The page would not stop bleeding.
Veyne had placed it in his innermost pocket—the one lined with lead foil and proofed against irony—and still he felt it seeping through the parchment of his coat, a damp, lexical stain spreading across his ribs like a rash of ink. The Senator's death-scene, written in the wrong tense, kept rewriting itself. When Veyne had descended the stairs of 734, Rue Morte-Scribe, the text had described a throat-cut in a red room. By the time he reached the cobblestones of the Alimentary Districts, the Senator was drowning in a bath of mercury. Now, as he approached the Wound, the page whispered of a hanging in a library with no ceilings.
He did not dare read it again. To read was to participate, and participation implied consent.
The Library of St. Giles the Forgotten occupied the epicenter of the Necropolis, spiraling downward into the crater known as the Wound That Never Closes. It was not a building so much as an excavation—a reverse tower of Babel constructed not toward the hubris of heaven but the humility of depth. Its architecture was bibliomorphic: flying buttresses shaped like open books, spines outward; domes of stained glass depicting not saints but indexing systems (Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress, the forbidden Yijing of Souls); and beneath it all, the stacks—miles of catacombs where the Husks of the dead were shelved according to the syntactical complexity of their final thoughts.
Veyne descended the Grand Staircase, his boots clicking against marble steps that were actually compressed anthologies of funeral orations. The air grew colder as he went down, thick with the smell of foxing and desiccated memory. Curators in grey livery moved between the shelves, their eyes covered with smoked-glass lenses to prevent them from accidentally reading the titles of the forbidden biographies. They pushed brass trolleys laden with tubular cases like the one at Veyne's hip—caskets for stories.
He was not welcome here, strictly speaking. Necrocurators operated in the margins of the Library's jurisdiction, in the spaces between the Dewey decimals. They were the red ink in a world of black type, the editorial correction that the text resented. Veyne kept his collar high and his quill concealed, though the bone warmed against his wrist, sensing the proximity of so many completed narratives.
He needed the Senator's file. If Madame Vane had been channeling the man's death, there would be a resonance signature in the Husk archives—a harmonic convergence between writer and written. To find it, he needed access to the Restricted Stacks, specifically the Marginalia Collection, where the biographies of those who died editing were kept.
The archivist at the reference desk was a woman of indeterminate age, her face blurred by the sheer volume of information she had consumed. She wore a high-necked blouse of library-card catalogues, each drawer containing a finger. When Veyne approached, she did not look up; she was reading a pocket-sized Husk, her lips moving silently in the absorption of someone else's grief.
"I require the Senator's trajectory," Veyne said, sliding his credentials across the marble—an embossed card identifying him as a Class-IV Semantic Hygienist, a lie that was almost true.
The archivist's hand moved, not to the card, but to a bell. She rang it once. The sound was not a chime but a footnote indicator: a small, superscript ding that seemed to float in the air beside her ear.
"We do not traffic in hypotheticals," she said, her voice the rustle of turning pages. "The Senator lives. Therefore, he has no Husk. Therefore, he has no file."
"He will die," Veyne said. "I have seen the draft."
"Drafts are not documents. They are intentions." She finally looked up. Her eyes were not eyes but miniature card catalogues, drawers opening and closing in the sclera, searching for his reference. "You carry a contaminated page, Hygienist. It sheds syntax on my floor."
Veyne glanced down. Indeed, words were dripping from his pocket—not letters, but entire clauses, pooling on the marble like inkblot tests that spelled out doom. He cursed in the Ablative case, causing the droplets to scatter backward into his coat.
"I need to see the Marginalia," he insisted. "Someone has been... editing. Pre-reading. You know the crime."
The archivist's expression did not change—she had long ago replaced her facial muscles with the stoic binding of leather volumes—but her card-catalogue eyes spun faster. "The Marginalia are restricted to Tier-Five Lexigraphers and above. You are... unclassified."
"Then I shall browse the open stacks."
"Careful," she said, returning to her Husk. "Some books read back."
Veyne turned toward the stacks. The shelves rose (or fell) into vertiginous depths, each level a ring of the descending tower. Here were the Recent Dead, their Husks still warm, glowing with the phosphorescence of fresh memory. There, the Ancient Biographies, their texts in languages that had never been spoken, only inscribed on the bones of prophets. And there—behind a gate of iron bars shaped like paragraph breaks—the Marginalia Collection.
He could not enter through the front. But Veyne knew the Library's secret anatomy. Every book has its gaps, its white space, its negative theology.
