The word Access burned in Veyne's palm like a live coal, but the pain was not thermal—it was grammatical. It was the sensation of a definition forcing itself into his flesh, the semantic weight of entry and permission and right-of-way compressing into a singularity of meaning that threatened to rewrite his hand into a keyhole. He needed to release it, to speak it into the lock of the Subjunctive Stacks, but the memory rose up unbidden, a footnote in his own biography that had been waiting to be cited.
Seven years prior. The Athenaeum of Obligated Forms.
Magister Oobligatum had no reflection.
This was not metaphor; the man cast no shadow, left no image in mirrors, and walked through puddles without disturbing the water's silvering. He was a vacuum in the field of optics, a blank space where a silhouette should have been, and he taught the Genitive Case from this position of absolute non-presence.
"You confuse possession with ownership," Oobligatum said, his voice emerging from the air two feet to the left of where he stood. "In the vulgar tongue, to possess is to have. In Thanatotic Grammar, to possess is to be the origin of."
Young Veyne—nineteen years old, his coat not yet made of pages but of simple wool, his quill still a common goose-feather—sat at the lectern, taking notes in a crabbed, anxious script. The classroom was a inverted bell jar, the air thin and preserved, the desks arranged in a spiral descending toward the Magister's empty silhouette.
"The Genitive," Oobligatum continued, and as he spoke, the walls of the classroom began to exhibit the case itself. Plaster cracked, and from the fissures leaked possession—the book's cover, the man's shadow, the corpse's grin. Each phrase manifested physically: a leather binding growing like lichen from the stone, a darkness pooling without source, a smile hovering disembodied and terrible. "It is the case of belonging. But consider: in our art, what does it mean to belong?"
He gestured, and a student—Veyne did not know his name, they were all anonymous in the Athenaeum—was pulled into the demonstration. The boy gasped as Oobligatum spoke a single word: "Animus."
The Genitive prefix.
The student's shadow detached. It stood up, stretched, and walked to Oobligatum, bowing. The Magister had taken possession of the shadow—literally, grammatically. It was now his shadow, the student's darkness belonging to the master.
"Do you see?" Oobligatum asked. The boy nodded, trembling. "I do not own the shadow. I have not bought it. But by placing it in the Genitive case—the shadow of Oobligatum—I have become its origin point. Its reference. It can no longer cast without my permission."
He released the shadow with a dismissive flick of syntax. It returned to the boy, but wrong—stretched too long, or too short, attached at the wrong angle, a reflection of possession rather than light.
"Your exercise," Oobligatum said, and now he turned to Veyne, though he had no face to turn, only a voice that seemed to come from inside Veyne's own skull. "Take something that belongs to another. Place it in the Genitive. Make it yours."
Veyne looked around the classroom. The other students were already attempting the working—one girl was trying to possess her neighbor's breath, another attempting to claim the dust motes in a sunbeam. Veyne had nothing. He was an orphan of the Alimentary Districts, raised on compressed newsprint and library paste. He owned nothing.
Nothing except his doubt.
It was a small thing, a skepticism he had nurtured since childhood, a refusal to believe in the permanence of the written word. He had stolen it from a priest who had tried to teach him scripture. It was the only thing that was truly his.
Veyne raised his quill—not yet bone, but already thirsty—and wrote in the air: "Dubium Veynis."
The doubt of Veyne.
The Genitive case.
The air shuddered. Oobligatum stopped. For the first time in the semester, the Magister seemed to see Veyne, though he had no eyes with which to see.
"You have claimed an abstraction," Oobligatum said, and there was something like fear in his disembodied voice. "You have placed a concept in the possessive. Do you understand what you have done?"
Veyne shook his head.
"You have made your doubt definitive," Oobligatum whispered. "It is no longer a passing thought. It is property. It can be stolen, taxed, inherited. You have commodified your skepticism."
He stepped closer, and Veyne felt the chill of the reflectionless man—a cold that came from having no image to bounce back warmth. "And worse. You have committed the first act of Necrocuratory. You have taken something that was unwritten—free-floating uncertainty—and bound it into syntax. You are not a Lexigrapher, boy. You are an Editor."
The classroom fell silent. The other students had stopped their exercises. The Genitive manifestations—stolen breaths, claimed dust, appropriated shadows—hung suspended in the air like particulates in amber.
"For this," Oobligatum said, "you must pay the price."
He reached out his hand, and Veyne saw that the Magister wore gloves of smoked glass. When he touched Veyne's shoulder, the contact was not physical but referential. Oobligatum was not touching Veyne; he was touching the concept of Veyne, the noun in the nominative case, the subject of the sentence.
"You have taken possession of an idea," Oobligatum said. "Therefore, something of yours must become unpossessable. Something must be removed from the Genitive. You must lose your speculum."
"My mirror?" Veyne asked, his voice cracking.
"Your reflection. Your ability to be seen by yourself. You will cast no image, not in glass, not in water, not in the eyes of others. You will be a subject without a predicate, a noun with no modifying image."
He snapped his fingers—a sound like a book closing.
And Veyne felt it go. He felt his reflection detach like the student's shadow had detached, but not to serve Oobligatum. It simply left. It walked out of his body, out of his concept of self, and did not return.
From that day forward, when Veyne looked in mirrors, he saw not his face but the room behind him, empty. When he walked past shop windows, he was a floating coat, a disembodied quill, a voice without a visage. He had paid the price for the Genitive. He had learned that to possess was to be possessed in turn.
Present. The Subjunctive Stacks.
Veyne gasped, returning to the Library's marginal corridors. The word Access was still hot in his hand, but now he understood its true weight. It was not just a key; it was a Genitive construction—the Access of the Stacks—and by holding it, he was possessing something that belonged to the Library itself.
He was becoming Oobligatum.
The realization struck him with the force of a declarative sentence: Every time he used Thanatotic Grammar to take a Husk, to redact a life, he was placing that life in the Genitive. The Husk of Veyne. The Erasure of the Necrocurator. He was not just killing people; he was making them his property, his grammatical possessions, collecting souls like a bibliophile collects first editions.
And the price? He looked at his hands, still translucent from Footnote's warning, still marked with the red editorial ink of [REDACTED]. He was losing his narrative reflection. He was becoming a figure in the margins, a citation without a main text, a possessor who was himself being possessed by the story.
He spoke the word Access into the lock of the Subjunctive Stacks.
The door—shaped like an open parenthesis—swung inward.
Beyond it lay not shelves but potentials. Books that were white, blank, humming with the energy of stories that had not been written but could have been. Here was the biography of the man Veyne might have been if he had not gone to the Athenaeum. There, the life of the Senator as a happy child, unmarked by politics. Everywhere, the Genitive case run rampant—the might-have-beens of the world, possessed by no one, available for the taking.
And there, floating in the center of the chamber, was the Senator's true manuscript.
Not the Husk he would leave behind when he died, but the book he had been writing when he was alive. The counter-narrative. The grammar of rebellion.
Veyne reached for it.
But a hand—familiar, blurred, existing only in the peripheral vision like a footnote to a forgotten text—reached out from the blank pages and grasped his wrist.
"Do not take possession," whispered a voice that sounded like Oobligatum, like Footnote, like his own second draft. "Not yet. First, you must understand what it means to be possessed."
The book opened.
And Veyne fell inside, not as a reader, but as a character.