The path east from the Archive was lined with white trees that didn't shed bark—they shed memory.
Each flake of peeling wood carried writing—blurred characters, sometimes a complete sentence, sometimes only the tail of one.They drifted through the air like thoughts that had forgotten who had them first.
By noon, the sun was an ornament: visible, irrelevant.Heat did not reach this place; sound did not travel far.I marked distance not by horizon but by how much my pulse delayed between beats.Even time was learning to stutter.
That was when I met him.
He sat beside a broken milestone, a man wrapped in gray layers that might once have been robes.A portable desk stood before him—nothing but a plank balanced on two stones.On it lay dozens of slips of parchment, each written upon, each alive.
Ink crawled faintly across their surfaces, letters rearranging themselves like insects adjusting to light.
The man looked up.His face was calm, lined like an old riverbed.His hands were what held my attention: translucent, thin as parchment, the veins visible as delicate script lines.When he flexed his fingers, faint cracks formed, and motes of paper dust fell.
"You came from the bell," he said softly. "The echo in your bones tells me so."
I didn't answer.Words were invitations, and invitations had prices.
He smiled faintly. "Good. You understand silence."
He gestured to the plank."Would you like to see what silence writes when left alone?"
I studied the moving letters on the slips.They weren't random.Each one mirrored the frequency pattern of the Archive's tone.I could almost hear the rhythm forming in my skull—short, long, long, short—like the pulse of a dying heart refusing to stop.
"You're recording the bell," I said finally.
"Recording?" He chuckled dryly. "No, young one. The bell is recording us. I only keep the transcripts."
He offered one slip."Here. This one has your shape."
I did not move to take it."My shape?"
"The way your energy curves when you think of leaving," he said. "It's a very sharp curve."
The parchment fluttered in his hand.The letters crawled into words.They formed my name.Ren.
I stepped closer, ignoring the warning tremor that rose in my stomach."How long have you been here?" I asked.
"Since I ran out of forgetting," he said. "Memory grows wild in these woods. You must prune it, or it wraps around the lungs."
"Are you the Archivist?"
He laughed—quiet, hollow, yet real."No. I'm a draft."
The word carried weight—capitalized in meaning.A draft: a version that precedes the final copy.A thing not yet approved, but too stubborn to vanish.
He leaned forward."The Archive writes people. It drafts them, edits them, and deletes them. Those who read too much become references.I was the seventh revision."
"And your hands?"
"Paper remembers touch better than flesh."
He raised one.The knuckles creased like folded corners of a book too often opened.When he moved them, faint lines of ink seeped out and vanished into the air.
I observed him for longer, noting his chakra—or rather, its absence.His energy didn't flow; it scrolled.Each pulse looped backward slightly before continuing, as though time itself was rereading the same paragraph.
"Do you eat?" I asked.
"Sometimes," he said. "But hunger fades after the body is footnoted."
He looked at me suddenly, eyes too clear."You're still in your first edition. Don't let the Archive rewrite you."
He pushed the parchment toward me again.The letters on it were no longer moving.They had stabilized into neat, slanted lines:
To seek silence is to invite echo.The more you listen, the more it listens back.
I took it carefully.The paper was warm, almost alive.As soon as my skin met it, the ink pulsed once, and the letters burned away into faint blue dust.
A faint hum lingered in my fingertips—a frequency I had never encountered.
"What was that?" I asked.
"Your next tone," he said. "The bell will use it when you're ready."
I turned the empty slip over.The parchment was unmarked—yet its weight remained in my hand, as if it remembered meaning even after losing form.
When I looked up again, the man was folding his papers.He stacked them with deliberate precision, as though building a tower made of forgotten thoughts.
Then, as he lifted his final sheet, his hands began to tear along the folds.
"You should go," he said, almost kindly. "The next revision doesn't like being watched."
"What revision?"
"The one that comes after silence."
He smiled again—thin, peaceful—and folded once more.The sound was dry thunder.His body collapsed inward, layer by layer, turning to pages that peeled apart in the breeze.
In moments, only the plank remained—and one sheet resting atop it.Blank.
I reached for it and stopped midway.From the blank sheet, a faint breath escaped—a sigh shaped like a word I couldn't yet translate.I let it go.
When I turned back toward the hills, the bell's tone had changed.No longer persistence—it was imitation.It had learned my rhythm.
For the first time since awakening in this life, I felt something dangerously close to recognition.Not fear. Not awe.Just acknowledgment.
The world had started to take notes.