"Every truth begins as a lie that learned to endure."
The candle had long since burned past its wick, yet the flame refused to die. It twisted in silence — blue at its core, gold at its edge — like a living tongue tasting the air for secrets.
Erwin Ruyn sat before it, ink-stained fingers frozen over a half-finished ledger. The parchment beneath his hand shimmered faintly, lines of silver ink rearranging themselves as if unwilling to stay recorded. Even his own handwriting defied permanence.
He did not remember when the habit began — this nightly ritual of documenting what the day had erased. Every morning, something was missing. A name. A word. A sound. Sometimes a face.
And so he wrote.
So he remembered.
The Record Room of the Sable Concord was buried deep beneath the city of Veyren — beneath the cathedrals and factories, beneath the gaslights that wept through fog. It was a place for those who served silence. The clerks above called them "Record Keepers." The priests, more devoutly, called them Gravediggers of Time.
Erwin had been one for seven years.
Or perhaps seventy.
The Concord's bells rang only for the living, and the living rarely descended this far.
He turned another page. The sound was soft — shhhhk — like the exhalation of something vast sleeping beneath his desk. The parchment was thin and veined, grown from treated memory tissue. Every Record was alive, faintly breathing with what it remembered.
Tonight's entry read:
"Seventh Night after the Choir's silence. One archivist missing. The reflection in the south mirror spoke out of turn."
Erwin blinked.
The ink trembled.
The candle flickered.
Behind him, something whispered in the voice of a woman he no longer remembered:
"You are writing it wrong again, Erwin."
He turned, slowly.
There was no one there.
Only the endless rows of shelves — black iron spines holding tomes that hummed faintly, as if in prayer. The air smelled of cold parchment, blooded wax, and the faint metallic tang of divine ink.
Erwin rubbed his temple. The headaches had grown worse since the Infinite Scar appeared across the western sky — a wound in heaven itself that bled light and silence both.
The Church said it was a punishment.
The Concord said it was a recording error.
Erwin, however, knew it was something else entirely — something that remembered him.
He closed the ledger and looked up toward the ceiling, though it was lost in darkness. Above the Records, the city slept. Above the city, the stars blinked out one by one.
And somewhere far beyond the veil of the firmament, the Almighty's Library turned another page.
"To keep a record," he murmured to the empty hall, "is to challenge oblivion itself."
Something unseen turned its gaze toward him from between the shelves — vast, ancient, and patient.
And for the briefest moment, Erwin Ruyn thought he heard it whisper his name from a thousand mouths:
"Keeper."