The containment alarm sounded once—and then stopped.
Already Elior was rising, as the sound faded, the chair scraping softly against the stone floor. His pulse hammered as he turned toward the archive doors, awaiting the response he had been trained to expect.
Red lights. Seals locking. Internal Containment sweeping the floor.
None of it happened.
Around him, the archive kept to its measured rhythm. Pens scratched. Pages turned. A clerk three desks over coughed politely into his sleeve and went back to copying a ledger. No one looked up.
Slowly, with deliberation, Elior sat down again.
That was wrong.
The Containment Alarm was not subtle. It bypassed human hearing, travelling directly through the building's sigil lattice. Every employee, from junior clerk to director, was conditioned to react before conscious thought had a chance to intervene. Drills were conducted. Penalties imposed. Consequences enforced.
Elior checked the wall clock.
09:18 am
One minute had passed since the alarm.
Swallowing, he looked back down at the desk.
The grey folder was gone.
For an instant, he considered that perhaps panic had finally overcome him—that he had merely dreamed the whole incident. The impossible file. The handwriting. The date in the future.
He pulled open the drawer under his desk, then the one at its side. Nothing. The desktop itself was clear, bare wood worn smooth by decades of clerical labour.
No folder.
Elior exhaled slowly through his nose and turned to his terminal. If the alarm had rung, it would have been logged; if the file had existed, it would have left a trace. The Bureau did not tolerate gaps.
He logged into the internal system and opened the alarm registry.
A single entry materialised.
09:17:42 — CONTAINMENT ALERT ACTIVATED
The line ended there.
No escalation code.
No resolution status.
No responding department.
As though the alarm itself had been interrupted mid-thought.
Elior fixed his gaze on the screen until the letters began to blur. He reached out, meaning to scroll down—and flinched as pain shot through his hand.
He looked at his palm.
Where a moment before there had been no mark, one now appeared.
Thin lines, crossing at sharp angles, seemed seared into his skin as if branded by a fine blade. The pattern was unfamiliar, but a pressure was building behind his eyes when he tried to focus on it, bringing a dull ache with a certainty that his stomach twisted.
He did not know the sigil.
He knew what it meant.
The realisation came whole, without words, as if remembering the end of a sentence begun by another.
Access
Elior closed his hand, hiding the mark. His breathing steadied-not because he was calm, but because panic would only make things worse. Whatever had happened, whatever he had seen, any outward display would draw attention.
Attention was dangerous.
He shut the terminal and returned to his work, copying a routine incident report about a "singing mirror" recovered from a provincial town. His pen moved steadily, while his thoughts raged.
If the alarm had sounded just for him alone, then one of the following had to be true:
1) He was malfunctioning.
2) The archive was malfunctioning.
3) Or something had deliberately isolated him.
Of these possibilities, none was acceptable.
The gentle chime of an internal summons echoed across the floor at 11:47 a.m.
Internal Containment. Elior Graves. Interview Room C. Please attend immediately.
His pen paused mid-word.
So they had noticed.
He stood up, smoothed his jacket, and then headed toward the inner corridors unhurriedly. The archive was not a place for runners.
Interview Room C was small and plain, its walls lined with dampening sigils that absorbed sound and, if rumour was to be believed, certain kinds of thoughts. A recorder sat at the centre of the table, its red light already glowing.
She, the woman opposite him, did not introduce herself.
"Sit", she said, her voice neutral.
Elior cedi.
"Describe the file", she said.
He met her gaze. "I cannot".
A pause.
"Explain".
"It no longer exists", Elior said cautiously." I have checked my desk, the registry. There is no physical or digital record remaining".
The recorder clicked softly.
The woman watched him for a long moment. "You're choosing your words. That is good".
She leant forward and started questioning him, not with accusations, but with confirmations. Questions that assumed familiarity with procedures he had never been cleared to learn. Questions skirting the edges of divinity without naming it.
He answered what he could and avoided what he could not. Each answer was like a walk along the edge of a blade.
The door opened halfway through.
A senior archivist came in, carrying a pile of documents. Without even looking at Elior, he set them down on the table, aligned imperfectly, corners uneven.
Then he left.
A fraction of a second later, the woman's gaze flicked to the papers.
The interview was concluded shortly thereafter.
She hesitated at the door. "You should not remember this," she said in a hushed voice. "If you do, report yourself."
Elior nodded.
He did not trust himself to speak.
-
Back at his desk, the misaligned stack was waiting for him.
He rummaged through it in a methodical manner, and his heart was now steadier, in a way that frightened him more than panic would have. Near the bottom, he found a personnel file.
The senior archivist's name was at the top.
It was crossed out.
Not struck through once, but layered-ink over ink, mark over mark, as if multiple attempts had been made to erase it.
Elior flipped through the pages.
In every version, the name was crossed out.
Every archived copy.
Across decades of records.
Reality had tried to forget this man. And failed. Gently, Elior closed the file and slid it back into the stack. At precisely 9:17 p.m. that evening, his palm began to burn again.