According to the municipal archive of Averon City, nothing unusual occurred on the twelfth day of Emberfall.
No fires were reported.No disappearances logged.No anomalies, disturbances, or irregular expenditures of church authority.
The record was clean.
Aren Vale knew this because he had written it.
The archive hall was silent in the peculiar way that only buildings filled with paper ever were. Not empty—never empty—but restrained, as if every shelf and ledger were holding its breath. Gas lamps burned overhead in dull glass cages, their light staining the long wooden tables a weary yellow. Dust hung in the air, visible only when Aren shifted and disturbed it.
He sat alone at Desk Seventeen, pen poised above the final page.
Municipal Incident Log — Outer District, Dockside WardDate: Twelfth Day of EmberfallSummary: No reportable events.
Aren stared at the words longer than necessary.
He wasn't suspicious. Suspicion implied expectation, a readiness for something to be wrong. What he felt instead was resistance—like pressing a finger against a surface that looked solid but yielded slightly under pressure.
He checked the supporting documents again.
Night patrol reports: intact.Dock manifests: signed and stamped.Watch rotation schedules: consistent.
Everything aligned.
Nothing happened.
Aren exhaled softly and finished the entry, signing his name at the bottom.
Aren Vale.
The ink spread slowly, darker than usual at first, then thinning as it dried. The letters looked… light. Not faded. Not smeared. Just less willing to stay.
He frowned and tilted the page toward the lamp.
The name was still there.
That should have been enough.
He told himself it was the paper. Or the humidity. Or fatigue. Records clerks learned early that explanations were cheaper than questions.
The archive bell rang once, sharp and metallic.
Closing hour.
Aren gathered the file, slid it into a leather-bound folder, and placed it on the cart beside him. The wheels creaked softly as he pushed it between the shelves, the sound swallowed almost immediately by the stacks.
The building felt larger at night.
Corridors stretched longer than they should have. Corners seemed to hesitate before revealing what lay beyond them. Aren had worked here for three years—long enough to know every aisle, every misplaced ledger—but the archive never truly became familiar.
As he filed the Dockside report into its assigned cabinet, a chill brushed the back of his neck.
Aren stopped.
It wasn't fear. Fear came with heat, with urgency. This was cooler, sharper—an awareness, sudden and uninvited, like realizing someone had been standing behind you for several seconds longer than was polite.
He turned.
There was nothing there.
Only shelves. Paper. Dust. The faint smell of lamp oil.
After a moment, the sensation faded.
Aren closed the cabinet and locked it, the click of the mechanism echoing more loudly than it should have. He rubbed his hands together and shook his head.
Too many late nights, he thought. Too many reports.
Still, as he collected his coat and briefcase, a question surfaced unbidden:
If nothing happened… why did the night patrol request three copies of the log instead of one?
He didn't pursue it.
He never did.
Outside, Averon City lay under a thin, persistent rain. Gas lamps reflected off wet cobblestones, stretching into trembling lines of gold. Dockside Ward smelled of river water, old wood, and rust—an honest smell, Aren had always thought.
He walked the same route every night, collar turned up, steps measured. Past the closed shops. Past the boarded tavern. Past the warehouse that marked the end of the street.
Except tonight, the street did not end.
Where the warehouse wall should have been, there was an alley.
It was narrow, barely wide enough for two people to pass shoulder to shoulder. The bricks were old, damp, uneven, their mortar dark with age. A single lantern hung near the entrance, its flame guttering despite the lack of wind.
Aren slowed.
The city changed constantly. Renovations, demolitions, temporary passages—none of that was strange. What unsettled him was not the alley's existence, but his certainty that it had not been there yesterday.
He stood there longer than necessary, rain soaking into his boots, staring at the gap in the warehouse wall.
The alley did not beckon.It did not threaten.It simply existed.
That was worse.
Aren took a step back, intending to turn toward the main road.
Then he heard it.
A low murmur drifted from within the alley. Rhythmic. Uneven. Voices, perhaps—though the sound lacked the usual cadence of conversation.
Chanting.
Aren's hand tightened around his briefcase.
He told himself to walk away.
Instead, he found his feet carrying him forward, past the threshold where lamplight thinned and shadows deepened.
The air changed immediately.
It was warmer inside, heavy with the smell of chalk and damp stone. The sound of rain faded, replaced by murmured words that scraped uncomfortably against his ears.
Three men stood near the far end of the alley, coats discarded, sleeves rolled up. A crude circle had been drawn on the ground, its lines overlapping where hands had trembled. Symbols crowded the edges—half-formed, inconsistent, some already smeared by moisture.
