Morning tasks should have sunk into the mundane. Inventory. Dusting. Sorting through the misfiled remnants of forgotten records. Offering polite nods to the senior archivists, who feigned ignorance of my name as it seeped into the Council logs, like ink bleeding into parchment.
Yet, with each breath, I felt as though I was stepping into the haunted halls of another's nightmare. The Calyra--my sacturary, my faith in the order and wisdom of the universe--had turned suddenly sinister. Decay lingered at its edges, a whisper of something vile.
Luthen, a few desks away, was humming softly, a disconcerting sound that had never before graced our shared silence. What he conjured was not a melody but rather a somber mantra, reminiscent of the slow, deliberate cadence the theologians invoked when they "read" the mirrors--those dreadful artifacts of reflection.
I feigned innocence, immersing myself in the tedium of my tasks. Yet, my mind betrayed me, as curiosity wormed its way through the cracks in my focus. I snooped.
In the shadows of the upper stacks lay records shrouded in obscurity, untouched by the hands of most archivists--not from any danger they posed, but due to their ghastly inconvenience. These were histories that ripped apart the fanciful narrative of the Calyra texts, recounting events that the Council quietly erased from the annals of time. Scribblers whose "official" tales had been so meticulously polished, they glistened like treacherous lies under the dim glow of flickering lanterns.
I began my grim inquiry with a ledger bound in glossy, defiant sheen: "War of the Fifth Sun: Calyra Edition." Heroic. Simple. A facade of truth.
Yet, lurking behind a false spine, I unearthed another tome that whispered secrets long buried: "The Fifth Sun Cracked and Wept."Weathered and forgotten, its pages caught the dust of ages, marred by fingerprints that held no trace of my own.
The first account proclaimed that TCOSA's armies had delivered salvation to the wretched cities at their brink. The other told a darker tale--of incineration before liberation. One version boasted that only a single city slipped into the abyss, while the other mourned for twenty-three months. The first sang of "victorious cleansing," a melody discordant with the second, which wept of "whole populations vanished into the night."
A chill seeped into me as I read, a dawning horror binding my thoughts: the Calyra did not merely record history; it wielded the quill like a butcher's knife, rewriting the truth.
Every conquest adorned with glory, all failures swept under the carpet of deceit. Every wound swaddled in a veil of silk, fashioning the blood into mere shadows.
The walls of the archives reverberated softly around me, an echo of pride for their terrible deceptions, ensnaring the very fabric of reality.
While inscribing the "acceptable" passages for public scrutiny, I often found myself slipping away from my desk, the shadow of Luthen casting an air of distraction--which was frequent. His gaze drifted into the void, eyes fixated on nothingness for what felt like an eternity. Whispers escaped his lips, secrets untold, answers to queries that lingered unvoiced.
As his humming crescendoed, I took to the depths of the more forbidden shelves.
In a narrow alcove concealed behind Case Cabinet 14B, I stumbled upon an oddity: a drawer that had eluded perception until this very moment.
I could hardly restrain my curiosity.
Within its confines lay a substantial folder, its label inscribed with the meticulous elegance of a scribe: "CALYRA SANTIONED - Coercion Protocols."
My breath caught in my throat, a cold shiver racing down my spine as I pried it open with unsteady hands.
Pages unfurled before me, detailing the dark machinations through which the Calyra sought to execute "narrative reassignments" in the face of TCOSA's... less than flattering decisions.
Wanton devastation to be reframed as "preventative purification."
Mass fatalism is given the euphemistic title of "historical condensation."
The ruthless seizure of territory craft as "strategic archivization."
Entire cultures wiped from existence? Simply "reclassification."
Any stirrings of dissent? Labeled as "anecdotal irrelevance."
And the most harrowing of all -- a dedicated section on the manipulation of mirrors.
A litany of commands lay bare:
Employ reflections to warp personal recollections.
Induce mirror-facilitated amnesia in nonconforming souls.
Utilize selective reflection removal to silence inconvenient witnesses.
Directives for unwanted testimonies? Glass capture protocol.
Nausea clawed at my insides. The Calyra was not merely rewriting recorded history. It was unraveling the very fabric of memory itself.
Mirrors repurposed as instruments. As weapons. As purgers of truth.
And if reflections could be erased... how easily they could be rewritten.
I thrust the file into the drawer--only to discover the drawer had vanished. In the mere blink of an eye, it had melted away into the shadows of the bookshelf, as if it had never graced this world.
I recoiled, my heart thumping like a frantic drum within my chest.
A chilling whisper grazed the back of my neck: "She hears us."
I whirled around. No one was there. Nothing.
Yet the books on the shelf quivered ever so slightly, a faint tremor that revealed the presence of something unseen. Something that had lingered, listening.
When I reentered the workroom, Luthen no longer hummed his haunting melody. He sat entranced, gazing at a blank page, quill poised above it, yet unwilling to etch a single letter. Ink dripped languidly, a somber metronome--each drop cascading to the same dreary point, conjuring a perfect obsidian circle upon the pallid parchment.
I approached with trepidation. "Luthen... are you well?"
He turned to me, his head moving with an eerie, deliberate slowness. His eyes remained unblinking, unfazed by my presence.
"Yes," he replied. The word fell from his lips a heartbeat too late, void of resonance, as if the very essence of the statement had been chiseled from within him.
I swallowed hard. "Are you certain? You seem--"
A smile crept across his face, strange and distant, as if it were merely a mask. "I am uncovering much about the Calyra today."
I recoiled slightly. "Such as what?"
His smile broadened in an unsettling manner. "There are depths you have yet to explore."
A cold shiver coursed through my spine.
He turned his gaze back to the page--slowly, almost reverentially, he dragged the quill across it, etching a solitary word.
VAERIN.
Again and again. Like an obsession. Like an incantation. Like a plea to some forsaken deity.
He never glanced my way. He did not blink. In the oppressive dimness of the hallway, I found myself retreating, my heart thrumming, a dreadful truth unfurling in my mind:
The Calyra does not merely rewrite history. It reshapes souls.
And Luthen was already veiled in its shadow.
