Some truths are born.
Some are built.
And some—some are shelved where no eyes should see them.
It was the third night since Cipher returned from the Vault, and the glyph still pulsed on his wrist like a wound stitched from belief. It did not ache, not in the physical sense, but in something deeper: the architecture of recollection. He'd dreamt of the swarm each night—not their shapes, but their whispers. And one whisper had called him by a name he did not remember ever having.
That was what brought him back to the Library.
Not the desire for answers, but the suspicion that he already had them once—and someone had taken them.
The upper levels greeted him with the usual sepulchral calm. Rows of inkroot-bound volumes hummed softly, their contents metabolizing knowledge with slow fungal grace. The tomes rearranged themselves on occasion, but only when unobserved. Cipher did not trust the lights here; they were too clean, too precise. Even darkness in the Library felt curated.
He bypassed the sanctioned archives. Vaulted aisles like ossified thoughts passed by, labeled in Guildscript: Revisions of Reality | Sanctioned Truths | Cognitive Mechanisms (Tier II and Below). Useless. Every book here had passed through eleven levels of verification, memory-proofed, cross-checked by Chrono-Cognitors. Sanitized. Tame.
But beneath every archive is a shelf no librarian will name.
He passed beneath the inkclock—its hourglass measured time not in sand, but in eroded facts—and traced a silent spiral down the rearward corridors, past the Scriptorium Tombs, until he reached the section he had once been told did not exist.
It was called The Untruth Annex.
No door. No threshold. Just a sudden wrongness, like stepping into a thought that had not finished forming. The corridor behind him faded, not into shadow but into irrelevance. He was somewhere else now. Somewhere less than real, but more than imagined.
The books here had no titles.
Some had spines but no pages.
Others pulsed faintly, breathing against the shelves.
They were arranged not by subject, but by consequence.
He passed one that smelled like salt and betrayal. Another, wet with the heat of a murder never committed. One tome wept gently when he passed, and another screamed in silence. Cipher moved carefully. Some books, he felt, should never be glanced at.
Then he saw it.
It was a child's journal.
Bound in brown leather, frayed at the edges, held shut by a ribbon that looked too much like a tendon. It had no glyphs, no bindings, no seals. Only a name on the cover: CAEL.
His blood slowed. Not Cipher. Cael.
He hadn't heard the name aloud in weeks.
He opened it.
The first page was blank.
So was the second.
The third bled ink as he touched it, words welling into the page like wounds reopening.
Day 0. I killed him.
Then, the Library left him.
No flash. No transition. Just a memory—inserted.
He stood barefoot on broken floorboards. A child's body, too light, too fragile. A knife in his hand. Rusted. Old. He looked down at it and felt the stickiness on the blade.
Blood.
Before him lay a man. Not a stranger.
A father.
The word formed without permission.
The man's eyes were open, but not seeing. The light had gone. Cael—no, Cipher-as-Cael—stood above the corpse, breathing in short, frightened gasps.
"I didn't mean to," the child whispered, though no one else was there.
Then the memory froze.
And something behind the memory asked: Didn't you?
The Library reasserted itself. Cipher stumbled back, clutching the journal like it might bite him. The memory had felt real. More than real. Total. There was no static, no cognitive fuzziness. It slotted into his mind with brutal precision. A memory he hadn't known he'd forgotten—or perhaps never owned at all.
He opened the journal again.
The next page was filled with text in his handwriting. But he hadn't written it.
The words described the murder in detail: time, place, the weight of the blade. It mentioned the man's name—Jareth—whom Cipher didn't remember but felt he should. It described a reason: fear. Not rage. Not vengeance. But the fear of being made into something else.
Cipher closed the book.
His hands trembled.
He accessed his Memory Lattice—a cognitive construct trained by Guild praxis to anchor real experience from dream or hallucination. He ran the lattice through the memory.
It passed.
The lattice confirmed the event. No anomaly detected.
The memory was now classified as authentic.
Which meant either he had killed a man as a child and forgotten it…
Or something had overwritten his lattice.
Which, by Guild law, was impossible.
Unless you entered the Library of Untruths.
He felt it now: a hollowness in the center of his personal history. A cavity where something had been removed. And in its place, this.
It made him nauseous. Because the memory fit too well.
He needed a second opinion.
But no Cognitor would touch a thought contaminated by Untruth. He was alone.
He stumbled from the Annex, carrying the journal like a curse. The corridor reappeared behind him, and the inkclock resumed its rhythm. The sanctioned shelves remained unchanged—but now felt like theater. Like scaffolding hiding a broken house.
As he reached the exit, he glanced at the glyph on his wrist.
It pulsed.
Stronger now.
And a new thought arose. Terrible. Slow. Inevitable.
What if this wasn't the first rewritten memory?
What if nothing he remembered belonged to him?
He could no longer trust recall.
He could no longer trust thought.
The Guild had trained them to verify reality through internal anchors, through repetition, cognition loops, mnemonic seeds. But what if those, too, had been scripted?
He thought of the journals in the Scriptorium. Dozens with his name. All contradictory. All plausible.
He had believed then that they were alternate outcomes.
What if they weren't?
What if they were edits?
Who, then, was Cipher?
Was he Cael still?
Or just the sum of whatever version the Library let him be?
As he stepped into Hollowwise's outer ring, the torchlight felt cold.
He looked up at the sky.
It was cloudy. But he no longer trusted the stars.
He thought, briefly, about reading another book.
Then decided against it.
For now.
But the hunger was there.
Because some truths are born.
Some are built.
And some are rewritten.
To be continued…