Severus ignored the taunt and focused on his surroundings. The old train station was deserted, the air thick with fog that clung to his skin and tasted faintly of metal and dust. The platform was empty, save for a single bench with peeling paint, and a rickety clock that had long ago stopped ticking. The tracks stretched out into the distance, disappearing into the fog like a forgotten memory.
He suddenly felt something vibrating in his pocket, a faint warmth that became more insistent with every pulse.
Severus pulled out a small sealed vial. Inside was a tiny sliver of charred paper, barely larger than a fingernail.
These were the remains of the ashes of Mira, the only woman who ever shared a pact with Severus, and died as a result.
„Rewrite it, Severus," whispered the voice inside him. „Turn her ashes into a core."
"No," Severus replied in a serious tone.
„Our pact is pointless if you never let me help you." The voice in his mind was insistent, but Severus had made his decision. He slipped the vial back into his pocket.
Severus took a seat on one of the wooden benches. The fog crept through the rivets of his coat, as if it wanted to touch something that was not visible.
"They're starting to... erasing me," he whispered. "All that remains of me shall slowly disappear..."
The voice inside him didn't answer immediately. It was focused on itself, which was always dangerous.
„I can't guide you here. I can only remind you. Your destination is the Library of Untruth." The voice inside Severus's mind finally spoke after a prolonged silence.
"And you complain that I don't accept your help..." He gasped as he looked up. The fog had curled and a silhouette emerged, female. He immediately recognized who she was.
The scene switched before his eyes and there she was. Mira, she sat at the window of her former lodgings in the old districts of Kaldris, her fingertips blackened with ink, her lips dry from reciting. He remembered, that was the moment he had first seen her like that, arguing with a «Witness» she didn't quite understand yet.
„You can't believe just to get power, Sev. You have to believe because you want it to be true." Her voice echoed in his mind.
"Believing is a trick, Mira. I prefer to choose doubt. At least it doesn't lie." Severus murmured to the memory of Mira.
She had shown him the core of her childhood back then. A cloth ribbon with the names of all her lost siblings. Each one was a story that had ended too soon.
"I don't remember what happened next... but I know it hurts." Severus spoke aloud to the memory of Mira.
Suddenly the memory blurred and Severus came back to his senses. "You're not her," he said quietly.
The silhouette in the fog nodded. She did not speak, but her gaze was Mira, and yet not Mira either.
The fog began to fade, and the ghostly figure grew clearer. Severus' heart lurched. It wasn't Mira. It was one of the Auditors, masquerading as a lost memory, a trick they often played on the desperate.
"The Witness Ashem is a mistake in the directory. His interpreters tend towards contamination. For these reasons it has been erased 134 times and yet it keeps coming back." The Auditor spoke, his eyes were pockets of black ink.
....
At the same time in the underground courtroom, in the heart of the Chancellery.
The lector Baleron stood in front of a wall relief. "They've found him. That's sooner than expected." His voice was razor-sharp and dry.
Next to him stood a child, with pale skin and eyes like printer's ink. It was one of their audit recruits.
"Are we finally going to erase him?" The child asked.
"No. Not yet." Baleron pulled a divining instrument from his coat. It was a splitting quill that could split any counterfiction in two.
"What are you going to do, lector Baleron?" The child asked again.
He turned to the wall, where his dossier lit up.
Internal threat analysis: Severus Ezren
Status: Connection to Ashem confirmed.
"Well, we'll separate them and erase their story." He replied in an authoritarian voice.
....
The ground trembled, the fog parting to reveal the ancient cobblestones of the station platform shifting and cracking. The tremors grew more intense, the air around Severus distorting like a mirage.
The Chancellery of Truths and their Auditors knew what he was intending to do and had taken countermeasures. „They lured me into a trap... why didn't you say anything?" His thoughts were devoted to the voice in his head.
But the voice remained silent. Suddenly, two more auditors emerged from a puddle of ink behind him. They moved with a fluid grace that hid their deadly intent. Each step sent ripples of shadow across the ground, like waves on a moonlit lake.
The third auditor's paper-thin features twisted into a smirk. "When something is erased, it doesn't mean it never was. Just that no one may ever believe it."
The platform crumbled beneath Severus' feet and the world around him turned into a vast, cavernous space with walls of bound books that stretched into infinity. There was no ceiling, no sky, just a crushing weight of knowledge that pressed down on him like a tomb.
"The Chancellery of Truths," he murmured to himself, recognizing the place from the whispers of the voice in his mind. He had arrived at the epicenter of the Auditors' power, a place where narratives went to die.
The tiles beneath his boots were a stark contrast of black and white, the very essence of truth and falsehood, laid out like a chessboard of fate. The dais, shaped like an inkwell, overflowed with a dark liquid that seeped into the floor, staining the pages of forgotten histories.
The voice spilled into his mind again, calm and methodical. „You're inside the argument now. Careful, every sentence you walk across wants to define you."
Severus looked around. The chamber was unimaginably large, its architecture a symphony of impossible angles and ever-shifting lines. If he didn't focus, the walls and floor seemed to fold into each other, like a Möbius strip of a mad architect's design.
On either side, spectral figures that had no eyes, no expressions. They were bound to the books they held, pages fluttering from their desiccated hands like the last breaths of forgotten souls.
They were the Witnesses of narrative law. Their very existence was a testament to the endless stories that had been told and retold within the World. Their duty was to maintain the integrity of the narratives that held the world together. They had no faces, no identities, just the endless pages of their charge.
Mira appeared before him, not in the flesh, but as an echo of memory, a ghostly apparition of the woman he had once known. Her eyes, though lifeless, held the faintest glimmer of recognition. Severus took a step forward, his hand outstretched, but she was no more tangible than the fog that had brought him here.