[POV: Ezekiel]
The Archive felt wrong.
Not hostile.
Not screaming.
Just wrong—like a page being torn out of a book while you're still reading it.
Ilhera's breath was shallow beside him.
She was still, but he could feel the tension in her body.
Not fear.
Readiness.
---
Then the door opened.
No creak.
No sound.
The room didn't react.
But Ezekiel did.
His body shivered—like his soul tried to back away before his feet could.
Because the man who entered…
Wasn't a man.
He was a sentence in walking form.
---
Wrapped in silence, layered in absence.
Cloth dyed in the ink of erased thoughts.
His face was bandaged.
His tongue cut.
His hands gloved in mirror-stitch fabric.
But the bone mirror he held reflected Ilhera—and nothing else.
No Archive. No Ezekiel.
Only her.
---
[POV: Ilhera]
> "Silent Reader," she whispered.
She hadn't seen one since she was ten.
Only four existed.
Trained not to observe, but to remove.
They weren't killers.
They were erasers.
Sent to pull people out of the script of the world without letting anyone notice.
---
She stepped back, but Ezekiel raised an arm—blocking her.
The Reader didn't flinch.
He held out the bone mirror like a summons.
The air around it pulsed.
Ilhera's name began to unwrite itself in the Archive logs above them.
> "He's erasing me," she said, trembling.
> "Then I'll stop him."
> "Ezekiel—NO—"
---
[POV: The Archive – Glyph Instability Log]
:: Vessel pulse detected
:: Silence core activation: Passive threshold breached
:: Phoneme destabilization imminent
:: Warning: WORD-LAW STRUCTURE NOT FULLY FORMED
:: Suggestion: Abort speech event
---
[POV: Ezekiel]
He stepped forward.
The Reader raised the mirror again.
Ilhera's outline flickered.
Her memory in the Archive blurred.
And Ezekiel spoke.
---
Not a sentence.
Not a name.
Just a single word.
A word not written, not taught.
A word the Archive didn't have permission to hear.
> "Stop."
---
The walls screamed.
Not out loud.
In meaning.
Every glyph within ten meters fractured, rewriting themselves into sigils of recoil.
The mirror cracked.
The Reader staggered—not from impact.
But because his identity blinked out of alignment.
He raised the quill.
Ink bled from it like acid.
He dashed a sigil into the air:
> ERASE. REBIND. STRIKE.
---
The air around Ezekiel bent.
His name began to dissolve from the Archive index.
But Ilhera moved first.
---
[POV: Ilhera]
> "You want to erase me?"
Her blade wasn't steel.
It was a glyph-woven pulseblade, built to cut concepts—not flesh.
She drove it forward—
Straight through the mirror.
---
The Reader didn't scream.
But the glyph on his chest pulsed—REDACTED—and tried to invert her weapon mid-strike.
Ezekiel reached out—
Touched the air beside the Reader's chest.
And whispered:
> "Forget."
---
The glyph shattered.
The Reader froze mid-motion.
His body slumped forward, and the mirror he held turned to salt—
Evaporating in the Archive's breath.
---
[Silence.]
Ezekiel was shaking.
Not from exhaustion.
From what he'd felt.
The word he spoke wasn't his.
It had come from inside him, but deeper.
Like something stored… waiting for the moment to be let out.
---
Ilhera stepped beside him.
> "You shouldn't have been able to do that."
He nodded slowly.
> "I didn't."
---
[POV: The Archive – Passive Echo Layer]
:: Vessel has spoken
:: Word-level stability: Uncertain
:: Listener status: World
:: Archive suggestion: Watch carefully
:: Sentence in formation