The scroll was folded with surgical precision—ink bled into its edges like veins around a wound. Kael found it balanced on the edge of his chamber door, resting atop a plate of untouched rations. No seal. No symbol. Just a line of careful, elegant script across its surface:
> Come see the words the gods tried to burn.
He knew the handwriting. Elyss wrote like someone who expected each word to be her last.
Kael rolled the scroll shut and dressed. The Knife, now reforged and quieter, hung at his hip. Its voice had changed—more deliberate now. More careful.
"She wants to show you something forbidden," it said.
"That's starting to become a theme," Kael muttered.
---
The Archivum's lower levels weren't on any map. Kael followed the memory of a whispered direction: third stairwell behind the Halls of Law, beneath the Root Chamber. Each step downward dimmed the air. The walls became less ornamented. The divine glowstones went out. Dust settled in patterns too precise to be random.
When he finally reached the bottom, Elyss was waiting in a long gray robe, her face partially obscured by her hood, and a lantern hovering beside her shoulder.
She didn't speak. Just turned.
He followed.
They passed beneath three locked gates—each more intricate than the last. The final one opened with a touch of her hand and a whisper Kael couldn't hear. As they entered the vault, Kael stopped.
The air was heavy. Not humid. Not stale.
Heavy with memory.
Books weren't shelved here. They were chained.
Scrolls weren't rolled—they were suspended in liquid light.
Statues lined the walls—figures not of gods, but of mortals mid-scream, mid-blessing, mid-death. All caught in the act of creation or rebellion.
Elyss gestured to a plinth at the center of the room. Upon it sat a single scroll inside a triangular containment rune.
"That," she said, "is what you're here for."
Kael approached slowly. The Knife whispered nothing. Core stirred—very faintly.
"What is it?"
"The only unaltered transcript of the Tribunal's first ruling against mortal sovereignty. The event that triggered the creation of Core."
Kael blinked. "Wait. Core was… mortal-made?"
Elyss nodded. "The gods didn't make her. They feared her. So they buried the truth."
He reached for the scroll.
The containment glyph flickered, then allowed his touch.
The moment he unrolled it, the room vanished.
---
He was standing in fire.
Not metaphor. Not vision. The scroll was doing this. Memory as reality.
He smelled smoke. Heard screaming. Saw towers of divine stone collapsing into mortal cities. Weapons unlike any he'd seen—built of raw will and logic—turning divine avatars to dust.
And at the center of it all, a woman.
Her eyes were silver.
Her skin was laced with the same glyphs Kael bore now—exactly the same. Chest. Arms. Spine.
She stood atop a ruin, holding a shard of obsidian light. Core.
When the gods struck her down, she didn't scream.
She laughed.
The vision broke.
Kael fell to one knee in the vault, gasping.
Elyss knelt beside him. "I didn't know you'd be compatible."
He stared at her. "What the hell am I?"
She hesitated. Then said quietly, "A memory that wasn't supposed to happen again."
---
They sat in the dust for a long time.
Elyss eventually broke the silence. "I should report you."
Kael didn't flinch. "You're not going to."
"No," she said. "I'm not."
She reached into her robe and pulled out a small, leather-bound volume. Flipped it open. Between the pages was a faded glyph pressed in blood-red ink.
"I wasn't born a historian," she said. "I was trained as a Seer. We weren't allowed to keep that title once the gods consolidated."
She looked at him—seriously, gently.
"I'm not loyal to them. I'm loyal to truth."
Kael exhaled. "That makes two of us. Or one and a half."
She smiled, faintly.
He drew a shard from his coat—a sliver of the Knife's old form. "This'll track me. Bind it into one of your books."
She took it like it was fragile. "If I do this, I'm with you."
Kael stood. "Then let's rewrite their ending."
They didn't shake hands. Didn't swear oaths. They were too smart for that.
But when Kael left the Archivum, the light above the forbidden vault flickered for the first time in centuries.
And Elyss was still standing there, watching the door.
Waiting for it to open again.