The Scrollery

Junior Archivist Matzen Bellus sighed, the sound barely audible above the restless murmur of the scriptorium. He sat alone, fingers stained red with Liturgical Ink, surrounded by texts that whispered ceaselessly—begging to be copied, to be reborn on fresh waxen parchment. He had been practicing vocabulary, carefully etching the seventeen strokes required to form the rune for “Consecration.”

When his father had delivered him to the Scrollery as a fresh-faced Scriptus Penitent, Bellus hadn’t known what awaited him beyond the wrought-bronze gates and the unblinking gaze of the bronze Automatons flanking them. That day, caught between martial silence and paternal expectation, his father had pressed a hand to his back and declared:

“I offer this, my son, as tithe. May he clean our slate in your service. Hallowed be the Father.”

Then gave a gentle push.

The sudden clatter of hooves on stone shook Bellus from the memory. He blinked down at his work. Not much progress. Calceo would be… disappointed. He would need something—an offering, a gesture to placate the old sage. His moods could be unpredictable at best.

His thoughts drifted to the Senior Librarum.

Absolutely forbidden to underclassmen such as he—and not merely for bureaucratic or hierarchical reasons. Exposure to raw, higher knowledge without the proper primer could cause one to… unravel.

He’d seen it happen once.

Flim. The quiet boy from his first year. Always seemed to be staring into a different world. One night, unnoticed, he slipped into the Librarum’s depths.

They found his body slumped against the far wall.

Where his head had been, there was only a stump.

And on the stone behind him—his blood and viscera had been shaped into runes so eldritch that even the attending faculty emerged from the room with bleeding eyes.

Lucky for Bellus, he had prepared.

He dipped a hand into the ink-stained pocket of his robe and drew forth a folded kerchief—his mother’s. Waxen silk, soft as breath, still clinging to her scent no matter how many times he’d pressed it to his face. It was the last thing she’d given him, just before his father marched him to the tithing line.

"Keep it close. And when the world is too much to bear… breathe me in, and I will be there."

He’d learned early that covering his eyes with the kerchief dulled the world’s edges. Hid terrible things.

It blinded him… so he could see.

The hooves again. Clack, clack, clack, clack.

A door creaked open in the distance, followed by a startled voice—nervous, young.

“...m-muh-master Calceo! You’ve returned so soon, I—”

“Silence, Penitent.”

The voice snapped like a thrown blade. It was followed by a Thaumaturgic thunderclap that rattled the hall’s bones. From behind rows of banded wood doors, the furious scratching of pens rose like a panicked symphony preparing its final dirge.

“Produce your work.”

“W-well, I... Master...”

“Flagellation. Twenty-two lashes. Take him away.”

An automaton stepped from its post in the corridor wall. They lined the halls at silent intervals—motionless, watchful—animated only at the will of the Faculty.

With stuttering, clockwork grace, the brass-and-wax monstrosity crossed the stone and entered the room. It emerged dragging the unfortunate pupil behind it, who kicked and screamed as he was escorted toward the Detention Quarter.

The heavy door slammed.

Time was short.

Calceo advanced on the next door.

“Present your work.”

Bellus sprang into action. He snatched a blank page from a book gently weeping in the corner—unfinished for ages, its story suspended in liminal space.

Another day, friend, Bellus thought, scrawling a hasty series of runes—these he knew well.

He folded the page like a placard and centered it on the desk. His hand dipped once more into his robe for the kerchief.

Then he slipped from the room, pulling the door gently closed behind him.

From around the corner, he heard the Cloven Sage reprimanding his peers with venomous precision. Bellus shivered and drew his robe tighter, walking on quiet feet through the flickering corridors.

At last, he reached the staircase.

It spiraled downward, vanishing into the stone.

The descent to the Senior Librarum.

It coiled into the earth like a buried prayer.

He took the first step.

His wax-linen footwraps met the stone like whispers between mistresses at a lord’s funeral.

The torches along the walls shifted in hue as he descended deeper into the Scrollery’s bowels—away from sanctioned knowledge, toward the forsaken tomes of the Senior Librarum.

The blazing orange of the MindFlame dimmed with each turn of the spiral. First to deep red. Then violet. At last, blue—the color of gnostic revelation. The color of the self.

He paused, one foot hovering above the next step, transfixed by the soft azure light flickering from a sconce embedded in the stone. It should have offered warmth—but gave none. It radiated something else.

Truth.

He reached out, compelled.

The flame leapt to meet him.

It bit his hand, searing his skin with ethereal heat, and in that instant, a voice split his mind like the tip of a dueling foil driven through silk.

"YOUR FLAME BRINGS RUIN. TURN BACK."

The final step waited at the foot of the stairwell like a forgotten supplicant—cracked, sunken, bowed by the weight of unanswered prayers. Bellus reached it with a sense of reverent relief. How long had he been walking? Minutes? Hours? He had no way to know. Only that the spiral had ended.

A long corridor stretched before him. Sparse torches, still burning that cold blue, lined the walls. He gave them a wide berth.

At the end, set into the stone like the gilded tooth of some fallen god, loomed a thick brass door. Rumor claimed it actually was—ripped from the jaw of a long-dead saint during the Waxen Crusades.

And slumped before it, snoring softly in a rickety high-backed chair, was none other than Slank.

Senior Scribe “Devout” Slank, Bellus thought, dripping sarcasm. The “devout” part was especially rich. The only thing Slank had ever shown religious devotion to was mealtimes—and perhaps the back of his own eyelids.

