The path ahead didn't fork or spiral or bend. It simply stopped.
They walked into it anyway.
At first glance, it looked like a clearing – just another pause in the Archive's terrain. But the air held no temperature. The trees looked melted at their roots. The earth was black, not like shadow, but like pages scorched until ink and intention had both burned away.
Curata knelt and ran her gloved fingers across the ash.
"This was written once," she said quietly. "Now it's gone."
Ash narrowed his eyes. "You mean forgotten?"
She shook her head. "No. Erased. Burnt out of the Canon."
They stood still as silence pressed in around them. It wasn't the kind of quiet that followed an ending. It was emptier than that – a silence that had replaced sound itself.
A few paces ahead, Echo paused. Something glimmered beneath the soot, coiled like a crack in the page.
It was a thread.
Silver. Unbroken. Barely tangible.
He reached out instinctively, but his ink moved first, drawn to the thread like water to drought. The ink didn't merge. It shivered.
Then the thread moved.
Before Echo could pull back, it snapped upward and wrapped around his wrist. His mind buckled, not from pain, but from something far more overwhelming – memory.
He saw pages screaming, arcs collapsing mid-line, belief systems flickering out with a hiss of red ink and fire. Entire myths were being not just redacted but incinerated. Gone from the collective narrative as though they had never existed.
A figure appeared – blurry, robed, faceless. They carried a torch made of editor's glyphs and publisher's rules. Around them: sigils. And at the center of their seal, a single brand burned into myth after myth.
Echo felt it sear into the front of his thoughts.
The mark of a Canon Purifier.
And behind it, a whispered directive:
What cannot be controlled must not be remembered.
The vision snapped.
Echo fell back, breath shaking, the thread now limp in his hand, its glow gone. It curled in his palm like a question he hadn't asked.
Ash rushed toward him. "What just happened?"
Echo's voice came out quieter than he expected. "It showed me something. Something that shouldn't be seen."
Curata stepped closer. "A Purifier?"
He nodded.
"They don't revise," she said grimly. "They erase."
"They're burning entire belief systems," Echo whispered, the weight of the thread still ghosting his skin.
Ash swept his boot across the blackened ground. "And we're walking through the aftermath."
Wind stirred. It was cold and intentional.
Then, across the soot, words began to form.
You are not authorized to carry memory.
Ash's eyes flicked toward the message. "That's a threat."
Echo didn't respond. He stepped forward, knelt, and for the first time since waking in the margins of the Canon, dipped his finger into his ink – not in defence, not in reflex, but to write.
A sentence. Only one.
Even forgotten things still remember.
The words sank into the ash. They didn't fade. They didn't reject the ink. They simply stayed quiet and alive, like roots taking hold where fire had failed to erase everything.
Curata's eyes widened. "That… shouldn't be possible."
Echo stood. "Then maybe it's time for more impossible things."
They left the clearing.
Behind them, his sentence remained.
Far above, in the Canon's administrative strata, a Purifier paused mid-scroll. A glyph pulsed on their script board – tracking ink, unauthorized sentence insertion, Class-2 anomaly.
They raised their hand.
A new directive began to draft itself.
Locate the source. Prepare a containment story.