Aren recognized none of them.
But he recognized the intent.
A ritual, he thought.
Not the sanctioned kind he'd seen sketched in confiscated records, precise and regulated. This was desperate. Improvised. Wrong.
One of the men stumbled over a word.
The chalk lines pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
The air thickened.
Aren felt pressure bloom behind his eyes, subtle but insistent, like a headache waiting for permission to begin.
Something began to separate itself from the shadows at the edge of the circle.
Not a body.Not a shape.
An absence—darker than the darkness around it, stretching upward as if testing the idea of height.
The men froze.
One of them screamed.
The thing did not move toward them.
It turned instead.
And its attention settled on Aren.
The pressure intensified, images flickering at the edge of his vision—records without titles, names crossed out, dates left blank. His breath caught, chest tightening as a realization settled into place with horrifying clarity.
This isn't dangerous because it exists.
It's dangerous because it hasn't been decided yet.
One of the men lunged toward the circle, desperation breaking through his paralysis as he tried to finish the chant.
Aren opened his mouth.
He did not plan to speak.
The word left him anyway.
"Stop."
The sound was quiet. Ordinary.
But the alley listened.
The shadow hesitated.
And in that hesitation, the chalk lines began to fracture.
The chalk lines split with a dry, brittle sound.
Hairline fractures raced along the circle, snapping symbols apart mid-meaning, turning careful intent into nonsense. The pressure behind Aren's eyes surged, sharp enough to steal his breath, but he didn't step back.
He couldn't.
The shadow convulsed.
It did not scream. It did not lash out. Instead, its edges blurred, stretching and folding in on themselves, as if it were trying to decide which version of itself was allowed to remain.
One of the men sobbed. Another dropped to his knees.
Aren stood at the mouth of the alley, rainwater dripping from his coat hem, lantern light cutting his silhouette into the gloom. He did not raise his hands. He did not chant.
He watched.
Fully. Deliberately.
Not as a threat.Not as an enemy.But as something that was.
The realization settled deeper, colder:
Undefined things survive because they are ignored.
The shadow reacted to being acknowledged the way a lie reacts to being written down.
It began to unravel.
Not dissolving—no, dissolving implied an end state. This was worse. The thing contradicted itself, fragments of its presence pulling in opposing directions as reality tried, desperately, to make sense of it.
The ground beneath the circle buckled.
One of the men scrambled backward, slipping in wet chalk, his scream cutting off as the alley warped. The walls shuddered, bricks grinding against one another, space compressing like a breath held too long.
The lantern flickered wildly.
Aren felt something shift—not outside him, but around him. The alley tightened, rejecting excess, rejecting uncertainty.
The shadow collapsed inward.
There was no explosion.
There was a sudden, total absence—like a word erased so completely that even the idea of it was gone.
The remaining men ran.
Their footsteps slapped against stone, then faded, terror echoing into streets that would never remember why they were afraid.
The lantern went out.
The alley folded.
Aren staggered backward as the ground tilted beneath his feet. Brick slid into brick. Space rejected itself. He felt his balance vanish—
—and then he hit wet cobblestone hard enough to knock the air from his lungs.
Rain soaked his hair, his coat, his skin.
Aren lay there, gasping, staring up at the familiar outline of the warehouse wall.
Solid. Unbroken.
There was no alley.
No chalk.No lantern.No gap.
Only rain and the distant sound of the river.
He pushed himself upright on shaking hands. His head throbbed, a deep, lingering ache, but the pressure was already receding, leaving behind a hollow quiet.
People passed at the far end of the street, umbrellas raised, footsteps unhurried.
No one looked his way.
Aren stumbled home.
He did not sleep.
Morning light found him back in the archive, hands unsteady as he unlocked the cabinet for Dockside Ward. He pulled the municipal log free and flipped to the relevant page.
Outer District, Dockside WardDate: Twelfth Day of EmberfallSummary: No reportable events.
The entry was exactly as he remembered writing it.
Except for the line beneath.
Written in neat, unfamiliar script, darker than the rest of the ink, was a single addition:
Addendum: Spatial inconsistency resolved without escalation.
Aren's breath caught.
He scanned the page for a signature.
There was none.
His name was gone.
Aren closed the file slowly, the leather cover soft beneath his fingers.
Somewhere—far beyond Averon City, far beyond records and walls and paper—something adjusted. Not in alarm. Not in anger.
In acknowledgment.
And Aren Vale understood, with a certainty that settled into his bones:
Records did not merely preserve what had happened.
They decided what was allowed to remain.