Of course, his father’s standing at the Scrollery had guaranteed his title. Lord Slank had tithed more servants to the institution than anyone else in living memory. A noble family. A noble waste of wax.

Bellus approached in silence, careful not to rouse the rotund sentry. Slank’s snores echoed down the hall, low and cavernous. It felt, for a moment, as though Bellus were standing in the belly of some great, sleeping beast.

Bellus pressed lightly on the door. Locked. Of course. He turned his eyes to the laggard in the chair—slumbering peacefully beneath the Scrollery. Too incompetent to utilize, too important to chastise. And so here he remained, snoring before a tomb of forbidden texts, the key to its secrets dangling just off his belt loop.

Bellus reached out to snatch it, fingers brushing the cold iron ring clipped to Slank’s robe—when it struck again. Not a blow, but a presence. The voice returned, loud as thunder in the temple of his skull:

“TURN. BACK.”

He froze.

For a moment, he hesitated—considering the poor student dragged away in chains for a misplaced rune. But the thought passed. No. He would not crawl back up those stairs empty-handed.

He snatched the key.

Slank stirred. His pudgy hand instinctively swiped at his robes—perhaps wiping crumbs or dislodging them. Sure enough, a gentle rain of waxcake crumbs scattered to the flagstones like some sacred offering.

Bellus held his breath.

“…Waxcake’s dry…” Slank murmured.

Bellus rolled his eyes, exhaling quietly. Then he looked to the key in his hand.

With the reverence of a priest at midnight mass, he slid it into the lock. Turned it slowly. The mechanism groaned with a THOCK that echoed through the chamber like a judge’s gavel.

Bellus dared a glance over his shoulder.

Still asleep.

He sighed and pushed gently.

The door opened inward—silent, effortless, as though it had been waiting all this time just for him.

He offered Slank a quiet nod of thanks, and crossed the threshold.

The air beyond was dense—not with dust, but with memory. It pressed down on Bellus like an old cathedral ceiling that had grown tired of holding back the heavens.

Shelves. Endless and circular. They ringed the chamber like ribs around a long-forgotten heart. And between those shelves were books and scrolls that shimmered—not with gold or ink, but with remembrance. Some blinked like eyes half-lidded in dream. Others sighed with the rustle of sleepless parchment.

This was no ordinary archive.

This was the Vault of First Thought.

He stepped inward.

As the door closed gently behind him—click—he realized there was no handle on this side. He was meant to remain here, it seemed, until it was done.

Whatever it was.

He walked the aisle slowly, mind ablaze with the weight of it. These were not just records of history. These were containing vessels—scriptures inscribed in wax, blood, memory, and flame. He passed one scroll that fluttered open at his presence, revealing a rune he couldn’t read but felt in his molars.

Then, nestled awkwardly between two cracked tomes—a strange shape caught his eye.

Not a book.

Not a scroll.

But a shard.

A jagged triangle of translucent wax, edges smooth like sea glass. It pulsed faintly with an inner light. When he reached for it, it whined—not sonically, but spiritually, as if recoiling from the idea of being held.

And yet—it allowed itself.

As his fingers closed around it, the Vault exhaled.

The blue torches in the chamber flickered to white. All at once.

And the wax shard whispered into the hollow of his palm:

"You are not the first."

His knees buckled.

His vision blurred.

He was no longer in the Vault.

He was falling.

Falling into a vision not his own.

Falling into a memory that remembered him.

The air rippled.

Bellus stood not in the Librarum, but somewhere older—somewhen older. The scroll-lined walls had vanished. In their place stretched a windless avenue of primordial wax, soft and undisturbed, glimmering faintly under a sulfur-colored sky. Estersa, unborn. The city in its dreaming womb.

The buildings were little more than silhouettes of intention, structures not yet remembered, windowless and breathing with soft, subterranean pulses. There was no sound save the slow drip of condensation from a waxen root overhead. Bellus looked down.

Footprints.

Two sets. Pressed into the wax slag ahead of him, winding down the boulevard like a poem left unfinished. He followed them with his eyes until they reached the far edge of perception.

There, in the distance: two figures.

They walked shoulder to shoulder, silent as dusk. Between them hung a lantern—a molten, opaline orb suspended on a rod of blackened iron. It swung gently, casting flame not outward, but inward, as if illuminating the space between their ribs. They walked in unison. They had done this before.

Bellus took a step forward, and the vision deepened. The air tasted of copper and honey. Another step—and the wax beneath his feet grew warm. Familiar. Inviting. He felt it whispering to him now, through the brand on his palm.

You belong to the fire.

You were shaped from the first thought.

You are a piece. Come home.

He staggered, heart thundering. His knees bent involuntarily. He looked again to the figures—and in the flicker of the lantern, he saw himself. The face of the man. It was his.

“No…” Bellus whispered. “No, I didn’t come here to finish someone else’s story.”

He turned, straining against the unseen tether. The wax gripped his heels like a pleading hand.

“I came here to write my own.”

He smiled, and stepped sideways.

It hurt.

Every tendon rebelled.

The wax screamed beneath his heel. The lantern flickered, and for a moment the world stuttered like a skipped page.

But he did not stop.

He walked off the path.

The vision trembled, the scent of his mother faded like a sigh of relief.

The city cracked, and somewhere beneath the Scrollery, the gods howled with laughter, or rage.

Bellus only bowed his head, and kept walking.