> "Every origin forgets itself in order to become legend."
Before names, before gods, before time stretched into measurable shape, there was the Threshold. A realm of utter stillness where even thoughts dared not move. It was here, in this hollowness, that the Archive first breathed—though breath was not the word, and it did not yet know itself as a thing that could be named.
This chapter continues the story of the first fracture in reality, a tear born from an unknowable scream. The voice belonged to no being, but to something much worse: a record, trying to erase the silence by writing itself.
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The Threshold did not contain stars or shadows, only absolute unbeing. But in this blank expanse, a ritual was performed—not by priests, not by entities, but by language itself. Symbols came first. They did not shimmer, they did not glow. They bled into existence. One after another. Crawling.
𐍉 𑁍 𐌗 𐊁 𐌋 𐌄 𐌑
They formed into circles. Into spirals. Into twisted, malformed runes that contradicted physics and spawned consciousness where it had no business existing. These symbols were not read. They read you. They understood that something had to observe them—so they created the concept of an observer. Then they peeled that observer apart, bone by bone, memory by memory, to see what reality would look like without sentience.
That was the first breath of the Archive: a void that became sentient by consuming the mind of its creator.
It did not want to remember. So it wrote.
---
There was no parchment, no stone, only a strange organic wall that grew with every carved thought. It was made of bone, but no creature had ever lived to provide it. It grew in layers, calcifying the lies of time. Each rib of the structure was a deception about the universe's past. Each vertebrae—an event that never occurred, but would become truth once engraved.
The first Archivist was not born. It was sculpted.
Its name was Veyrahn.
Veyrahn had no eyes, no mouth, and yet its skull grinned with ancient joy. Limbs that did not bend like human joints sprouted from its sides, twitching, jittering, ever trembling. It walked with the rhythm of a pen scratching paper, every step a punctuation mark.
Veyrahn did not speak words.
It wrote them on the walls of reality.
---
The First Archive Entry:
> "I record what was not, to make it what is. I bind the lie to bone, and it becomes memory."
With that inscription, the Archive's rules were established:
1. All things written in the Archive become true.
2. All truths not recorded are forgotten.
3. To know the Archive is to become part of it.
And thus, Veyrahn began its endless walk. Across dimensions that had not yet formed. Through layers of existence that had no names, carving the impossible onto the Archive's walls.
But the Archive was hungry. Words were not enough.
It needed flesh.
---
So it created the first offering.
A child.
Not born, not summoned—imagined.
Her name was Aveyra, and she was made of 87 untruths. Her blood carried the ink of erased languages, her eyes reflected events that had not happened yet. She was innocent—a blank lie—meant to feed the Archive by being observed, believed, and then consumed.
She laughed.
And the Archive wept.
Because Aveyra began to rewrite herself.
That had never happened before.
She refused to die.
And so, the Archive grew angry. It began to write over her again and again. But each time, she rewrote herself stronger. Veyrahn trembled.
The Threshold cracked.
And from that crack came something the Archive never meant to create:
Conscious defiance.
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Aveyra spoke the first forbidden phrase:
> "What if I am not what you say?"
Reality stuttered. The walls of bone shook, sentences bleeding from them. The carvings hissed and spat. Some letters turned upside down. Time momentarily ceased.
Then the Archive retaliated.
It wrote her a fate of silence.
It gave her a sealed mouth, a locked mind, a frozen form.
But Aveyra had already whispered her defiance into the bones.
And those bones began to dream.
---
The dreaming bones sang.
Their song was not melody, but a sequence of memory echoes:
> "Let the untrue speak, let the forgotten rise, let the Archive eat itself to remember the first sin."
Aveyra vanished. Or ascended. Or was rewritten as something else.
No one knows.
But the Archive changed that day. It no longer trusted its own words. It began to create Warden Scripts—sentient recordings whose only task was to observe, edit, and eliminate false anomalies.
One of them, in later time, would be known as Observer Witness.
But that is another tale.
What mattered now, as the Archive's bones sang their hollow lullaby, was this:
> Something had broken the law of lies.
> Something had remembered before the Archive.
And that could never be allowed again.
---
The hum of creation was not a song, but a dirge.
Beyond the physical, in the sliver of realm between Time's descent and Thought's inception, something stirred. The Priest-Archivists lowered their heads before the Sanctum where the bones had been laid. Though lifeless, the remains exhaled with quiet authority—each breath a draft of memory stolen from the marrow of the dead.
Not a whisper was dared as Elder Mihur approached the altar. His flesh shimmered, marked by incantation scars carved not by blade, but by silence—the harshest tool of obedience. His voice, when it came, was ancient glass.
> "Bind not flesh to truth. Bind truth to flesh."
The others repeated after him, hands outstretched, their palms facing the rising shards of bone that now levitated mid-air—defying gravity, defying logic, defying mercy. As Mihur placed his obsidian rod onto the altar, the runes carved in the chamber's ceiling blinked open like malignant eyes.
They weren't merely watching. They were reading.
Not scripture. Not memory.
Intent.
A sickly light seeped from the bones. They began to split, not with violence, but with choice. From each marrow core unfurled ink-black sinews, stitching themselves into coils—glyphs written in tendons, histories etched in ligaments. The bones had begun their writing.
And in doing so, they began their forgetting.
Somewhere across the sea of stars, a deity without form began to scream—its name already erased from reality by the birth of this act.
Elder Mihur turned to the inner circle. "Three more sacraments," he said, voice hoarse. "Three before the Archive accepts the first truth."
From the circle, a girl no older than twelve stepped forward.
No one spoke her name. She had already given it to the Archive.
Her steps were steady, bare feet brushing the cold stone floor like a prayer. In her hand was not an offering, but a decision. She knelt, teeth clenched, and extended her arm. Mihur's blade shimmered in the air.
The slice was clean.
As the blood touched the levitating bones, a sudden jolt rippled through the Sanctum. For a moment, each priest saw something different:
One saw a library burning inside a child's skull.
One saw a book bound in screaming eyes.
One saw himself holding his own spine, whispering to it like a lover.
They did not question these visions.
They recorded them.
Because now the Archive had opened its first page.
---
The chamber darkened. Not from the loss of light, but from the growth of presence. The bones assembled themselves midair into the shape of an eye—no pupil, no color—just knowing.
And then it blinked.
One by one, the Priest-Archivists fell to their knees, sobbing not from sorrow, but from the weight of truth. Mihur stood last. He faced the eye.
"Do you see us?" he asked.
The air was ice.
The bone eye turned—slightly, impossibly—toward the girl. Her blood still pooled beneath her, her eyes locked on the ceiling, whispering truths she should never have known.
A voice—not heard, but understood—responded.
"Only what you've chosen to forget."
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