Elias left the Archive earlier than usual.
He couldn't stay inside those walls anymore. Every shelf felt like it was watching him. Every word looked too fragile, as if it might change the moment he turned his back.
He needed answers.
There was only one person he knew who might give them.
Mira Solenne.
She had once been one of the best linguists in the Written Order. She studied dead languages, forgotten alphabets, and the strange spaces between words. Then, one day, she left the Order without explanation.
Elias found her in a small bookstore at the edge of the city. The windows were dusty, and the air smelled of old paper and tea.
When she saw the black book in his hands, her face went pale.
"Where did you get that?" she asked.
"The Obsolete Stacks."
Mira slowly closed the shop door. "Then you shouldn't have."
"What is it?"
She stared at the book as if it were alive.
"That is Lexicon."
Elias frowned. "A dictionary?"
Mira gave a weak, humorless smile. "No. A grave."
She told him the truth.
Long ago, the world did not have one single history. It had many. People remembered events differently, and all of those memories were real.
But that made the world unstable.
So the Written Order chose one version of reality and made it official. Every other version was slowly erased not by destroying people, but by deleting the words that allowed those versions to exist.
"When a word is erased," Mira said, "everything that depends on that word begins to fade."
Elias looked down at Lexicon.
"And this book?"
"It contains the words they failed to destroy."
A sudden crash came from outside.
The windows rattled.
Mira's eyes widened. "It's starting."
"What is?"
"The forgotten things are waking up."
Somewhere in the city, something that should not exist had just been remembered.