Kira Zaytseva led him to a small reading room, a pocket of quiet carved out of the Scriptorium’s greater silence. A single oil lamp burned on a heavy oak table, its light a small, warm island in the cool dark. The air smelled of dust, old paper, and the faint, clean scent of beeswax from the lamp’s polished base. She had left his companions, the stoic warrior Fedor Sokolov and the wounded guide Alani Vainu, in the upper halls with bread and water. This next part of the journey was for him alone.
The charcoal rubbing of the Unfinished Tablet lay between them. Its black, blocky script was a stark wound on the pale paper, a copy of a question that had cracked the foundation of Kira’s world. She had spent a lifetime cataloging endings. He had come looking for a beginning.
— It is an outlier, statistically insignificant, — Kira said. Her voice was as dry as the scrolls stacked in the alcoves around them. She did not look at him, but at the rubbing, as if it were a flawed specimen under glass. Her professional skepticism was a wall she had spent decades building.
Sineus looked at the paper, at the empty space of three finger-widths where the answer should have been. He thought of the cloying fog of the Echoing Blight, the way it unmade the very ground beneath his feet. He thought of the high, thin shriek of torn reality he alone could hear. Statistics did not matter when the world was being erased one memory at a time.
— It is a chance, — he countered, his voice quiet but firm. He met her gaze across the table. — It is the only one we have.
Her argument was a fortress of logic. His was a raft made of a single log in a storm. He would not let it sink. He would not let her sink it.
Kira held his gaze for a long moment. The lamplight softened the hard lines of her face, but it could not hide the profound weariness in her eyes. She had seen too many worlds die. She had cataloged too many failures. Her cynicism was not a philosophy; it was a scar.
She studied his face, seeing past the title of Knyaz, past the northern lord from Belogorod. She saw the faint lines of exhaustion around his eyes, the tension in his jaw that spoke of a burden carried for too long. He was not a naive prince chasing a folktale. He was a man who had stared into the abyss and had not blinked. He was clinging to this single, flawed record not out of foolishness, but out of necessity.
Her perception of him shifted. He was not another data point in her long list of failures. He was a fellow soul, standing on the edge of the same precipice.
Sineus, in turn, saw past the cold archivist. He saw the woman hiding behind a wall of facts to keep from drowning in despair. The constant, low ache behind his own eyes, the price of seeing the Pod-sloy, gave him a strange empathy for her. He knew what it was to see a truth that isolated you, to carry a weight no one else could comprehend. Her fortress of logic was a prison she had built for her own protection.
A quiet, fragile understanding formed between them in the lamplit silence. It was not a bond of agreement, but of a shared, desperate question. The tension in the room eased. The argument was over.
Kira Zaytseva gave a single, sharp nod. The decision was made.
She rose from the table, her ink-stained robes rustling. She moved to a locked cabinet of dark, heavy wood in the corner of the room. From a chain around her neck, she produced a small, bronze key. The lock turned with a dry click that echoed in the quiet.
She did not pull out a single scroll. She returned with a heavy armload of them, their casings made of dark, oiled leather and sealed with small, lead stamps. These were not the public records from the Hall of Lost Worlds. These were catalogues. Inventories of the Scriptorium’s deepest, most restricted archives.
She laid them on the table, the sound a heavy, final thud. She had committed to a deeper level of assistance. The search for the missing entry would begin in earnest.
— If the story from the tablet exists anywhere else, it will be referenced in one of these, — she said, her voice stripped of its earlier cynicism. It was now the voice of a scholar on the hunt. — A cross-reference to a myth, a footnote on a map, a keeper’s private log. We are not looking for the story. We are looking for its shadow.
They worked. The great silence of the Scriptorium pressed in around their small circle of light. Kira unrolled the first catalogue, her nimble fingers breaking seals that had not been touched in a generation. Sineus sat opposite, his task to scan the dense, spidery script for any mention of the tablet’s origin, its unique script, or any tale of a Blight defeated.
Hours passed. The lamp burned lower. The pile of discarded catalogues grew. The script was archaic, full of unfamiliar terms and the coded shorthand of long-dead archivists. Kira would murmur a translation, her finger tracing a line. Sineus would shake his head, and they would move on. A new rhythm formed between them, a partnership of shared focus.
He learned the texture of her world. He saw the names of archives sealed for containing “memetic contagions.” He read of others holding “unstable paradoxes.” The Scriptorium was not just a library; it was an armory and a prison for the most dangerous things in the world: ideas.
Kira unrolled another scroll, this one bound with a simple leather thong. It was an index of personnel, a list of keepers and their assigned vaults from the Scriptorium’s founding centuries. It was a long shot. A dead end, most likely.
Sineus took one side of the heavy parchment, holding it taut. His gaze drifted down the columns of names and titles. Keeper of the Celestial Orrery. Guardian of the Unspoken Verse. Master of the Fading Maps. Each title was a story in itself.
His finger stopped.
It was a simple entry, tucked away near the bottom of a long column, written in a slightly different hand than the others. It was an addendum. An update.
— Here, — he said, his voice a low rasp.
Kira leaned closer, her dark hair falling across her shoulder. She followed his finger. The entry was stark.
Zoya Petrova, it read. Keeper of the Sealed Archive.
The title hung in the air between them. The Sealed Archive. It was a place so restricted it was not even on the Scriptorium’s public maps. A place for knowledge deemed too dangerous for the world to know. A place for final secrets.
— Zoya Petrova, — Kira breathed the name, her expression hardening. — She has been the keeper for fifty years. She is bound by oaths older than my order. She believes some truths are so devastating they are better left forgotten.
Sineus looked at the name on the scroll. Zoya Petrova. He did not know this woman, but he knew her philosophy. It was the same logic that had led his own people in Belogorod to cut away their past, to feed the Blight with their convenient lies. It was the logic of a slow, comfortable suicide.
They had their lead. They had their next step. It was not a dusty scroll, but a living guardian. A woman who had dedicated her life to keeping the door shut.
The lamp cast a steady, golden circle on the oak table. Outside the small room, the great silence of the Scriptorium held its breath.
They had their lead. Now they went to find the woman who guarded the last secrets.