He walked not down the main aisle but along the wall, his fingers tracing the spines of encyclopedias until he found the gap he sought: a missing volume, a space between Memetic Hazards and Mnemonic Plagues that was exactly the width of a slender man. He stepped into the gap.
The space between the shelves was not darkness. It was margin.
Veyne existed now in the white border of the page, the unprinted periphery where the text dared not tread. He moved sideways through reality, sliding between the lines of the Library's official geography. Here, gravity was a suggestion, distance was measured in ems and ens, and time flowed in the direction of reading—left to right, top to bottom, a waterfall of sequence.
He navigated by the footnotes.
They appeared as glowing, superscript numerals floating in the white void, tethered to invisible texts by threads of semantic connection. Veyne followed the footnote marked [7]—a reference to the Senator's ancestral estate—moving through the margin like a spider traversing the gutter of an open book.
And then he was not alone.
The figure stood (if standing was the term) in the narrow space between two towering footnotes: [14] and [15]. It was humanoid but compressed, existing in the lateral dimension of the margin, its body flattened like a pressed flower or a letter written too late. It wore a coat of索引索引 (index cards), each one fluttering with bibliographic data. Its face was a blur, redacted by the very nature of its existence in the supplementary text.
"Necrocurator," it said, and its voice appeared not as sound but as text at the bottom of Veyne's vision: a small, tasteful font, serifed, polite.¹
Veyne's hand went to his quill. "You know my true title."
"I know your margins," the figure wrote, its words appearing in the air like steam on a mirror. "I am Footnote. You may cite me as [REDACTED], though that is not my numeral."
"You're Unbound," Veyne said. "An Illegible. No—you exist below even them. You are the citation of a ghost."
Footnote shifted, its form flickering between parentheses. "And you are a grammatical error walking. You carry a pre-read Husk. You disturb the syntax of causality. The Senator's death is meant to be a declarative sentence, not an interrogative."
"I didn't kill him," Veyne said. "His death killed Madame Vane before it happened."
"Anacoluthon," Footnote wrote—a Greek term for a sentence broken by sudden change in structure.² "The narrative is broken. Someone is editing without preserving the manuscript's integrity. They are using White-Out not to correct, but to censor."
Veyne withdrew the bleeding page. In the margin-light, the text had stabilized, showing a single image: a desk, a red room, a quill poised to write. But the hand holding the quill was blurred, smeared by the frantic motion of revision.
"The Senator was writing a counter-narrative," Veyne said. "A forbidden grammar. I need to know what it was before it's redacted entirely."
Footnote extended a hand—long, jointed like a paragraph indent—and touched the page. Where its finger made contact, the blood-ink retreated, revealing a hidden layer of text beneath, palimpsestic, scraped but not erased:
"The Twelve Radicals are not roots but chains. The Author is not dead but editing. The Reader is complicit."
Then Footnote did something impossible. It reached into its own chest—into the space where a heart would be, if it were a main text and not a reference—and withdrew a key. Not metal, but meaning. A semantic instrument shaped like the word Access.
"Take this," Footnote wrote, the words appearing on Veyne's retina like floaters. "It opens the Subjunctive Stacks, where the books that might have been are kept. The Senator's true biography is there—not the one he lived, but the one he was prevented from writing."
"Why help me?" Veyne asked.
"Because," Footnote wrote, and for the first time, the font wavered, became bold, then italic, then bold again, as if the emotion was too strong for the formatting, "you are the only character in this story who has noticed the page numbers are bleeding. Look at your hands, Necrocurator."
Veyne looked down.
His hands—the long, pale fingers that had extracted a thousand Husks—were becoming translucent. Through them, he could see the text of his own coat, the pages of his biography, and there, in the margins of his own life, editorial marks in crimson ink:
"[REDACTED—see alternate draft]"
"You are being revised," Footnote wrote. "Hurry. The next chapter is coming, and in it, you may not exist."
The margin began to collapse, the white space filling with black ink as the Library's security systems detected the unauthorized conversation. Footnote folded itself into a smaller and smaller font, becoming a subscript, then a symbol, then nothing, leaving only the key—the word Access—heavy and hot in Veyne's palm.
Veyne ran, not through the margin but across the lines, leaping from the top of one paragraph to the next, descending toward the Subjunctive Stacks where the might-have-beens screamed in perpetual potentiality.
Behind him, the page in his pocket whispered a new sentence, one he felt rather than heard:
"The Necrocurator opened the wrong door, and found not the Senator's past, but his own second draft."