The door was hidden behind a wall of banned textbooks.
Sera ran her fingers along their spines—titles whispering truths that had once been doctrine before they were declared dangerous. Each volume she pushed revealed an inch of brass. A latch. A sigil pulsing faint green.
She didn't knock.
The stairs beneath led downward—spiraled, crumbling, lit only by phrases etched into the walls.
"Empires record what they fear.""Truth persists where fiction fractures.""The author is not the myth. The myth is not the memory."
At the bottom, the chamber opened like a wound stitched by candlelight.
He sat at a desk carved from stone and sorrow.
Evran Tal. The historian. Caelum's archivist. The man who once swore never to let silence win.
He didn't look up.
"You burned the statue," he said, voice dry as dust.
Sera didn't deny it.
He gestured to a stack of journals, each one bearing Caelum's sigil—but with pages defaced, rewritten, commented on by hand.
"Every myth has footnotes," Evran murmured. "And yours are bleeding across the margins."
She stepped closer. Saw sketches—Caelum as a youth. As a student. As a lover. As a liar.
Evran finally met her eyes.
"He never wanted forever," he said. "He wanted revenge dressed as philosophy. The tragedy is that he was brilliant. And scared."
Sera clenched her jaw. "My mother died because of his reforms."
Evran nodded. "Mine disappeared protecting them."
A long silence.
Not heavy.
Shared.
He slid a book across the desk. Unmarked cover. No date.
Sera opened it.
Inside: Caelum's final private journal. Pages never published. Words written in ink blurred by grief.
"I don't know who I've become. But I know I built a language that forgets how to say 'I'm sorry.'"
She blinked.
Evran whispered, "Do you want to expose him?"
"No," she said. "I want the world to know he failed. And then chose to vanish instead of healing it."
Evran lit a lantern. "Then take this. Not for hate. For memory."
Sera didn't thank him.
She just took the book.
And in the street above, someone began spray-painting Caelum's name backwards.
As if trying to reverse the story.