"Not all keys open doors. Some open wounds."
—------
The floor still pulsed where Clara's blood had drawn the spiral. Dimly lit shelves loomed around them like a cathedral of forgotten artifacts.
Gustav knelt beside her, staring at the symbol — a perfect spiral of seven concentric lines, intersected by an eighth that shimmered faintly with a reddish glow.
"This wasn't in the Codex," he murmured. "Not the public one."
Clara's breath came slow and shallow. She was pale, but her voice was steady.
"There's a private Codex?"
He nodded, already reaching into his satchel. From within a hidden pocket, he retrieved a small, square-wrapped object bound in wax-dried leather, sealed shut with a symbol Clara hadn't seen before — a broken circle with two dots inside.
Codex Negare.
It pulsed faintly in his hand, reacting to the blood still dripping from Clara's palm.
"This version was hidden even from the Council. I found it behind a false wall in the Black Archive," Gustav said. "I was never meant to open it. But I think it was always meant for you."
He cracked the seal with the edge of his thumbnail.
The wax broke silently. The pages inside whispered as if alive.
It didn't feel like opening a book.
It felt like violating a grave.
The moment the wax cracked, the room changed.
The warmth fled. Even the light from Gustav's lantern seemed to withdraw, retreating from the cover of the Codex like a child backing away from an open casket.
Clara took a single step back — not out of fear, but instinct.
The kind of instinct that lives in the marrow of every living thing that knows something is wrong.
The book pulsed.
Not metaphorically. Physically.
It throbbed in Gustav's hands, as if it had a pulse of its own.
As if it remembered being alive once.
And it didn't like being disturbed.
"It's… breathing," Clara whispered.
Gustav didn't answer. He couldn't.
He was too busy forcing his fingers to obey. To keep turning the cover even when everything in his bones screamed at him to stop.
"This was written in layers," he murmured. "Ink first. Then blood. Then ash. Then… something else."
Clara frowned. "Something else?"
He turned the first page — and the parchment shivered.
There were symbols scorched into the surface, not written. Burned in. Letters made from lightless fire.
But beneath them… shadows.
Yes — actual shadows, like fingerprints of a memory that never belonged on paper.
They slithered along the edge of the page, curled beneath the surface, and disappeared as quickly as they arrived.
Clara's voice dropped.
"This Codex… it remembers being read."
Gustav nodded once, tight.
"That's why they buried it. It doesn't just record truth. It punishes those who seek it."
He turned another page.
His eyes scanned quickly — too quickly. He blinked hard, his head shaking once as if fighting off vertigo.
"Stop if it's hurting you," Clara said.
"No," he whispered. "This part's important. It's about her."
Clara stilled. "Bathory?"
He shook his head.
"No. The one before her. The Sibyl."
He read in fragments, translating between dead tongues:
"She who held the mirror before it reflected power…"
"The witness of all endings, bound to silence…"
"Her name forgotten, so her words would remain unclaimed."
"She's not a priestess," Gustav said. "She's a sacrifice. A keeper of failed truths."
He pointed at the illustration — a faceless woman, her mouth sealed with thread, surrounded by seven shapes blurred into smoke.
Clara leaned in.
"What are those things around her?"
Gustav studied them.
"Versions. Lives. People she watched die — over and over."
He looked up, eyes wide.
"She's been waiting. Not to be found — but to be remembered."
Clara's voice turned soft. Reverent.
"Like me."
Gustav hesitated. Then nodded slowly.
"No… not like you. Because of you."
"Every time you forgot your past lives, she had to remember them all. That was the deal. The only way the mirror would let you forget… was if someone else carried the weight."
Clara backed away, shaking her head.
"That's cruel."
"That's the mirror," Gustav said. "It never gives without taking. Every act of mercy is paid in blood. Usually someone else's."
When he opened it, dust and cold exhaled into the room.
They both leaned in, and as Gustav flipped through the first dozen pages, intricate line drawings and blood-red ink revealed fragments of knowledge too dangerous to be known.
A mirror not made of glass
A name lost seven times
A woman who remembered her love before she remembered herself
Then, halfway through, they found it:
A page depicting a room beneath a museum — pillars carved with faces, a pool of ink instead of water, and in the center: a round table with seven chairs. No mirrors. Only shadows.
Clara's breath hitched. "That's not a place. That's a person."
Gustav nodded. "Irene. Or what she's become."
The title scrawled across the top of the page:
Sibyllae Oblitae — The Forgotten Sibyl
Gustav read aloud:
"The Sibyl is not called. She is revealed. Only when two souls wound each other with truth, and one bleeds from love willingly."
His eyes flicked to her hand.
The spiral was still there. The blood — drying now — still glowed faintly.
"You did that," he whispered.
But Clara wasn't looking at him.
She was staring past the book, into the darkened corner of the room — where one of the brick walls was… shimmering?
No. Breathing.
She rose slowly, almost entranced.
One hand pressed against the bricks. Her palm throbbed — and the Codex spiral on her skin flared.
A click.
Then another.
The bricks rearranged themselves, silently. A circle formed.
Gustav was on his feet now. "It's opening."
"It was always there," Clara said distantly. "We just didn't know how to bleed the lock."
Before them, the wall receded — and revealed a spiral staircase descending into pitch-black silence.
---------
They stood at the top of the stairwell for a moment, frozen.
The temperature had dropped.
Far below, something pulsed faintly. Not light. Not sound.
A heartbeat made of memory.
Clara tightened her fingers around Gustav's. "We go together."
He nodded. "Always."
---------
They descended.
Each step sounded like walking through someone else's dream.
The deeper they went, the less the air moved. The less their bodies felt real.
Gustav reached into his coat and drew a small lantern.
Its light didn't expand — it only wrapped around them like a halo. Anything beyond two feet became a blank void.
At the bottom of the stairs, the corridor opened — stone walls pulsing with age and energy.
And there — at the end of the hall — was the second door.
A slab of black stone carved with the same spiral.
This time, there were seven lines, each ending in a deep gouge, and a circle in the center.
Clara didn't wait.
She raised her palm, the symbol now glowing again as if stirred awake by proximity.
She pressed it into the seventh gouge — and screamed.
Not in pain. In memory.
The scream of a woman who had once died here. In this exact place. In a different name.
Gustav caught her, barely.
The door shuddered. Then cracked.
It opened.
---------
Behind the door was silence.
Not just the absence of sound — but a silence that swallowed meaning. That erased reflection.
Clara blinked. "Where are the mirrors?"
"There aren't any," Gustav whispered. "This is where mirrors go to die."
She stepped forward.
The Codex Negare in Gustav's hand crumbled into ash.
He didn't stop her.
And from the shadow at the far end of the chamber — where ink and glass blurred — a voice spoke.
Not loud. Not feminine. Not masculine.
Just ancient.
"You bring your blood. But do you bring your memory?"
A flicker.
A shape.
And then, seated at the center of a round obsidian table, a woman lifted her head.
Her eyes were pure white.
She smiled faintly.
"You made it. Past the lies."
Her hand lifted slowly, beckoning.
"Now face the lives."
—------