Kaelen Vance reached for the warmth that should have been there, and his hand fell through cold sheets.
He froze, his fingers curling into the empty mattress. The morning light of Oakhaven filtered through the heavy shutters, painting stripes of dust-mote gold across the room, but the silence was wrong. It wasn't the peaceful quiet of a sleeping house; it was the absolute, sterile silence of a stopped clock.
"Lyra?"
His voice cracked, dry from sleep. He sat up, pushing the spectacles up the bridge of his nose—a nervous tic that had carved a permanent groove into his skin. The other side of the bed was made. Not just empty, but pristine. The pillow was fluffed, the quilt pulled taut with military precision. It looked like no one had slept there in years.
Panic, cold and sharp, pricked at the base of his skull.
He swung his legs out of bed, his bare feet hitting the wooden floorboards. Cold. Too cold for late spring in Veridia. He moved to the hallway, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
"Elen? Sweetheart?"
The door to the nursery was at the end of the hall. He had painted it himself three years ago, a soft, clumsy shade of azure that Lyra had laughed at but refused to let him fix. He rushed toward it, his hand reaching for the brass knob.
The door was brown.
Kaelen stopped. He blinked, rubbing his eyes behind the lenses. The door was unpainted, rough-hewn oak. The brass knob was iron.
"No," he whispered. "No, the light is just... the shutters are closed."
He grabbed the handle and threw the door open.
He expected the crib. He expected the mobile of carved gryphons spinning slowly in the draft. He expected the smell of milk and lavender powder.
He was met with the acrid sting of bleach and old mops.
It was a broom closet.
Shelves lined the walls, stacked with linens and cleaning supplies. A bucket sat in the center of the floor where the crib should have been. The floorboards were different—stone, not wood.
Kaelen stumbled back, his shoulder hitting the doorframe. The air left his lungs. He stared at the bucket, waiting for the image to flicker, for the illusion to break. It didn't. The bucket remained a bucket. The mop remained a mop.
Breathe, his mind commanded, falling back on the Archivist's discipline. Catalog the data. Analyze the discrepancy.
Hypothesis 1: I am dreaming.
Hypothesis 2: I have suffered a stroke.
Hypothesis 3: Someone broke in and... remodeled? In one night?
None of it made sense. He turned and ran back to the master bedroom, tearing through the wardrobe. His robes—grey, wool, standard Archivist issue—were there. But Lyra's dresses? Gone. The red silk scarf she wore to the harvest festival? Gone. The tiny shoes Elen had outgrown but they couldn't bear to throw away?
Gone.
"This isn't possible," Kaelen hissed, gripping the sides of his head. "I held her last night. We talked about the Light Tithe. We talked about..."
He stopped. What had they talked about?
He tried to grasp the memory of the conversation, but it was slippery, like trying to hold oil in a fist. He remembered her smile. He remembered the sound of her voice. But the words? They were dissolving into white noise.
The Anchor.
The thought surfaced from the depths of his panic. He needed proof. Physical proof.
He dropped to his knees in the hallway, crawling toward the ventilation grate near the floor. Two months ago, Elen had taken her favorite toy—a small, crudely carved wooden horse—and shoved it through the slats. Kaelen had promised to unscrew the grate and retrieve it, but he'd forgotten. Lyra had teased him about it just yesterday.
If the horse is there, they existed. If the horse is there, I'm not insane.
His fingers fumbled with the screws. They were rusted tight. He didn't care. He clawed at the metal, his fingernails tearing, until the grate gave way with a screech of protesting iron.
He shoved his hand into the dark, dusty throat of the house. He swept his arm back and forth, his chest heaving.
Dust.
Cobwebs.
Something hard.
Kaelen's fingers closed around wood. A sob broke from his throat, half-laugh, half-wail. He pulled it out.
It was the horse. One leg was broken, and the paint was chipped, but it was undeniably real. He clutched it to his chest, closing his eyes. "See?" he whispered to the empty house. "See? I'm not crazy. You're real."
A sharp pain spiked behind his eyes—a migraine that hit with the force of a hammer.
He gasped, dropping the horse. It clattered to the floor.
As he looked at it, the air around the toy seemed to... ripple. The colors of the wood desaturated, turning grey for a split second before snapping back to brown. And floating above the object, suspended in the air like dust motes caught in a sunbeam, was a string of jagged, luminous blue text.
