CHAPTER II THE MOURNER ARCHIVE

Sleep didn’t come that night. It didn’t even try. Noen lay in bed, staring at the cracked ceiling above him. The hum echoed in the hollows of his bones, pulsing in waves that made the air feel too thick to breathe. Even with every light on in the apartment, the shadows still moved. They stretched differently now. He remembered the way it looked at him. Not with malice. Not hunger. Reverence. That was worse. He grabbed his coat  before the sun rose and left. Where he was going, light didn’t matter anyway.

The undervault.

Hidden in the sewage routes beneath Caelridge’s oldest districts, the Undervault was a myth to a most, a whisper to the rest. But Noen had been there before. Back when Reina was still alive, asking questions the city didn’t want answered. It wasn’t guarded by soldiers. It was guarded by shame. A maze of forgotten archives, censored texts, outlawed audio logs. Things MIND had erased from the surface but hadn’t managed to destroy. He found it in the corner of an old generator room: a vault door that looked like it hadn’t been opened it years. But he knew the sequence. Reina had found it once. Together, they’d joked it led to hell. Noen didn’t laugh now…

The room beyond smelled of rust and mildew and memory. Screens flickered with half deleted files. Data pads hummed with unstable energy. He pulled on gloves, brushing away dust from one of the old consoles.

SEARCH QUERY: MOURNERS

The result bled across the screen like open wounds.

Mourners are sentient grief constructs formed in high-emotion zones, usually post-trauma. Capable of memory interference. Proximity to children increases activity.

Noen’s pulse quickened. He searched deeper.

A symbol kept appearing. A downward facing eye, crossed by a single line. Underneath it: “DIRGE PROTOCOL 7”

Another file opened. A shaky, low resolution video clip. A mourner stood in a room with a child. The child was laughing and the Mourner was humming. Noen paused there. Reina had always said someone used to sing to her in her sleep when she cried alone. He’d always thought it was her imagination. Now he wasn’t sure.