.
---
Kael'ith dropped the quill. His breath came hard and fast.
What had he just done?
This wasn't magic.
This was authorship.
He hadn't cast a spell.
He had edited reality.
---
Behind him, the shelf where the broken bottle once sat now bore a faint line of fresh text.
Inkborne No. 1: Destroyed by Marked Author Kael'ith Varion.
Log Date: Resumed.
The Archivum was watching him.
And it had just started writing him back.