Kira’s world, a universe of ordered fact and cataloged endings, had been cracked by a simple question. She fought the tremor by falling back on process. Her fingers, stained with the faint memory of ink, moved to the stone tablet Sineus had indicated. She had to verify his claim. She had to find the flaw.
The sandstone was cool and gritty beneath her touch, its surface worn smooth by ages of silence. Her gaze traced the blocky, unfamiliar script. She did not need to translate it line by line; she knew its contents by heart. Anomaly 734. A losing war. A desperate gamble. A turning tide.
Her index finger followed the final carved sentence, a statement of improbable survival. Then it met the blank space below. An emptiness of three finger-widths. The record was confirmed to be incomplete. The final entry, the one that explained how, was missing. This was the flaw. This was the anchor that had always held her cynicism in place.
— It is a fragment, Knyaz, — she said, her voice regaining its flat, instructional tone. She was an archivist again, explaining a broken pot to a tourist. — A story without an ending is not a story. It is a failed data set. A scribe’s error, perhaps. Or a lie left unfinished.
She had always dismissed it as such. An anomaly. A statistical outlier that proved the rule by its own brokenness. She recited the familiar rationalizations to herself, a catechism against the foolishness of hope.
Sineus did not argue. He did not try to debate her logic. He simply knelt. From a small leather pouch at his belt, he produced a stick of dark charcoal and a roll of thin-pressed paper. The simple, practical items seemed out of place in the grand tomb of worlds. An everyday habit in a hall of apocalypses.
He unrolled the paper over the tablet’s face. With slow, steady strokes, he began to make a rubbing of the text. The scrape of the charcoal on the paper was a small, dry, insistent sound in the profound quiet. It was the sound of a man who refused to accept that the book was closed. He was securing a copy of the incomplete data, preserving the question itself.
Kira watched his hands. They were a warrior’s hands, calloused and strong, yet they moved with the careful precision of a scholar. He was not discouraged by the missing information. He was gathering what was there.
She looked from his hands to his face. In the flickering torchlight, she saw the faint lines of exhaustion around his eyes. The strain of a long journey, she assumed. But his expression was not one of triumph. It was not the look of a man who had won an argument. It was the raw, unguarded expression of desperate hope.
He was not a prince playing a political game. He was a man who had walked through a nightmare and found a single, flickering candle. He was protecting the flame with everything he had.
That emotion was a contagion.
It was a feeling Kira had not allowed herself in thirty years. Not since she was a young acolyte, first learning the terrible arithmetic of the Blight. Hope. It was a phantom limb, an ache in a place she had amputated long ago. Her carefully constructed wall of cynicism, built from the dust of a thousand fallen worlds, trembled. For the first time, she felt its true nature: not a fortress, but a prison.
The scrape of the charcoal stopped. Sineus carefully rolled up the paper, the black text a perfect mirror of the stone. He tucked it away and stood, his gaze meeting hers. He had his proof. A copy of a question.
— There are other archives, — he stated. It was not a request. It was a continuation.
Kira felt her own long-buried hope stir in response. It was a painful, unfamiliar sensation. The cynicism that had been her shield for so long now felt like a shroud. The prince’s determination was a solvent, dissolving the cold logic that had kept her safe, and sane.
She could send him away. She could declare the matter closed, the anomaly dismissed. It was her right as Lead Archivist. It was her duty, as she had always seen it. To manage endings. To protect the living from the false hope of the dead.
But she looked at the empty alcove where the tablet sat. A story without an end.
Perhaps it was not a failed data set. Perhaps it was simply an unfinished record.
Kira gave a single, sharp nod. The decision was made. She would not be a gatekeeper. Not anymore. She would be a partner. She turned from the Hall of Lost Worlds, her dusty robes swirling around her.
— There are other archives, — she confirmed, her voice tight.
She did not wait to see if he followed. She knew he would. She was no longer leading him to a grave. She was leading him toward a secret.
The torchlight threw their long shadows against the stone. The silence of the hall felt different now, charged with possibility.
She led him away from the public despair of the great hall and into the quiet, restricted corridors where the Scriptorium kept its real secrets. The air grew colder, the scent of paper sharper. They passed doors sealed with lead and iron, archives deemed too dangerous or too fragile for even most scholars. Her sandals made soft, slapping sounds on the polished stone floor.
— The tablet is old, — she said, thinking aloud. Her mind was working again, connecting data points, searching for patterns. It was a familiar process, but the goal was new. She was not looking for proof of failure. She was looking for a thread. — Pre-Consortium script. The masons who built this level of the Scriptorium were from the same region. Their own records might mention the story. A local legend. A folktale.
Sineus walked beside her, his longer stride easily keeping pace. He remained silent, letting her work. He had planted the seed of the question; now he was giving her the space to let it grow. It was a patient, intelligent kind of leadership she was not accustomed to.
She stopped before a simple, unadorned wooden door. It was bound with a single, thick band of unpolished bronze. There was no lock, only a complex knot of interwoven leather cords. A memory lock.
— This is the Annex of Regional Lore, — she explained. — Records collected when the Scriptorium was founded. Most of it is myth. Superstition. But if the story on the tablet was known, some echo of it might be in here.
Her fingers, nimble and sure, began to work at the knot. It was not a puzzle of loops and pulls, but a sequence of touches that had to be performed in the correct order, recalling the oath of the first annex keeper. It was a task she had not performed in a decade.
The knot fell away. The door swung inward with a low groan, releasing a puff of air thick with the smell of dry rot and forgotten things.
Inside, scrolls were stacked in precarious columns from floor to ceiling. It was not a library; it was a forest of paper.
— We will start here, — Kira said, stepping into the cramped space.
She took a lantern from a hook by the door and lit it. The small flame pushed back the darkness, revealing a chaotic jumble of history. It was a mess. It was disorganized. It was a place where a secret could hide for a thousand years.
It was perfect.
For the first time that day, a flicker of something other than weariness crossed Kira Zaytseva’s face. It was the thrill of the hunt.
She turned and led him from the chaotic annex toward the Scriptorium's deeper secrets.
