The Archives of Ebonroot

Every town has a place people avoid without understanding why. In Ebonroot, it was the Public Records Hall. It stood hunched at the edge of the northern forest, its stone facade stained with moss, its windows dark as closed eyes. No one remembered who had built it. No one questioned its presence. It was simply there, like a bone buried too deep to dislodge.

Mallory Finn was the archivist. She had been for fifteen years. Each morning at precisely 8:03, she emerged from her narrow brick cottage on Crofton Lane, her shoes always spotless, her skirt ironed to a razor-crease. A thin scarf circled her neck like a noose of routine. Her hair, silver at the temples, was pulled back so tightly it sharpened the angles of her face. Her gaze often lingered too long, and when she smiled, it was as if she were only trying it on.

People called her reliable, efficient, harmless. They were wrong about the last part.

Sometimes, she thought she heard voices behind the walls. Once, the ink in her pen turned to water mid-signature. But she dismissed such moments, filed them under fatigue or imagination.

Mallory had never ventured beyond the third floor.

There were five floors on record, and rumors of a sixth, but the elevator only acknowledged three. The staircase curved upward into shadow, sealed with an iron grate that had resisted her attempts to pry it open. A bronze plaque near the base read: Authorized Access Only. The lettering had long since dulled. She spent her days among boxes of deeds, birth records, and lost wills. Dust coated the shelves like a second skin. Time didn’t pass normally in the Hall. The clocks ticked, but never in unison. Sometimes Mallory felt the building was watching her.

Then, one Tuesday morning in April, she found the file labeled with her own name. It was tucked between land records from 1892 and tax documents from a nonexistent township. She recognized her handwriting on the tab: Finn, Mallory. File 03-887.

She hesitated. She had never filed anything under her own name. She had never seen this folder.

She opened it.

Inside were photographs. Her, but not quite. The eyes were hers, but the expression was older, deeper. There were letters written in her script, but in a language she could not translate. Diagrams of plants she’d never seen. Maps of places that didn’t exist.

And a certificate.

Name: Mallory FinnBorn: 1987Died: 2026

She stared at the date. It was one year from today. She took the folder home that night, slipping it under her coat. For the first time in fifteen years, she left the Hall late. The shadows felt longer, the air heavier. At home, she made tea and read every page. She almost burned the folder. She sat with a lit match over the sink, her hand trembling. But something held her back. A memory she couldn't place. A voice she had once loved.

The dreams began that night.

She was underwater, floating through tunnels of stone and root. Voices called her name in tones that felt like wind through glass. She saw herself not as a woman, but as a thread, weaving through time, unraveling and re-forming. The next morning, the elevator greeted her with a soft chime she had never heard. Its buttons now included 4 and 5.

She hesitated. Then pressed 4.

The doors opened into a room lined with mirrors. None showed her reflection. Instead, each panel shimmered with scenes she didn’t recognize. A desert of red glass. A city suspended in webs of silver. A library built into the skeleton of a whale. She turned, but the elevator was gone.

The mirrors whispered.

They told her who she had been.

Once, she was not Mallory. She was Malarien, Keeper of the Forgotten. A weaver of lost truths. She had walked between the gaps of the world, cataloging what time wished to erase. Then she had chosen to forget. The reasons were unclear, even to the mirrors. A pact made. A grief endured. A sacrifice remembered only by the roots of the world.

Now, the forgetting was unraveling.

Mallory’s days changed. She still arrived at 8:03, but the scarf was gone. Her clothes clung less rigidly to shape and season. In low light, her eyes reflected like wet ink. Her footsteps no longer echoed like shoes, but like pages turning. When she entered, papers fluttered in a hush of recognition. The dust drew back as though remembering her touch. She returned to the fourth floor each night. She learned the language of the letters. It was the tongue of memory itself.

Then came the key.

It was on her desk one morning. Small. Black. Heavy as a secret. Attached was a card.

You are ready.

She knew where it belonged. The iron grate.

That night, she climbed the stairs. The key fit perfectly. The lock clicked like a sigh. The gate swung open. The fifth floor was not a floor. It was a forest, stretching endlessly beneath a twilight sky. Trees grew from shelves. Books hung from branches. Beneath her feet, the floor breathed.

She walked.

Each step awakened something in her. The veins beneath her skin darkened like calligraphy. Her breath came slower, carrying the scent of ink and moss. Her silhouette wavered, as if she were being remembered into place. At the center of the forest stood a figure made of paper and bark.

Mallory remembered the figure's name: Caltheran. Her counterpart. The Guardian of the Buried. It had waited centuries.

"Why did I leave?" she asked.

"Because you loved someone who could not live among truths," it answered. "You chose to forget. But forgetting unravels in time."

Mallory closed her eyes. A face surfaced. A man with green eyes and laughter like summer rain. A name just out of reach. A life she had buried under layers of ink and habit.

"I’m not who I was," she said.

Caltheran approached. "You are becoming."

She stayed in the forest for hours or years. Time bent easily there. When she returned to the third floor, morning sunlight filtered through the stained windows. The building exhaled.

She began to change the archives.

Records shifted. Some disappeared. Some reappeared. People in Ebonroot began to forget things they had clung to. Lost pets returned. Names long vanished were spoken by children who couldn’t explain how they knew them. The mayor dreamt of cities made of coral. A baker baked bread that made people cry without knowing why. Mallory’s appearance shimmered like a memory still forming. Her hair floated faintly even without wind. Her fingertips left faint marks of silver on paper. She spoke to the building and it responded in rustlings and door-hinged sighs.

She did not age.

The final floor came months later.

The elevator simply descended. No button pressed. No noise.

Below the building was the root.

The place where memory began. Where forgotten stories curled like ferns. Where the dead did not rest, but waited. She walked among them. Each step wrote a new record. The past folded into the future. She was no longer Mallory Finn.

She was the Archive.

The townspeople still avoid the Records Hall. But sometimes, a curious child enters and finds a toy they lost long ago. A man swears he saw his mother reading in the window, though she died last winter. A letter arrives in a mailbox with no stamp, no sender, and only one word inside.

Remember.

And deep beneath the world, the Archive stirs.

Always listening.

Always becoming.

And if you listen closely, when the wind moves just right through Ebonroot, you might hear a name. One you never knew, but somehow remember.