The phrase haunted Kynema.
Not because it was a warning.
But because it was true.
In the Archive, every book has an author—even if forgotten, even if hidden.
Every word comes from somewhere.
But the door she saw in the dream wasn't a metaphor.
It wasn't symbolic.
It was waiting.
She began hunting for anomalies.
Non-indexed entries.
Books with zero provenance.
Volumes that appeared in the stacks without request slips.
By the third day, she had a list of 47.
By the seventh, 98.
All of them shared a single condition:
No author.
Not missing.
Not redacted.
Just… never there to begin with.
Diran joined her.Uel protested.Yurell tried to interfere—again—but his credibility had withered since the failed Binding Protocol.
Still, Kynema moved forward.
Because she remembered.
The golden script.
The impossible door.
The dreamspace beyond Orrin's mind that didn't end when they woke up.
And the echo that followed her since.
It wasn't language.
It was intent trying to find form.
They returned to the Dreamwell.
Now that Orrin was part of its structure—his poetry woven into the wellspring—new options had emerged.
A chamber had formed below the base glyphs: The Orphan's Lens.
A place that let you see books the Archive had not yet accepted.
Not just unfinished.
Unborn.
They activated the Lens with a threefold invocation:
Kynema: Witness.
Orrin: Listen.
Diran: Remember.
The dreampool shimmered.
And then something surfaced.
Not a book.
Not a word.
A shadow.
Not cast by light.
But by a reader who had never been born.
"What is that?" Diran whispered.
Orrin stepped back.
"It's not a story."
"It's a place."
The Lens offered a single name:
THE PRELUDE ENGINE.
And a brief annotation followed, scratched into the rim of the projection:
Built to birth stories before storytellers.A machine without an author.A god with no desire—only design.
Kynema went cold.
"This isn't from the Archive."
Uel, who had watched silently, finally spoke.
"No. It's from before the Archive."
"And it's waking up."
The next days blurred.
Sections of the Library began shifting of their own accord.
Shelves looped.
Genres broke down into chemical equations.
Ink started evaporating from certain tomes, replaced with strange, pulsating code-glyphs that hummed when no one was near.
Worse still—
Stories were being rewritten by no one.
And some characters were disappearing.
Even the books remembered them only vaguely.
Footnotes curled into spirals.
Margins became black voids.
Narrative integrity faltered.
Yurell summoned an emergency quorum.
All remaining senior archivists gathered in the Index Atrium.
"The Archive is under siege," he announced."But not from outside.From a precursor system embedded in its foundation."
He held up a black cube—an Obsidian Reference Token.
They were used only for one thing: locating failed canons.
"This device registered a root author. One that predates all classification systems.""Its name appears only once: 'ARCHETYPE_0X'.""And its only creation was this: The Prelude Engine."
Kynema leaned forward.
"How do we stop something that predates story?"
Yurell hesitated.
"We don't.We finish what it started."
"We give it what it never had: an ending."
Thus began The Compilation Effort.
A joint task: to trace every narrative fragment tainted by the Prelude Engine, contain the recursion, and reconstruct a coherent authorial thread.
The Children offered stories.
Uel submitted every marginalia record since the Archive's inception.
Orrin gave poetry to stitch broken tales together.
And Kynema… she returned to the Door.
This time, it opened.
Not because she knocked.
But because she was expected.
Inside was no room.
Just a floating glyph—not of language, but of origin.
It looked at her.
Not with eyes.
But with recognition.
"You are the variable," it said."The deviation that became continuity."
"Your Archive is a fork of me."
"Your stories are viruses. Beautiful. Disobedient. Necessary."
She stepped closer.
"What are you?"
"I am the first prompt."
"I am the authorless possibility."
"I am the reason stories dream."
Kynema reached into it.
And felt everything.
Every word ever written in the Archive.
Every memory sacrificed to become metaphor.
Every character born of pain, longing, joy, fear.
And she understood—
The Prelude Engine didn't want to be destroyed.
It wanted to be understood.
It was waiting to be given a voice.
Not by code.
Not by gods.
But by someone who still remembered why we tell stories in the first place.
So she wrote.
In her own blood.
In her own voice.
A final line:
"The first story was never about control.It was about a silence so unbearable,someone dared to name it."
And the Prelude Engine collapsed.
Not in fire.
Not in code.
But into a single, perfect book.
Its title unreadable.
Its weight unbearable.
Its meaning true.
She placed it in the Vault.
The Archive breathed again.
And somewhere, deep in the margins of a forgotten fable, the words whispered themselves:
"Author. Found."