The corridor closed behind him like it had never been there.
The room he entered was dim, all walls swallowed by shelves so tall they seemed to lean away from him, their spines receding into a haze. Somewhere above, light fell in thin, shaking threads, catching the floating dust like ash in a windless sky.
The Archivist was there.
Not walking toward him, not looking up from the desk in the far corner, but there—as if he had been part of the room long before the boy stepped into it. His fingers moved across an open book, not turning pages but holding them down, as though they might lift and scatter on their own.
"You found a seam," the Archivist said, without looking up.
The boy's grip tightened on the book under his arm. "You've been hiding pages."
A faint pause. "Not hiding. Postponing."
The boy stepped closer. "From me."
"From anyone who might tear them before they can be read." The Archivist's voice was steady, but something under it had fray. "Some memories aren't meant to arrive all at once. They collapse the spine. They unbind the rest."
The boy thought of the key in the gutter of his book, how it felt warm, alive, and wrong. "You mean they collapse me."
"You are the book," the Archivist said simply. Then his eyes lifted, and for the first time since their first meeting, the boy saw hesitation there. "And yes."
The boy stepped closer still, his shadow reaching over the desk. "Why? Why keep me from it? If it's mine, if it's real—"
"If it's real," the Archivist interrupted, "then the story ends. And you with it."
The boy didn't answer. He felt the weight of the girl's words from before—about the shape being the thing you fall through—and didn't know which one of them to believe.
"Is it the truth?" he asked finally. "The thing you're keeping?"
The Archivist's eyes lowered again. "Truth is just the shape we give to what we can survive. I am… choosing a shape for you."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I can give you without losing you here and now," the Archivist said. His gaze flicked up again, sharper. "And I'm not ready to lose you. Not yet."
The boy looked around the room. Every shelf was heavy with volumes whose titles he couldn't read, though he knew some were his. Others… he couldn't tell. "What's in those?" he asked.
"Other stories," the Archivist said, too quickly.
"Mine?"
"Not all of them."
"Then where's mine?"
The Archivist hesitated, then pushed the book on his desk an inch forward, as if that gesture alone might admit something dangerous. "Pieces of it are here. Pieces are in your hands. Pieces you've already walked through without recognizing them."
The boy's mind itched. "And the rest?"
"Locked. Because if you take them now, you won't have anywhere to go afterward."
The boy set his book on the desk, the key still wedged in its center. "And if I tell you I don't care?"
"Then I would tell you that you will," the Archivist said softly. "After you forget again."
The boy almost laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You keep saying that like it's a kindness."
"It isn't," the Archivist said. "It's a delay."
Something moved in the dust overhead—an echo of a page turning somewhere far away. The Archivist's eyes narrowed slightly, tracking the sound. Then his expression hardened.
"I can give you one page," he said at last. "One that won't collapse the rest. But it will bring you closer. And that's not something we can undo."
The boy swallowed. "Show me."
The Archivist reached for a drawer under the desk. The lock clicked open. Inside was a single sheet, edges torn like it had been pulled from the middle of something greater. No title. Just words—dense, uneven, written in a hand that felt almost like his own.
He slid it across the desk.
The boy hesitated, then picked it up.
The ink shimmered for a moment before settling into meaning.