The next morning, Ashen Halweir woke with the taste of salt and ash in his mouth.Not the ordinary kind. This one carried memory.

A sunken library. Screaming books. A hand of bone scrawling in a language that unstitched logic.

Ashen sat up, gasping.

His room in the tenement above the Paper-Keeper’s Guild was small, dim, and crammed with the scent of mold, pressed parchment, and drying ink. A dead wasp lay curled in a windowsill jar. He stared at it for a long moment, certain he’d seen it alive in the dream, flapping against an invisible dome of thought.

His coat still damp from the night before hung by the warped door. The invitation from the funeral had vanished from his pocket. He wasn’t surprised.

What did surprise him was the object now resting beside his bed:

A book. No title. Bound in what looked like calcified skin, stitched with wire and spider-glass. It hadn’t been there before. When he reached for it, it trembled.

It trembled.

Ashen yanked his hand back.

The moment his skin had grazed the cover, his vision twisted not a flash, not a memory, but a collision. His mind felt scraped open. He saw:

• A wheel of severed tongues chanting in perfect unity.

• A cathedral built upside-down beneath a bleeding sea.

• A mirror that reflected the future, cracked just where his own eyes would be.

• A name. Unspoken. Burned. Sealed.

Then it was gone.

He crawled back from the book and hissed through his teeth, pressing his palms into his eyes until stars burst behind them. His heart thundered.

“Get a grip,” he muttered, but his voice shook like brittle glass.

That’s when he noticed the mark.

His left wrist, pale under the lamplight, now bore a strange ink-like symbol—an eye, horizontal, bound in thorns. It shimmered faintly, like veins of mercury. 

“Seven sigils,” the mirror-faced being had said. 

“Seven keys.” 

This was one of them. 

Downstairs, the Paper-Keeper’s Guild was already humming. Quillfolk catalogued dreams, scribes bound confessions into living scrolls, and a tea-drinker at the corner table whispered apologies to their own shadow. The Guild had never pretended to be sane 

Ashen passed unnoticed through the labyrinth of ink-drunk scholars. He had only one destination: The Obscura Vault.

It was a forgotten archive below the guild—where records too unstable or forbidden were sealed. His mother had once warned him never to go near it.

“Because names are not just written,” she had said. “They are planted. And some grow teeth.”

The lift to the Vault was a brass cage wrapped in chains of obsidian script. He spoke the access word—his mother's name—and the cage shuddered downward. It descended into silence.

Real silence. A silence so complete that Ashen could no longer hear his own heartbeat. Only when the gate opened did noise return, like a gasp of breath after drowning.

He stepped into the Archive of Endings.

It wasn’t a room. It was a catacomb of books, descending endlessly in concentric rings, each shelf older than the one above. Some tomes bled. Others whispered. Some simply watched.

At the center stood a single being.

Not human.

She wore robes of unraveling text and floated inches above the black-marble floor. Her eyes were sealed by thread, yet she turned as he approached.

“Ashen Halweir,” she said, though he had given no name. “You bear the first mark. Why have you come?”

He held up the strange book from his room. “This appeared beside me. I touched it. I saw… something. I need to know what it is.”

The Archivist tilted her head.

“Then you have already opened the first sigil. The Book of Null Testimony cannot be seen by the unmarked. It is the record of truths that were never allowed to exist.”

Ashen blinked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Exactly.” She floated closer. “There are six more marks. Each will awaken when you cross a threshold between real and unreal. Once you bear them all, the Archive will open fully—and you will read the true name of the world.”

He felt suddenly small. “What happens if I read it?”

“The world ends.”

The answer was so simple it was terrifying.

Ashen took a step back. “Then why would I ever do that?”

The Archivist’s stitched eyes widened as if in awe—or sorrow.

“Because the god inside you will make you.”

Above, in the waking city, the rain paused for the first time in a year. And from the depths of the drowned cathedral, something opened its eyes.