Thane staggered again, the clasp pulsing in his hand.
Solenne’s voice returned, more intimate now.
“She was your mentor. Or your rival. Or both. Her name was Lys.”
Thane’s breath caught.
“I remember her. She taught me the ethics of forgetting.”
“And you taught her the danger of silence.”
The chamber shifted once more. The sealed eye glyph flickered, then opened—just slightly. A sliver of light spilled into the room, revealing a hidden alcove behind the pedestal. Inside, a scroll lay coiled in a glass cylinder, sealed with wax bearing the Archive’s sigil.
Thane reached for it.
As his fingers touched the glass, the chamber darkened. The scroll unravelled midair, revealing a map—
not of space, but of memory. Corridors, chambers, glyphs. And at the centre, a node marked with a single word: Solenne.
Thane turned to her.
“You were the Archive’s conscience.”
“I was its silence,”
she replied. “Until you fractured me.”
The chamber pulsed once more and the clasp in Thane’s hand dissolved into ash. The scroll folded itself and returned to the alcove, now sealed again.
Thane stood alone, but not untouched.
The Corridor of Betrayal had not condemned him. It had inducted him.
