The descent felt endless. With each step, the air grew heavier, as if they were pushing through unseen layers of history, thick and suffocating. The torches lining the walls flickered but gave off little warmth, their glow swallowed by the vast darkness ahead. Kael glanced at the shifting stone beneath his feet, unnerved by how the floor felt less like solid ground and more like something breathing beneath them.
Elyra muttered a spell under her breath, a simple light charm meant to steady the path. The moment the magic left her fingers, it flickered, dimmed, and faded into nothing. She frowned, flexing her fingers. "Something's dampening the magic here."
Thorne's eyes scanned the passageway with the scrutiny of a craftsman who had seen too many structures fail. He exhaled through his nose, arms crossing. "This isn't just a passage. It's something trying to lead us."
Kael hesitated. He wasn't sure if it was just his imagination, but his footsteps felt… delayed. As if the sound of his boots meeting stone took a second longer than it should have. He tried again, this time focusing on the rhythm of his steps. There it was—a half-second lag, like the Archive itself was struggling to catch up with reality.
A soft, distressed chirp made him glance at his shoulder. The Inking trembled, its usually playful wings pulled tight against its small body. It didn't fly off, but its unease was evident.
"The deeper we go," Kael murmured, "the more out of sync everything feels."
The walls pulsed. Not physically—but something beneath the surface shifted, reconfiguring like muscles tightening around bone.
Elyra stopped mid-step. "It's not just reacting," she whispered. Her eyes traced the patterns in the stone, the faint traces of old runes erased over time, reforming into something new. "It's guiding us."
The passage opened into a vast, hollow chamber, its ceiling lost in an expanse of darkness. The air here was colder, damp with an age that stretched beyond memory. The moment they stepped inside, soft golden lights began to flicker, floating through the air like fireflies.
Not fireflies. Pages.
Hundreds of them, weightless and silent, drifting as if caught in an invisible tide. Kael reached out toward one, but the moment his fingertips brushed the edge, it dissolved into wisps of light.
Lira's voice was hushed with wonder. "They're fragments. Pieces of something long forgotten."
Her gaze fell to the far wall, where faded script had been carved into the stone, the language ancient but not unfamiliar. She ran her fingers along the inscription, murmuring a translation aloud.
"Those who forget are forgotten."
A ripple of unease passed through the group. Elyra's expression hardened. "Don't speak your names aloud," she warned. "In the Archive, names have power."
Zara let out a slow breath. "Right. No names. No touching glowing things. No getting stabbed by possessed books."
Despite her sarcasm, tension coiled in the room like a drawn bowstring. The pages flickered, their glow pulsating. And then Kael heard it.
His name.
Spoken softly, like a whisper riding the wind. He turned sharply toward the sound, but there was nothing there—only shadows stretching across the floor, stretching too long, too far.
"Did you hear that?" Kael asked, voice barely above a breath.
No one else spoke. But by the way Elyra's fingers twitched toward her satchel, and the way Thorne's hand went to his belt, he knew they had.
The shadows at the far end of the chamber thickened. At first, Kael thought it was just the natural dimness of the room, but then they began to move.
A figure emerged—not stepping forward, but forming, piece by piece, like ink bleeding into water. It had no solid shape, no defining edges, just the suggestion of a presence, shifting and twisting, flickering between light and dark. Its voice, when it spoke, was not one voice, but many, layered upon each other in eerie unison.
"You walk among what was lost."
Zara's grip on her dagger tightened. "I've had enough riddles. Talk straight."
The shadow convulsed violently, as if something unseen had clamped down on it. Its form flickered, distorting. And then it tried to speak again.
It began to say a name.
Then stopped. The darkness behind it split, as if something else had forced it into silence.
Kael felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. "It's afraid."
The shadow seemed to shudder at the observation. Then, in a voice barely more than a breath, it spoke again. "The Archive remembers what it should not."
Lira stepped closer, her analytical mind pushing past the fear. "Remembers… or was made to forget?"
The shadow flickered erratically, shifting faster now, unraveling at the edges. But before it faded completely, its final words slipped through the darkness.
"A memory waiting to resurface."
And then it was gone.
Silence fell, deep and suffocating. The only sound was the soft rustling of the drifting pages.
Thorne's voice was steady, but his hand was clenched into a tight fist. "It's not warning us." He exhaled slowly. "It's warning about us."
Lira knelt beside the nearest floating page, fingers hovering just above its surface. "Someone tampered with this place," she murmured. "Rewrote parts of its history."
Zara scoffed. "Yeah? And?"
Lira shot her a sharp glance. "And that means the Archive isn't just storing knowledge—it's forgetting things that were meant to be remembered." She gestured toward the pages flickering in and out of existence. "If the Codex holds the truth, then someone tried to erase it."
Kael exhaled slowly, staring at the blank spaces between the words on the Codex page Elyra still held. "Are we supposed to fix that?" His voice was quiet, almost reluctant. "Or are we just making things worse?"
Elyra traced the worn edges of the page, watching as the faint script shimmered ever so slightly. "It reacted to the shadow's words," she said, almost to herself. "Like something is trying to reveal itself to us."
Thorne frowned. "Then we should be careful what we uncover."
A deep, unsettling silence settled over them.
The chamber trembled, a deep groan reverberating through the walls like something awakening.
Ahead of them, the path split. On one side, a corridor bathed in golden light, warm and inviting—but the glow pulsed, unnaturally rhythmic, as if calling rather than guiding. The other path stretched into shifting shadows, its darkness thick and heavy, yet somehow… familiar.
Kael swallowed. "So… forward? Or toward what was lost?"
A slow, deliberate heartbeat echoed through the chamber, growing louder.
Zara clicked her tongue. "We take too long, and I bet neither path will be here anymore."
Lira hesitated, then swallowed hard. "Either way, we're stepping deeper into something we might not be able to undo."
Elyra tightened her grip on the page, her jaw set. "Then we choose now."
They stepped forward.
The other path collapsed into darkness.