I didn't sleep.
The candle guttered out hours before dawn, but I sat at my desk anyway, staring at the smear of dried ink where her name should have been. The room was cold. The rain hadn't stopped. I could hear it dripping from the gutters outside, steady, unrelenting.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that figure in the corner. Those shifting letters. That blurred face.
I kept whispering her name to myself, terrified the silence might steal it away.
"Lyra. Lyra. Lyra."
But when dawn came and the pale light crept across the desk, I almost broke.
Because I remembered something I shouldn't.
It wasn't Lyra this time. It wasn't even mine.
A name slipped into my head like a splinter: Kareth Volne. I knew him. Or, I shouldn't have, but I did. A boy with ink-stained hands. A laugh like gravel. A boy who had once stolen apples with me from the market and who'd been caught, dragged away by guards, never seen again.
Except none of that had ever happened. I searched my memory desperately, clawing through scraps of half-truths. His face was clear in my mind, his voice, the way he limped slightly on his left leg. But when I tried to recall where, when, how, the details broke apart like ash in the wind.
I grabbed the journal again, opened to a fresh page, and scrawled his name.
Kareth Volne.
This time the ink stayed. The letters didn't twist into gibberish. But when I blinked, the words blurred anyway, refusing to sit still.
The mark on my hand was bleeding through the skin.
I hadn't noticed it before. Perhaps because the candlelight had been too dim, or perhaps because I hadn't wanted to look. But there it was: a faint black smear across the palm of my left hand, shaped almost like a letter that refused to settle on one form. Sometimes it was a crooked "V." Sometimes a broken "O." Sometimes nothing at all.
The shadow-man had left it.
My first thought was to burn it away. But when I pressed the candle flame close, the mark only shifted, as though mocking me.
"Everything erased still exists," I muttered.
The words weren't mine. They had been pressed into my mind by that thing. And now the world had given me not only Lyra, but this… Kareth.
Why me?
I slammed the journal shut and stood, pacing. My body felt foreign, heavy. Every time I blinked, I saw flashes of faces I didn't know. Some men. Some women. Old, young. All unfamiliar, and yet my heart ached with the certainty that they had been real once.
The burden was already crushing me.
---
I went into town, half-mad, desperate for proof.
The market bustled despite the rain. Vendors shouted over each other, offering fresh bread, smoked fish, damp fruit. Ordinary life. The sight of it made me sick.
Because I saw what no one else did.
A stall stood between two vendors, a small, crooked cart with a cracked sign: "Jareth's Candied Nuts." The man behind it was fat, bald, grinning. His apron was smeared with sugar. I remembered him suddenly. His laugh. His habit of giving children an extra handful for free. I remembered the way he died, trampled when a horse bolted through the square.
But when I asked a passing woman if she saw the cart, she blinked. "What cart?"
I turned back. The stall was still there. Jareth smiled at me, holding out a paper bag. "Want a taste, lad?"
My hands shook as I reached for it. The moment I touched the bag, the stall collapsed into black dust, vanishing before my eyes. The space was empty again, nothing but wet cobblestones.
The woman gave me a wide berth, muttering something under her breath.
I stumbled away, clutching the bag. It was real. Heavy in my palm. When I tore it open, candied nuts tumbled out, glistening with sugar. I bit into one. Sweet, bitter, metallic.
They tasted like memory.
I spat them out, bile rising in my throat.
---
By the time I returned home, my head was splitting. The rain hadn't let up. I collapsed into the chair by the fire, clutching my hand. The mark was darker now, more defined. The shape had twisted into something like an "A."
Archivist. The word surfaced without permission.
I didn't know what it meant. Not fully. But I knew this much: the mark wasn't just a stain. It was a key. A chain. A curse.
It had chosen me.
And with it came a truth I didn't want: Lyra wasn't the only one who had been erased. She wasn't the first. She wouldn't be the last.
My mind kept circling back to the shadow-man. Why me? Why show me this? Why press this weight into my bones?
I didn't know. I only knew one thing with certainty.
If I followed this path, if I used this mark, I might find her again.
The thought alone was enough to steady me.
---
I opened the journal once more, dipped the quill into ink, and forced my shaking hand to move.
Archivist's Record – Entry One.
That's what I titled it. If the world was determined to erase her, then I would write her back into it.
I filled the page with everything I remembered about Lyra. Her face, her voice, her habits. I described the pendant, the scar, the hum she used when reading. I wrote until the ink bled through the page and my hand cramped, terrified that if I stopped, the details would slip away.
When I finally set the quill down, I felt… lighter. Not whole. Never whole. But steadier.
The mark pulsed faintly on my hand, almost approving.
---
Later that night, when the rain eased to a drizzle, I stood at the window and looked out over the city. Lanterns flickered in the streets below. Life went on as if nothing had changed.
But I knew better.
Somewhere in the cracks of reality, something was feeding on memory, devouring pieces of the world.
And I was the only one cursed, or chosen, to notice.
I pressed my marked hand against the glass.
"If you're listening," I whispered into the night, "then hear this: I will not forget her. I will not let her vanish. Not Lyra. Not Kareth. Not anyone you take."
The glass fogged with my breath. My reflection stared back, gaunt and haunted, with a black mark crawling across his palm.
I hated him already.
But he was all I had.
That was the night Kaelen the scholar died.
And the Archivist was born.