[Object ID: NULL]
[Status: UNREGISTERED ASSET]
[Error: Texture File Corrupted]
Kaelen scrambled back, crab-walking away from the toy until his back hit the wall. "What... what is that?"
He rubbed his eyes, but the text didn't vanish. It hovered over the wooden horse, crisp and geometric, utterly alien against the rustic backdrop of his home. It looked like the calligraphy in the forbidden tomes of the High Synod, but sharper. Cleaner.
He reached out a trembling hand. As his finger brushed the blue light, a static shock—far stronger than wool on a dry day—zapped him.
[System Notice: Contact Established.]
[User: Kaelen Vance. Soul Integrity: 99%. Corruption: 0% -> 1%.]
Blood began to drip from his nose.
He wiped it away, staring at the crimson smear on his hand. It looked dark. Too dark. Almost black in the dim light.
He stood up, his legs shaking. He grabbed the horse—ignoring the static buzz that made his teeth ache—and shoved it into his pocket. He needed air. He needed to see people. He needed to find someone who remembered.
Kaelen threw on his Archivist robes, not bothering with the buttons, and burst out his front door into the street.
Oakhaven was waking up. The tiered city, built into the side of the massive God-Scar canyon, was bathed in the golden glow of the morning sun. Carts rattled over cobblestones. The smell of baking bread and coal smoke filled the air. It was perfectly, terrifyingly normal.
"Mrs. Gable!"
Kaelen spotted his neighbor, an elderly woman sweeping her stoop. She had babysat Elen a dozen times. She had knitted Lyra a shawl for the winter.
Mrs. Gable looked up, her wrinkled face breaking into a polite smile. "Oh, good morning, Master Vance. You're up early. Usually, you bury your nose in books until noon."
Kaelen rushed to her fence, gripping the iron rails. "Mrs. Gable, have you seen Lyra? Or Elen? They aren't in the house. I think... I think something happened."
Mrs. Gable paused, leaning on her broom. She tilted her head, her expression shifting from politeness to mild confusion.
"Lyra?" she repeated, testing the word like a foreign coin. "Who is Lyra, dear?"
"My wife," Kaelen choked out. "Your friend. You drank tea with her on Tuesday. You knitted a shawl for her."
Mrs. Gable laughed, a dry, rasping sound. "Oh, Master Vance, you always did have a vivid imagination. That comes from working in the Grand Library, I suppose. Too many stories."
She shook her head, returning to her sweeping. "Wife? You've been a lifelong bachelor since you moved in, dear. Always said your books were the only company you could tolerate."
The world seemed to tilt on its axis. The sounds of the street—the cart wheels, the distant church bells, the wind—faded into a high-pitched whine.
"No," Kaelen whispered. "That's not true. You know them."
Mrs. Gable didn't look up. "Go have some tea, Kaelen. You look pale. The heat can get to the mind, you know."
Kaelen stared at her. He looked at her eyes. For a second, just a fraction of a second, the pupils didn't look round. They looked square. Pixelated.
Then she blinked, and they were normal again.
"You..." Kaelen stepped back. "You're wrong."
He turned and ran. He ignored her calling after him. He ran back into his house, slamming the door and bolting it. He leaned against the wood, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
They erased them.
The thought wasn't rational, but it was the only one that fit. The Synod. The Inquisition. They had done something. They had rewritten the book of his life and torn out the pages that mattered.
He paced the hallway, his hands shaking. He needed to think. He needed a plan. He caught his movement in the hallway mirror—a tall, silver-glass oval Lyra had bought for their anniversary.
Kaelen stopped.
He looked at his reflection. The pale man with the messy dark hair and the terrified eyes looked back.
Kaelen raised his hand to touch his face.
In the mirror, the hand remained at his side.
Kaelen froze. He stared at the glass. One second passed. Two.
Then, the reflection's hand jerked upward, snapping into position to match Kaelen's real posture. It wasn't a fluid motion. It skipped frames. It lagged.
[System Warning: Local Reality Latency High.]
[Rendering Error: Synchronization Failed.]
Kaelen stared into his own eyes in the glass. The reflection blinked.
Kaelen hadn't.