The paper felt wrong in his hands. Not brittle, not damp—just wrong, like it had been written in a place where hands didn't hold pens, where letters weren't supposed to touch paper.
The ink bled slightly, but the words were sharp enough to cut:
There was a weight above me, shifting. At first it was the sound that hurt—the thump, the slide, the thump again. Then came the smell. Damp and sour, like a garden that had been left too long in the rain. I tried to move, but my arms were held down, not by rope, not by hands. By the ground itself.
It pressed against my chest like it knew me. The air got thicker. I opened my mouth and tasted dirt. I wanted to spit, but the weight above me was laughing. Two voices, almost the same, close enough to touch if I could move. One of them said my name, but it was too muffled to hear it whole.
I think I asked why. Or maybe I didn't. Maybe the sound I made wasn't a question at all.
The thumping stopped. The air stopped. The rest is—
The boy stopped reading. The sentence trailed into a smear, as if the writer's hand had been dragged away mid-letter.
He looked up. The Archivist was watching him with a gaze that didn't quite blink.
"Is this—" the boy began.
"That," the Archivist said, "is one page of something much longer."
"Is it mine?"
"It's yours," the Archivist said, "but not all of it is true."
The boy's grip on the page tightened. "It feels true."
"That's how the false parts stay in place."
He set the page back on the desk, almost afraid to keep touching it. "How many more like that?"
"Enough to make an ending," the Archivist said quietly. "Enough to undo you."
The boy's chest ached with the urge to ask for them all, but the page was still in front of him, and something in it was still breathing.
He looked at the shelves. At the book under his arm with the key. At the single drawer that had been opened.
"I'll come back," he said, though he didn't know why.
"You always do," the Archivist said.