Velora didn't remember walking to the Archive's eastern wing.
She rarely remembered the steps that brought her to the places no one else dared enter.
Only that she had arrived.
The hall was colder here. Not from lack of heat, but memory.
This wing had been sealed since the early days of the Rebirth Accord when truths had grown too large to fit the narrative the Council so carefully rewrote.
There were no candles here. No torches.
Just long-dead sconces and stone ribs overhead, like the bones of something ancient that never truly rested.
A door waited at the end of the corridor.
Not grand. Not ornate.
Just wrong.
The kind of wrong that didn't need explanation.
It had no handle. No plaque.
Just a keyhole shaped like an eye that had long since been filled with dust.
She stepped closer and placed her palm against the center of the door.
It didn't glow.
It didn't react.
It remembered.
A click sounded from deep within.
Not like a lock turning but like something old exhaling for the first time in years.
The door opened just enough to let the dark spill out like smoke.
Velora stepped inside without hesitation.
If she hesitated, the room might close again.
Inside was a space untouched by the Rewrite.
A round chamber. Candleless. Quiet.
The walls were bare, but the silence pressed in like something sacred had once happened here and something worse had tried to erase it.
In the center stood a stone table carved from Archive rock smooth, veined with faded silver, pulsing faintly like a heartbeat beneath stone.
On the table: a book bound in white.
Unmarked. Untouched.
Velora circled it once.
Then again, slower.
She ran her fingers along the edge of the table.
There were symbols etched into the border sigils of memory-keeping, truth-binding, name-protection.
Most were burned out.
Some had been carved over.
Not erased.
Just… overwritten.
She opened the book.
Blank.
The first page. The second. The third.
Then
A single line.
"You lived once. Not like this. But close enough."
Her throat tightened. She didn't react. Didn't blink.
She turned the page.
"You chose me. In another version. And I chose to forget."
Velora stared at the ink. It hadn't bled.
It didn't even look recent.
But she had been here yesterday.
Hadn't she?
She closed the book.
Her breath came slow, measured.
She looked around the room again at the walls, the shadows, the stone.
Then toward the far end, where something else waited.
A mirror.
It stood seven feet tall, rimmed in dull bronze. Cracked in three places.
But no dust covered its surface.
Velora walked toward it, slowly.
Her reflection greeted her before she reached it.
White coat. Frayed cuffs. Silver rings.
One braid over the shoulder.
Gold eyes dulled with knowing.
But the reflection blinked out of sync.
Her heart didn't race. She had no heart left for that.
She stepped closer.
The reflection was smiling.
She wasn't.
She reached toward it.
The mirror rippled. Not glass memory.
And somewhere behind it, a voice that was almost hers whispered:
"Which version are you this time?"
Velora stepped back.
The ripple stopped.
The smile vanished.
Her reflection returned.
Unsmiling. Frayed. Watching.
She left the chamber without another word.
The door shut behind her with a sigh like falling ash.
Hours later or minutes, or years; the Archive didn't care—Velora sat in her cell again.
The candle had burned down to half.
She hadn't lit it.
She never did.
And on the table behind her…
The coin was back.
She didn't move.
Didn't reach for it.
Didn't even look at it.
But she knew it was there.
The coin was always there.
Same weight.
Same tarnished gold edge.
Same Hollow Star with its eight uneven points.
She remembered flipping it once.
Once.
It landed on fire.
She never flipped it again.
There was a sound in the corridor.
Not footsteps this time.
A voice.
Distant. Young.
"She's still in there?"
"She never leaves. They say she doesn't need to eat."
"That's not possible."
"Neither is remembering your mother's name if the Council didn't authorize it."
A pause.
"Do you think she's dangerous?"
"No. I think she's worse. I think she remembers what we forgot."
Velora closed her eyes.
Not in pain.
Not in peace.
In recognition.
They were right.
She didn't eat much.
She didn't sleep.
She didn't pray.
She remembered.
That was enough.
In the mirror of her memory, Rael still stood beside a burning city.
Tessa still smiled before she vanished.
And the coin?
The coin still spun.
It spun even now.
Not in her hand.
But somewhere.
Waiting to be flipped again.