Velora had seen glyph signatures a thousand times.
Each Council member had one: a binding seal of identity, shaped by the mind and imprinted onto the Archive's protocols. It was not just a signature. It was a mirror.
And hers had never changed.
Until now.
She activated it to authorize a low-level clearance update on the Sector Twelve forgetting case.
It didn't respond.
It pulsed once.
Then whispered: "Tessa."
She froze.
The voice was quiet. Not mechanical. Not Archive-coded.
It was human. Familiar. Like someone speaking through the crack of a door long since sealed.
She reset the glyph, breath tight in her throat.
On the second activation, her signature warped. The spiral looped inward, then twisted in on itself, curling like a broken thread. A line of ash formed at the base of the symbol.
Then it spoke again:
"I remember the fire. You called it order."
Velora stepped back. Not from fear—fear she could process.
This was deeper. A slow unraveling of certainty. The glyph was linked to her cognitive imprint. For it to change…
It meant something else had written over her.
Alastor arrived minutes later, summoned by silence. He paused the moment he saw the glowing spiral on her desk.
"That's not your pattern," he said.
"No."
"It's not even… stable."
He moved closer. The signature continued pulsing, slow and deliberate, like it was breathing.
"You didn't authorize this?"
Velora shook her head.
"Then it means the imprint isn't fully yours anymore," he whispered.
She didn't reply.
Instead, she stared at the spiral.
"If the version of me that buried Tessa wasn't the original," she said, "then what am I?"
Alastor didn't answer.
Neither did the glyph.
But the room suddenly felt too full—like a third presence had arrived and was waiting to be acknowledged.
That night, Velora didn't sleep.
She stayed in her quarters, staring at the cracked mirror above her desk. Her reflection held steady, but it didn't feel like it belonged to her.
Behind her, the candle burned low.
And the coin spun once.
Without being touched.
She reached for the memory log connected to Harven's terminal—the Councilor who had broken last week. Most of his records had been scrubbed after his disappearance, but one remained corrupted instead of deleted.
She activated the fragment.
A blurred room appeared in her mind. Not the Archive. Somewhere older. Stone walls. Glyphs worn down by time. And in the center—
Tessa.
She stood facing a mirror. Not her own, but one that had clearly belonged to someone else. Her voice was faint but calm.
"If this fails," she said, "someone has to know we tried. That memory wasn't always a weapon."
She looked directly at the mirror.
"They're building the Archive like a vault, but it's not a vault. It's a mouth."
The fragment splintered and collapsed into static.
Velora stared at the smoking shard, her hands trembling.
Tessa had left that message before the Rebirth.
Before Velora's memory had been rewritten. Before her loyalties had calcified into silence.
"She left that for someone," Alastor said from behind her. "Maybe for you."
"She didn't trust me."
"She trusted the version of you that didn't survive."
An alert chime sounded. Velora looked to her console.
A new report. Sector Twelve again.
Not an attack. Not sabotage.
An erasure.
An entire residential block had gone dark.
Not physically.
Administratively.
The rooms still existed. The buildings were intact. But every digital record—every civilian name, every birth certificate, every image file—was gone.
The people had vanished from memory.
Velora opened a backup file and typed a name. A woman she remembered from a week ago. A quiet worker with jade-green nails who always left tea outside the sub-archive door.
The screen blinked.
File not found.
She tried again.
Nothing.
She wrote the woman's name by hand, ink scratching into the parchment with urgency.
The paper curled inward. The ink sizzled. Then turned to ash.
Velora inhaled sharply.
"Memory doesn't just decay," she said.
"It devours."
Later, she walked the empty halls of the Archive. The lights flickered above her, one after the next, like blinking eyes that couldn't agree on what they were seeing.
She paused in front of the council mirror. Her reflection stared back, pale and composed.
But the eyes were wrong.
They were too still.
And when her lips parted, the voice that emerged was not hers.
"You're not losing your mind," it said.
"You're finding the one they buried."
Velora stood perfectly still, not even blinking.
"I want the truth," she said aloud.
The reflection smiled.
"Then be ready to lose everything they gave you."