Elior did not sleep.
He lay on his narrow apartment bed, staring at the ceiling as the city breathed around his window. The burn on his palm had subsided to a dull throb, but the sigil stayed in his mind with uncomfortable clarity.
At dawn, he resolved upon a course of action.
He returned to the Bureau earlier than usual.
The archive seemed quieter that morning than usual, its lamps casting long shadows between the shelves. With practised ease, Elior moved down the rows he had traversed countless times.
He stopped before the restricted access terminal.
Clearance Level 1 was not granted to view anything beyond the publicly available incident logs. Normally, the system would summarily reject him.
Today, the screen hesitated.
Then:
TEMPORARY ACCESS GRANTED
CLEARANCE LEVEL 2 — PROBATIONARY
Slowly, Elior exhaled.
Thus, this was their response.
He navigated the restricted catalog, being careful not to open material too sensitive. Minor anomalies. Dormant cases. Incidents marked Resolved but never explained.
The deeper he went, the more pressure built up behind his eyes—but it did not become intolerable. Painful but endurable, so long as he could think of the material as records and not as revelations, his mind stayed balanced.
Then he saw it.
A closed file with a familiar classification code.
He opened it.
It described a minor god, localised, weak, and bound to a single ritual site; the resolution was brief and clinical.
The final line caused his breath to catch.
Incident resolved by Archivist Elior Graves.
It preceded his employment date by twelve years.
His hands trembled while he closed the file.
Someone had written him into history.
Or he had enrolled himself.
There was a stirring at the edge of his perception: not a voice, not yet, but a pressure, like the sensation of being watched from behind glass.
Elior shut down the terminal session and stepped away.
As he turned, a small brass bell sat on a desk nearby. Its surface was dulled with age.
The Bell of Stillness.
He had read of it.
He had never been authorised to touch it.
The bell rang once.
Elior was now alone.
A soft, amused whisper brushed his ear.
"You have already written to me."
The lights in the archive began to flicker.
While deep within the Bureau, on a desk that should have been empty, a file that shouldn't exist moved.