"A disturbance?" Kaelen repeated; the words tasted like copper wire. He adjusted his spectacles, fighting the urge to check the pocket where the wooden horse and the treasonous note burned against his hip. "I assure you, Captain, I live a quiet life. My neighbours... they are elderly. Perhaps they heard the wind."
Captain Varrick did not blink. His eyes were a pale, watery blue, devoid of the usual saccadic movements of a human scanning a room. He stared at a fixed point on Kaelen's forehead.
"Noise is a symptom of disorder, Archivist. Disorder precedes Corruption. The Order of the White Noise takes all reports seriously."
Kaelen felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach at the mention of the Order.
Varrick wasn't just a city guard. The Oakhaven Watch wore blue and carried truncheons to break up tavern brawls. Varrick wore the pristine, high-collared white trench coat of the Inquisition's Field Division. They didn't patrol for thieves; they patrolled for errors.
Everyone in Oakhaven knew the rumors, though no one spoke them aloud. The Order didn't arrest people. They "Sanitized" them. If the Watch took you, you sat in a cell for a week. If the White Noise took you, your family stopped setting a place for you at the table the next morning, not out of grief, but because they genuinely forgot you existed. Varrick wasn't a peacekeeper; he was a human eraser.
"We will verify the sanctity of your dwelling," Varrick said, stepping back and gesturing toward the library exit with a gloved hand. The leather creaked—a sound too loud for the hushed hall. "Standard protocol. You have nothing to hide, correct?"
It wasn't a question. It was a command disguised as polite conversation.
"Of course," Kaelen lied.
The walk back to the lower districts was a blur of sensory overload. Kaelen kept his head down, counting the cracks in the pavement. One, two, gap. One, two, gap.
Beside him, Varrick moved with a terrifying, frictionless grace. He didn't walk so much as glide, his white coat remaining immaculately clean despite the soot and grime of the city streets. It was unnatural. Mud seemed to repel off his hem; dust refused to settle on his shoulders. It was as if the world itself was afraid to touch him.
Passersby didn't just step out of his way; they flattened themselves against walls, averting their gaze. A fruit vendor silenced his pitch mid-shout, covering his basket of apples as Varrick passed, as if the Captain's mere presence could rot the fruit.
They reached the house. It stood narrow and grey, squeezed between two larger tenements like a book on a crowded shelf. Kaelen's hand shook as he fit the key into the lock.
"After you, Captain."
Varrick stepped inside. The air in the hallway was stale, smelling of dust and the faint, ozone tang of the static Kaelen had unleashed earlier.
"Atmosphere reading Sub-optimal," Varrick murmured, running a gloved finger along the hallway mirror. He looked at the dust on his fingertip, then rubbed it away. "Hygiene correlates to piety, Archivist. Dust obscures the Light."
"I... I haven't had time to clean. The archives have been busy."
Varrick ignored him. He moved through the house with the efficiency of a machine. He didn't look at the paintings or the books. He looked at the corners of the room. He checked the seal on the water barrel. He lifted the rug in the sitting room with the toe of his boot, checking the floorboards for loose seams.
He was hunting for divergence.
Kaelen stood by the door, his breath shallow. Please don't go to the bedroom. Please don't go to the bedroom.
Varrick turned and walked straight to the bedroom.
Kaelen followed, his pulse hammering in his throat. Varrick stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, staring at the single bed.
"You live alone," Varrick stated.
"Yes." The lie came easier this time, though it scraped his throat raw.
"And yet," Varrick stepped into the room, pointing to the floor, "there are indentations in the rug on the left side of the bed. As if a second nightstand stood there recently. And the wear pattern on the floorboards suggests two occupants navigating this space."
Kaelen's stomach dropped. He wasn't acting like a detective looking for clues; he was acting like a surveyor looking for geometric inconsistencies.
"I... rearranged the furniture," Kaelen stammered. "Last month. To maximize the morning light."
Varrick turned slowly, his expression unreadable. "Inefficient. But not illegal."
He turned to the second door. The nursery. The broom closet.
Varrick opened it. The smell of bleach wafted out. He stared at the mop bucket sitting in the centre of the cold stone floor. He stood there for a long time, tilting his head slightly, like a hound listening to a frequency humans couldn't hear.
"This room," Varrick said softly. "The geometry feels... constrained. The dimensions do not match the external architecture."
"It's just a closet, Captain."
Varrick crouched. He wasn't looking at the bucket. He was looking at the floorboards near the wall. Specifically, the ventilation grate Kaelen had torn open only an hour ago.
The screws were stripped. The metal around the holes was bright and scratched, the paint chipped away by Kaelen's frantic fingernails. It looked exactly like what it was: a hiding spot that had been hastily forced open.
"Deformation detected," Varrick whispered. He reached for the grate.
Panic, cold and absolute, flooded Kaelen's system.
