The sound of the bell had not simply faded away. It had settled into the very foundations of Greyrock, becoming the new heartbeat of the village. In the following days, Arteo observed the changes with a mixture of wonder and terror. As the village flourished, he withered.
The air was indeed cleaner. The children, once pale and taciturn, ran through the streets with flushed cheeks. The merchant whose sack he had mended had reopened his stall, displaying fruits more colorful than usual. Even the goats seemed to give more milk.
But for Arteo, every improvement in the village was a reminder of the price he was paying. The holes in his memory were not vague: they were precise, painful voids. Trying to recall the face of Elara, his assistant in the restoration workshop, was like looking through frosted glass. He knew she existed, but the features evaded him, erased.
Borgo, whose arm was now skillfully splinted by Megan, had noticed his torment. One evening, as Arteo stared into the fire in the common room of the Inn, the innkeeper sat down next to him with a sigh.
"Memory is like a scar, Scribbler," he said, not in an aphoristic tone, but with rare sincerity. "Sometimes it hurts more to remember than to forget. My wife... her smile. Sometimes I wake up at night and for a moment I can't see it. Then it comes back. It's a pain that renews itself." He paused. "But it's a pain I choose to carry. Because without it, I would have nothing of her."
Arteo looked at him, surprised. It was the first time Borgo had spoken of his past. "How do you bear it?"
"You don't bear it. You transform it." Borgo gestured toward the forge through the window. "Like metal in the forge. The heat changes it, it doesn't destroy it. Perhaps your memories aren't fading. They're just... changing form."
The next day, Hilda burst into the Inn, the rolling pin in her hand like a weapon. "Scribbler! I need your help. Hanno's cursed rooster has escaped again and is destroying my vegetable patch!"
Arteo, eager for any distraction, accepted. The chase was comical and desperate. The rooster, a ball of red and black feathers named "Flame," seemed endowed with diabolical intelligence. It dodged, pecked, and evaded every attempt at capture.
"To the left!" shouted little Figge, Hilda's son, laughing. "No, wait, right!"
Arteo stopped, panting. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to calm down. And then he saw it: a fleeting but clear image. He saw the rooster, instead of dodging, charging directly toward him, beak open in a silent squawk of defiance. The image lasted a second, then vanished.
When he reopened his eyes, Flame was already launching its attack, exactly as foreseen. Arteo, instead of retreating, took a quick step to the side and grabbed the rooster mid-flight, wrapping it in a jute sack.
"You saw the future!" exclaimed Figge, jaw dropped.
"No," Arteo murmured, more to himself than to the child. "I just... read its intention." The tingling in his temples had returned, different from the pain of the Ink. It was more like the vibration of a lute string. The bell. It must be the bell.
Later, while helping Roric reorganize the forge, the thing happened again. Roric was looking for a specific punch, a thin tool he used for delicate engravings.
"I used it yesterday to fix Lyn's buckle," he grumbled, rummaging through piles of tools. "I don't know where I put it."
Arteo, without thinking, walked toward a dark corner, where a rotten wooden crate had been stacked months earlier. He bent down and, moving a piece of moldy leather, found the punch. He had no memory of having seen it there before. He had simply known where it was.
Roric looked at him, not surprised, but thoughtful. "The silver," he said simply. "It's waking you up." He approached the bell, which now rested on a makeshift stand in the forge. "I forged it for purification. But pure silver does more. It reflects the truth. It shows the connections between things." He placed a hand on the bell. "For me, it makes the metal feel like a friend. For you... it's showing you the threads that bind everything. The past of objects. The intentions of creatures."
"Is it dangerous?" Arteo asked, his voice a thread of sound.
"Everything that reveals the truth is," Roric replied. "But it's a danger worth running."
That night, the dream was not of consuming pages. It was more vivid, more cruel. He saw the Library, but not as a place of wonder. He saw a huge, complex machine, made of word-gears and narrative-pulleys. And he saw himself not as a restorer, but as fuel. Pieces of his memory—no longer vague, but specific: the first time he held a book, the scent of the woods behind the orphanage—were being ripped away and thrown into a furnace, fueling the machine so it could rewrite Greyrock's history.
He woke up suddenly, his body drenched in cold sweat. He had to understand. He had to know. He walked toward the square, like a sleepwalker. The full moon illuminated the bell, transforming it into a silvery beacon.
He placed his hand on the cold surface.
The river of images that overwhelmed him was not just of the past. He saw the village as a tapestry of interwoven narratives. He saw the original story, gray and immutable as stone. Then he saw himself, a thread of black, living ink, stitching new points, creating a different, more colorful, more chaotic pattern. And he saw the bell not as a simple object, but as a cosmic suture point. The place where the new narrative was anchoring itself to reality, replacing the old one.
He also saw the price. With every stitch he made, a thread of his own existence was unraveling and being incorporated into the tapestry. He wasn't just losing memories; he was becoming part of the story he was saving, diluting himself into it.
And he saw the Proofreader. Not as a shadow, but as a worker of the great machine. Its function was not cruelty, but maintenance. It was trying to repair the tear Arteo was creating, not out of malice, but to preserve the integrity of the narrative machine. Its opposition was dogmatic, not personal.
When he removed his hand, he stumbled. The truth was more frightening than any monster. He was not a hero. He was an anomaly. And the system was trying to correct him.
At that moment, an inhuman scream, charged with suffering that went beyond the physical, rose from Torvin's manor. It wasn't just a man dying. It was a narrative collapsing. An ending refusing to be rewritten without a fight.
Arteo looked at his hands. He knew what was about to happen. He felt the tension growing in him, like a bowstring about to be released. The Library was calling him back. The first cycle was complete.
But now he had a choice. He could let himself be dragged away, consumed and defeated. Or he could use what he had learned. He could try to fix the new narrative so that it would endure, even without him. He had to talk to Roric. He had to figure out how to make the anchor so strong that it would survive his return to the Library.
The game was not over. It was just changing level. And he, finally, was beginning to understand the rules