The replica opened its eyes.
It didn't speak.
Didn't scream.
It simply breathed.
In the dim light of the sanctuary, the copy of Callum lay within the open altar, its skin pale and stretched tight like parchment, the bones beneath visible in unnatural clarity. Every breath it took was shallow—deliberate. Almost rehearsed.
Callum stood above it, the Archivist now gone. The mask still pressed to his face.
He felt no fear.
Only a question repeating in his skull like marrow leaking from a cracked femur:
> Am I the original?
The replica blinked, mirroring him.
The same scar.
Same faded bruises.
Even the same faint freckle on the left shoulder—a detail no one else would know to include.
Callum stepped back.
The copy did too.
They stood like reflections without mirrors.
But only one of them was breathing.
---
He left the replica in the altar and stumbled back through the throat-like corridor.
The Archive had changed again.
The hallway now pulsed, like a peristaltic tunnel carved into something once alive. Bones jutted from the walls like teeth. As he passed, he noticed they were his.
Tiny carvings on the femurs and ribs now bore dates. Notes. Journal entries.
They were his notes, etched into calcium.
> "Host is accepting the loop."
"Subject 14 has begun phase drift."
"Repetition stabilizes identity."
He touched one of the ribs, and it responded—shuddering under his palm, vibrating like a tuning fork beneath layers of time.
---
When he reached the study, something had shifted.
The walls were closer.
The ceiling, lower.
Photos that once lined the mantle were blank now—frames full of smudged bone dust. The fireplace was cold. The mirror, returned—but wrong.
Instead of his reflection, it showed the house as it looked before. Clean. Bright. Pre-collapse.
In the mirror, Callum saw himself sitting by the fire with Greaves, drinking tea.
But he had no memory of that moment.
None.
He reached out to touch the glass—
—and his reflection did not move.
It stared at him.
Then, slowly, smiled.
---
He broke the mirror with his elbow.
Behind the shards: a cavity.
A hollow in the wall, lined with wax and curled photographs. And in the center, a spine—coated in dust. Wrapped around it was a yellowed sheet of paper.
Callum unrolled it.
His own handwriting.
> "They're not loops. They're layers."
"Every failed subject becomes the house. The archive grows by forgetting."
"Your bones will remember what your mind was told to erase."
At the bottom, a crude drawing.
The Archivist.
But its mask was cracked.
And behind it, the face was his.
---
He collapsed to his knees.
The room swam.
He tried to scream but only bone dust came out.
His body ached—not with pain, but with remembering. His joints ground together, reshaping. His hands pulsed, swelling with new knuckles. He felt a second set of lungs shifting under his ribs, struggling to inflate.
Then came the sound.
A creak.
Not from the floorboards.
From the walls.
The house was moving.
---
Doors shifted.
Stairs twisted.
Hallways restructured.
He tried to reach the front door, but it was gone. In its place: a hallway of bone-lined portraits—all of him. In various phases of change. Some fully skeletal. Some still raw and red with half-shed flesh.
He ran.
Room to room.
No exit.
Just recursion.
In the kitchen, he found a bowl of teeth on the table.
Each one engraved with his initials.
---
Then the whispers returned.
> "Host 2."
"Host 9."
"Host 14."
A voice, low and fragmented, reverberated through the house like a jaw snapping shut:
> "The Archive cannot forget you."
"You are inside its nervous system."
"You have always been."
---
Callum fell against the wall, clutching his temples.
Visions flooded his mind.
He saw:
A girl in the mirror with no eyes, peeling her face away like damp wallpaper
A hospital room filled with identical Callums, each whispering "I'm the real one"
A bone violin, strung with nerves, playing itself in the dark
Greaves, skinless, laughing from within a glass case
His own jaw on a surgical tray—still chewing
He screamed.
And something in the wall screamed back.
---
When he awoke, he was in the library.
Except the books were gone.
Shelves replaced with columns of femurs, vertebrae stacked like novels.
One column trembled as he approached.
Inside it, wedged between ribs, was a cassette tape.
Labeled:
> "C. MERCER – FINAL ENTRY (REPEATED)"
He found an old tape recorder beside it.
Pressed play.
His own voice crackled from the speaker:
> "If you're hearing this… it's already too late."
> "I've seen what I become. I've become what I feared."
> "The Archive is not a place. It's a ritual of forgetting. It uses us to remember itself."
A pause.
A long, wet breath.
> "I left the loop once. It pulled me back."
> "You can't escape what you are."
Then static.
And faint chewing sounds beneath it.
---
That night, he returned to the sanctuary.
The replica was gone.
But in its place was a chair made of spinal cords.
And upon it: a note.
Carved directly into the vertebrae.
> "WRITE."
Beneath that: a stylus made from a human ulna.
And a blank parchment of stretched skin.
The Archive no longer wanted him to discover.
It wanted him to record.
---
So he wrote.
He wrote of bones that remembered things he never lived.
Of organs that spoke in rhythm.
Of mirrors that stored memories.
Of a house that digested every life it housed.
Of faces worn like masks by forgotten hosts.
And as he wrote, the walls pulsed with approval.
The Archive was feeding.
On him.