If Varrick opened that vent, he would see the dust disturbance where the toy horse had lain for months. He might smell the lingering resonance of the "Deleted" object. He would know something was there, and that it was gone.
Stop him, Kaelen's mind screamed.
He didn't have a weapon. He didn't have a spell. He only had the desperate, illogical wish that the vent was sealed. That the evidence was gone.
He stared at the screw Varrick was reaching for. He focused on it with a manic intensity, visualizing the metal not as a hard, fixed object, but as a variable in an equation.
Metal is just data. Data can be compressed.
A high-pitched whine filled Kaelen's ears—the sound of a hard drive spinning up to maximum RPM. The shadows in the room seemed to lengthen, jagged and pixelated.
[System Alert: Reality Edit Initiated.]
[Target: Ferrous Alloy (Screw/Frame).]
[Command: MERGE.]
The air around the vent rippled like heat haze.
Varrick's fingers were an inch from the metal when it happened. There was no flash of light, no magical spark. It was a glitch.
For a single frame of reality, the screw and the frame occupied the same coordinates. The textures flickered violently—grey steel fighting against black iron. Then, the universe corrected the error.
Snap.
The screw didn't turn. It fused. The head of the screw melted into the frame, losing its threading, losing its shape, becoming a single, smooth lump of deformed metal. It looked like it had been welded by an invisible torch, but the metal was cold.
[Corruption: 1.2% -> 1.5%]
Varrick stopped. His hand hovered over the deformed metal.
The Captain went very still. The silence in the room stretched, heavy and suffocating.
"Curious," Varrick said. His voice lacked surprise; it held only the cold calculation of a system encountering an edge case.
He touched the smooth lump of metal. He tried to grip it, but there was nothing to grip. The grate was sealed as if it were part of the foundation.
"Structural degradation," Varrick murmured, standing up. He wiped his glove on a handkerchief. "This building is old. The metal is... unstable. It behaves like liquid."
He turned to Kaelen. The pale blue eyes narrowed, the pupils contracting to pinpricks.
"You should report this to the Maintenance Guild, Archivist. Metal that fuses without heat is a sign of danger. It is unsafe."
"I... I will," Kaelen breathed, leaning against the doorframe to keep his knees from buckling. "I'll put in a request tomorrow."
Varrick stared at him for five seconds—an eternity. He was scanning Kaelen, looking for the tell, the spike in heart rate, the sweat. Kaelen forced himself to think of math. Prime numbers. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13...
"Very well," Varrick said abruptly. "Inspection complete. No Class-A contraband found."
He swept past Kaelen, his coat billowing. Kaelen followed him to the front door, feeling lightheaded. The Corruption hummed in his veins, a low-grade fever that made the edges of his vision fuzzy.
Varrick stepped out onto the stoop. He reached into his coat pocket and produced a stick of thick, white chalk.
"You are clean, Archivist," Varrick said, his back to Kaelen. "But you are erratic. You scream in the morning. You disturb the peace."
Varrick drew a symbol on the wood of Kaelen's door. It was a circle with a line through it—the symbol of the Mute.
"This mark is for your protection," Varrick said, turning to offer a smile that looked like a jagged tear in a picture. "It tells the patrol that this house is under observation. To ensure no... further disturbances occur."
He pocketed the chalk.
"Do not let me hear of you speaking names that do not exist, Kaelen Vance. The next time I come, I will not be looking for dust."
Varrick walked away, his boots clicking rhythmically on the cobblestones. Click. Click. Click.
Kaelen stood in the doorway until the white coat vanished around the corner. Only then did he sag, sliding down the doorframe until he hit the floor.
He looked at the white mark on the wood. It wasn't just chalk. It was bone dust compressed into a stick. He could feel the faint, holy radiation coming off it. It was a target.
He pulled the wooden horse from his pocket. It felt heavier now.
He pulled Bren's note from the other pocket.
Stop before they delete you too.
"Too late," Kaelen whispered to the empty house.
He looked at his hand. The black veins were fading, retreating under the skin, but the tremor remained. He had edited reality. He had fused metal with a thought. And Varrick hadn't seen magic; he had seen a structural error.
Kaelen pushed himself up. The fear was still there, churning in his gut, but something else was rising to meet it. Cold, hard anger.
They had marked his door. They had threatened his life. They had erased his wife.
He walked to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. Not for a weapon—he wasn't a soldier. He went to the pantry and pried up the loose floorboard he used to hide his spare coin purse.
He placed the wooden horse and Bren's note inside. Then, he grabbed his satchel.
If Varrick was watching the house, Kaelen couldn't stay here. And if the Library records were altered, he needed to find the one place where the truth couldn't be edited.
He needed to find the edit logs Bren had mentioned. He needed to find out who pressed the delete button.
He packed a loaf of bread, a waterskin, and the knife. He threw the Archivist robe over his shoulder.
He wasn't going back to work.