The pen—crafted from an ulna—was warm in Callum's hand.
The parchment—skin, stretched tight—seemed to pulse as he touched it.
He didn't remember sitting.
But he couldn't imagine standing.
He wrote.
He wrote because the Archive demanded it. Not in words—but in sensation.
In the scratching under his scalp.
In the pop of his bones as they rearranged silently, invisibly, inside him.
Each sentence he scrawled bled slightly.
Not ink. Not blood.
Marrow.
Words written in what made him.
> "The first librarian never died. He fractured. His spine was stretched into a timeline."
"We walk on it now."
The parchment curled as if shivering.
The walls whispered in approval.
He kept writing.
---
Sometime—minutes, hours, eons later—he dropped the pen.
The bones around him trembled.
And the parchment folded itself… and crawled away.
He didn't follow it.
He couldn't.
His knees had fused to the floor. His feet, now flat bone, had become part of the sanctuary itself.
He didn't panic.
He understood.
He was anchoring the memory now.
---
A sound cracked through the chamber:
A scream, human, but echoing with more than one mouth.
The wall to his right split open like a wound.
From within, darkness oozed—not smoke, not shadow, but consciousness.
Heavy.
Alive.
Intentional.
Then, a figure stepped through.
No mask.
No robe.
Not the Archivist.
Greaves.
But different.
His skin was glass. His bones glowed from within, pulsing with a memory Callum couldn't bear to see.
Greaves stepped forward, his mouth split in a frown that bled into a grin.
> "I tried to erase you," he whispered. "You came back wrong."
Callum's jaw moved on its own.
> "You fractured me."
Greaves touched his chest—right over the heart.
> "I needed to. The Archive won't take a whole host. It needs gaps. Cracks. Places for memory to pour in."
Callum rose—though he didn't move.
He unfolded.
A thousand tiny fingers beneath his skin extended, pulled, lifted.
He stood as his body bent incorrectly, spine curling upward, shoulders blooming with extra joints.
And from his back—
Pages emerged.
Flesh-parchment.
His skin writing itself.
---
Greaves smiled.
> "You're ready."
The room dissolved around them.
And in its place: the original Archive.
---
There was no ceiling.
Only sky.
But not the sky above.
A sky made of bone.
Massive vertebrae coiled like galaxies. Cartilage stars pulsed in cosmic rhythm.
And beneath it all, stretching into the infinite:
The Origin Spine.
It lay across the world like the fossilized body of a dead god—its bones older than time, its ribs housing entire ecosystems of memory.
And at its base—
A door.
Simple.
Wooden.
Callum stepped toward it.
---
The closer he came, the louder the Archive whispered:
> "This is where we began."
"This is where we loop."
"This is where you were broken… and filed."
He touched the door.
It didn't open.
It swallowed him.
---
He was a child again.
Six years old.
Standing in the hallway of his childhood home.
A woman—his mother—stood at the end of the corridor, crying.
She was holding something.
Something white.
Something… bone-like.
She turned to him, her mouth opening—
—but no sound emerged.
Just dust.
The dust became teeth.
The teeth became a scream.
---
The hallway twisted.
His childhood room cracked and split, folding into itself like paper soaked in blood.
The bed became a ribcage.
The walls, vertebrae.
And there, in the center—
The replica.
Only now, it was no longer him.
It wore his face.
But the eyes were hollow.
The mouth: sewn shut with hair.
It held a book.
The title: Callum Mercer – Memory 7: Discarded.
It reached out, slowly…
…and handed him the book.
---
When he opened it, the pages were blank.
Until he blinked.
Then:
> "You are not the first.
You are not the last.
You are the shelf between failures."
He turned the page.
A mirror.
Embedded in flesh.
And in it—the face of the First Archivist.
He screamed.
---
He awoke in the womb.
Not metaphorically.
A room of pulsing walls, soft tissue, warmth.
He floated in fluid, umbilical cords wrapping his limbs.
Above him, the ceiling blinked.
An eye, larger than galaxies.
He tried to scream—
—but lungs were still forming.
Around him, a voice:
> "You were archived before you were born."
"You are not alive."
"You are remembered."
---
Then came the whisper of the First Archivist.
A voice in the spine.
> "You are no longer flesh."
"You are binding."
> "Write."
---
He awoke standing in front of the sanctuary altar.
A final scroll awaited him—coiled, trembling.
It was made from the skin of every past Callum.
He picked up the ulna stylus again.
Began to write.
This time, not in words.
In diagrams.
Symbols.
Bone configurations.
He didn't know what they meant.
But the walls did.
The house groaned in satisfaction.
---
He finished the scroll.
And the floor split.
He fell.
---
He landed in a chamber of mirrors.
Infinite.
Each mirror showed a different version of himself.
One smiling.
One skinless.
One hollow.
One with hundreds of mouths.
They all turned toward him and whispered:
> "It's your turn to be filed."
The mirrors cracked.
And behind each:
Shelves.
Endless.
Each filled with bones.
And every bone…
His.
---
Then came the sound.
The chewing.
Close.
Louder.
And then—teeth.
Not human.
Not beast.
Something older.
Callum turned.
And saw it.
The Archive.
In its truest form.
A creature made of fractured memories. A spine as tall as towers. Skulls fused into a choral mass. Hands that turned pages made of people. Eyes that blinked in time with the reader's heartbeat.
It opened its mouth.
> "Time to shelve you."
---
Callum screamed.
But the sound was filed.
Just another fragment.
Another entry.
The Archive reached forward.
Not to kill.
Not to consume.
To catalog.
It plucked him gently from the floor.
Folded him.
Filed him.
Labeled him:
> Host 14: Complete. Stable. Archivist-Class.
And placed him on the highest shelf.
Where he could still see.
Still remember.
Still… write.