The word wouldn't leave her.
Erased.
Anaya turned it over like a sharp stone in her hand. Every time she tried to sleep, the fragment of that forbidden record surfaced. A student, unnamed, centuries ago. A resonance like hers. No ending, no death, no future. Just absence.
It wasn't just omission. It was surgery. Someone had cut this life clean from the body of history.
But scars remain, even when wounds are hidden.
The next morning, she went to the Library of Futures under pretense of studying for Professor Davrin's examination. The grand hall smelled of dust and candle wax, shelves spiraling upward into galleries wrapped in iron railings. Students hunched over tables, whispering, scribbling notes.
She found the Historical Glimpse Archives—volumes thicker than her arm, each bound in different shades of leather. She searched for Transfer registries, cross-checking years, then decades.
Page after page, name after name. Glimpses were listed beside each: Ralen Vorr, destined to heal a hundred soldiers on the Plains of Reigh; Myria Senn, architect of the Third Citadel.
But there were gaps. Pages where ink had bled faintly, as though something had been blotted out. Names struck through not with lines, but with void. Her stomach tightened.
She pressed her palm against one gap, half-hoping for resonance. The paper thrummed faintly, like a muffled heartbeat.
Someone had been there. Someone still was.
Later that week, she whispered her suspicion to Leila during a walk around the cloister gardens.
"There was another like me. The records won't say who, but I felt it."
Leila frowned. "And you think digging into it is wise? The Academy guards its histories for a reason. Not all truths make life easier."
"Easier isn't the point," Anaya said. "If there was another, then I need to know what happened. It could happen to me."
Leila looked away, her jaw tightening. "Or worse. It could happen because of you."
The words stung more than Anaya expected.
That night, Rafael caught her slipping out with a candle and a stack of stolen notes.
"You've got the look of someone about to pick a lock," he said softly.
Anaya froze. "I'm not—"
He grinned. "Relax. I'm not Mira. I won't tell." Then his face sobered. "But if you're prying into things the Headmistress doesn't want pried… be careful. Secrets here aren't just ink and dust. They're traps."
"Then let me trip them," Anaya said. "Better me than someone else."
For once, Rafael didn't joke. He just reached out and touched her sleeve lightly, as if trying to anchor her. "Don't let them swallow you whole."
The breakthrough came unexpectedly.
In a neglected alcove of the west wing, she found a cabinet of scrolls no one had touched in decades. The dust was thick, the locks rusted. Inside: letters from Academy wardens to families of Transfers. Most spoke of triumph, discipline, success.
One scroll, though, was torn, half-burnt, the seal cracked.
She unrolled it carefully.
To the family of— the name was gone, ink scraped into oblivion.
Your child has demonstrated aberrant resonance incompatible with institutional structure. For the stability of the Academy, we regret to inform you—
The rest was charred, blackened as though fire itself had tried to silence it.
Her pulse raced. She held the parchment close to the candle. On the edges of the burn, faint writing glimmered—residual ink.
She mouthed the words: The rewriter must not remain.
Her hands shook. The word was there, written centuries ago. Rewriter. The same name Veyra had never spoken aloud, but which Anaya now understood belonged to her.
The next lesson in the Atrium became unbearable. Mirrors showed possibilities, but all Anaya saw were fragments of that missing student. A flash of a figure in uniform. A hand raised against fire. Eyes that burned like her own had in the storm of echoes.
When she pressed Veyra, the Headmistress's face hardened.
"Stop searching."
Anaya's throat tightened. "So it's true."
"You are not the first," Veyra admitted, voice like stone. "But the last time nearly broke us."
"What happened?"
"Enough." Veyra's cloak swirled as she turned away. "If you value your place here, Anaya, let the dead remain silent."
But silence had never satisfied her.
She grew reckless. Over the following nights, she returned to the archives with stolen chalk and ink, tracing wards to reveal palimpsests beneath the paper. She began mapping gaps in the registries, drawing connections between missing names. Each thread tugged another loose.
Kato caught her once, hunched over a spread of stolen documents.
"Anaya…" His voice cracked with fear. "Do you know what happens to students who dig too deep?"
She didn't look up. "Maybe they're erased. Which is why I need to know."
"Or maybe they're erased because they asked."
His words haunted her.
The confrontation came when Mira, sharp-eyed and smug, cornered her in the refectory.
"You've been sneaking around," Mira said, voice pitched low. "Whispers follow you. Do you think no one notices?"
Anaya bristled. "Stay out of my way."
Mira leaned close, smirking. "History has a way of swallowing people like you. Transfers who don't belong. Transfers who break things. Maybe I should help it along."
The fury in Anaya's chest nearly unleashed itself, but she caught the ripple of resonance in Mira's words. It wasn't just taunt. It was knowledge. Mira knew more than she should.
For the first time, Anaya wondered if her rival was connected to the erasures.
The climax came with a discovery beneath the Chapel of Glimpses.
She had followed an old blueprint of the Academy, a stolen copy from the archives. It marked a chamber sealed three centuries ago.
The door was hidden beneath layers of plaster, runes half-worn. She whispered a resonance, and the plaster cracked.
Inside: a room lined with empty pedestals. On each, the faint outline of a nameplate, but every name scratched away. At the center stood a broken mirror, shards scattered like frozen tears.
When she touched one shard, visions assaulted her.
A boy's laughter. Screams of students fleeing. Flames swallowing a hall. Headmistress robes—not Veyra's, but another's—stained with ash.
And a voice: If you are seeing this, then you are me.
Anaya staggered back, breath ragged.
The shard pulsed once, then disintegrated to dust.
She stumbled from the chapel at dawn, exhausted, shaken, but aflame with knowledge.
There had been another. They had left behind an echo, hidden in the bones of the Academy. They had tried to speak across time.
Not erased fully. Not yet.
And Anaya knew, with a clarity that chilled her, that she was walking their path step for step.
Unless she found a way to change it.