The boy stood silently for a moment, digesting what the Archivist had said. The idea that his forgetting had weight, that it reshaped not just memory but reality—that was hard to grasp. But something in his gut knew it was true. Knew it in the same way he knew how to walk, how to speak, how to read, even though he couldn't remember learning any of it.
"You've changed," the Archivist said, almost casually. He was walking again, fingers trailing across the shelves as if reacquainting himself with the volumes he had curated for lifetimes. "You used to be quieter. Passive. You barely asked anything. You wandered, broke down, wrote fragments, disappeared."
The boy blinked. "And now?"
"Now you talk." The Archivist smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Now you ask questions. Now you pull the cloth off the mirror. And I don't know if that's a sign of healing, or collapse."
"I want answers," the boy said firmly.
"And that's what worries me."
The Archivist stopped in front of one of the shelves. He pulled out a book that looked exactly like all the others—black cover, no title. "You were never meant to be the one steering this," he said. "The structure had its rhythm. First the forgetting. Then the wandering. Then the moments of stillness. The Girl. The swing. The letters. The Archive. The spiral. A loop. Not perfect, but controlled."
He opened the book. Inside, the pages were shredded—not ripped, not burned, but dissolved, like they had been forgotten before they were even written.
"But now," the Archivist continued, "you ask the same question in three different chapters. You wake up before the swing should exist. You meet her again and again, and neither of you seem sure how many times it's been. The timeline is smearing."
He closed the book and returned it to the shelf.
"If this keeps going," he said, "the story will lose its order completely. Cause and effect will drift. You'll read an ending before the beginning. You'll write letters you haven't written yet. The Archive may give you a memory that belongs to someone else. Or worse—one that belongs to the truth."
The boy's throat tightened. "Isn't that what I want? The truth?"
The Archivist turned toward him again, voice quieter. "No. You want meaning. You just think the truth will give it to you."
He walked back to the desk and rested a hand on the scattered pages there—some full, some blank, some bleeding black into the wood like they couldn't contain their own ink.
"This world is built on fragments," the Archivist said. "Scattered like ashes, pieced together by belief. And belief needs sequence to survive. Once you lose that… it's not a story anymore. It's just noise."
The boy swallowed hard. "What happens to me when the story breaks?"
The Archivist hesitated. That was answer enough.
Then, with measured breath, he spoke: "It's already starting. You've felt it. Scenes looping with slight differences. Letters arriving out of order. Conversations you don't remember having—yet. The story isn't just forgetting itself. It's folding."
The boy looked down at his hands. They were steady.
But inside, he felt something shifting.
Not fear.
Not even confusion.
A kind of distant inevitability.
Like he'd known this moment was coming.
Like he'd been here before.
And would be again.