Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

[ A few hours earlier ]

The spiral always stole Saffi's breath again.

Alteea walked ahead of her, hip bumping a hanging cable out of habit. Her lab coat fluttered behind like a flag.

"Alright" Alteea said "This is where I abandon you."

Saffi blinked. "What"

"I have to open the petals" Alteea explained"It's first sunrise. The city will complain if its windows don't bloom on time"

She made a little opening motion with her hands, like a flower.

"You're leaving me alone!?"

"In the oldest and safest secret library in Neoshima?" Alteea smiled. "Yes. You're not going to set anything on fire. That I know of"

Saffi glanced at the walls again. If she had to set something on fire here, she would probably cry first.

"You can keep looking around" Alteea added. "Just ignore the giant Eon tome you stared at. It's mostly useless. Old theories, wrong theories, and someone's ego"

"You said that yesterday" Saffi raised a brow.

"I meant it yesterday" Alteea said. "Back in a bit. Don't fall down the stairs. The Council would be very upset if we had to list "death by archive" on a report"

She tapped two fingers twice against the rail in a nervous little habit, then headed up. Her steps got quieter. The soft hiss of a hidden door above swallowed her.

Silence breathed in around Saffi.

For a moment she just stood there, one hand on the rail, heart thudding a little too loud. Then she let out a slow breath.

"Okay" she told herself "You're trusted. Try to act like it."

She didn't go near the huge Eon tome. It sat on its pedestal one level down, massive and serious. Alteea might call it outdated, but nobody made a book that big without stuffing something inside it.

"Later, maybe" she told herself

Instead, she stepped down one level, then another.

Here the shelves changed. Less obvious theory. More… Private work.

She reached for a thin binder that had no spine label, only a small sticker that said: PROTOTYPE JOINTS - DISCARDED.

Inside: precise diagrams of something that looked like a mantis if a mantis had been built by a bored engineer. Hinges, tension lines, annotations about stress points. Notes in three different handwritings argued with each other in the margins.

She traced one drawing with her eyes.

"This looks like Raizen's grapples" she muttered.

She put it back carefully.

The next shelf held a schematic of the Underworks. Not the Underworks she knew - no street names, no stall markings. Just lines. Pipes, tunnels and junctions, drawn in fine ink and colored threads.

At first it looked like chaos. Then her mind caught the pattern. The curves had space. The intersections repeated at strange, neat intervals.

Saffi swallowed and looked closer. Little arrows marked flow direction. Here and there, small circles were crossed out with red ink, as if someone had closed them on purpose.

"This isn't just infrastructure" she whispered. "This is… balanced."

She put that back slower than the last.

She moved along the curve of the wall, fingers touching the edge of book spines, labels brushing her knuckles. Old trial reports. Cultural surveys. Behavioral analysis of Nyx swarms. Early versions of luminite refinement protocols, where the failures were circled three times and underlined.

Every tenth page or so, something had been removed. Neatly. Whole paragraphs sliced out. Some spreads were just empty, white holes where text should be.

Someone had deleted history with a very sharp hand.

Saffi's stomach tightened.

At the end of one row, tucked behind a thick manual on pressure valves, her fingers brushed something different. Thin. Smooth. No label on the spine.

She eased it free.

A simple folder. No title on the cover. Only a faded stamp in the top corner, barely visible.

⍊𝙹∷ FIELD REPORT 00.

She opened it.

The first page almost made her cough. It was mostly blank. No neat blocks of text. No long conclusions. Just a grid. A chart.

Horizontal axis: time.

Vertical: some kind of reading, it was censored by black ink or a very persistent marker. Maybe some kind of current or energy.

The curve started where she expected - above zero. Like any output chart. It rose, peaked, dipped.

Then, halfway across the page, it stabbed the zero line. Sharp, almost vertical spike.

Kept going.

Saffi's brows pinched. She leaned closer.

The scale under the line had no label. No units. Just numbers, growing.

"That's not…" she whispered.

She flipped to the next sheet.

Sparse notes. Tight, careful handwriting. Not Alteea's. Not Kori's. She'd watched them both sign enough forms to recognize their shapes.

She found a header in the corner.

Prof. A. Eiden.

Her mouth went dry.

Saffi read faster.

"Unexpected collapse" one line said.

"Total loss of traceable signatures in radius."

That was it. No details about distance. No pretty diagram. No list of conditions. The kind of stripped down, half erased thing you only leave behind when someone orders you to burn the rest.

At the bottom, stamped in small, hard letters:

RESULT: CLASSIFIED. FURTHER STUDIES - PROHIBITED.

She swallowed again and flipped the folder shut for a second, like that might make her heart slow down.

Her brain didn't listen.

⍊𝙹∷ Field report 00.

Lead: Eiden.

She turned the folder over, checking the back, the inside cover. A tiny set of numbers was printed near the corner.

Date.

She didn't have to search her memory for long. She had read enough of the Lighthouse's "do not touch" files while Alteea was in the bathroom to know that combination. Year. Month. Day.

The north mountain expedition.

The one where fifteen went up and fourteen never returned.

The one with no Nyx readings on the report. The one that had been stamped CLASSIFIED and shoved into a box with all the enthusiasm of someone hiding a corpse under a rug.

"Of course" she breathed.

Her fingers tightened on the folder's edge until the paper crinkled.

Eiden had said it was a malfunction. A one time accident. A spike he could not explain.

This was not a malfunction report. It was an experiment.

And whatever they were testing had not only killed everyone around it. It had done something worse.

"Total loss of traceable signatures" she repeated under her breath. "Not bodies. Signatures."

Gone in a way the instruments could not follow.

The line on the graph dropping under zero flashed in her mind again.

It felt cold.

The air in the archive stayed the same controlled temperature, but goosebumps prickled up her arms anyway.

She knew she didn't understand half of what she was looking at. The math scribbled in the margin might as well have been another language. The terms bent her mind after the third read.

But she understood enough.

Eiden had led something on that mountain. Something nobody should ever touch again.

And Raizen had walked on that same mountain, years later.

Her throat tightened.

Saffi looked up the spiral. The glass steps gleamed faintly, dust particles slowly moving in the air.

"If this is real" she whispered "and not just some abandoned theory…"

She looked back down at the folder.

Raizen always wanted to understand the things that could kill. That was the only reason she even considered what she considered next.

This is dangerous.

But he could help.

Both felt true at the same time.

Her heart made the choice for her.

She slid the thin folder under her shirt, pressing it flat against her chest and stomach. The cover was colder than she expected. It met skin under the band of her bra and she sucked in a breath.

"Stars, that's cold" she hissed quietly.

The contact sent a weird little shiver up her spine. She tugged the shirt back down quickly, smoothing the fabric. From the outside, nothing showed. Inside, the sharp corner dug slightly into her ribs every time she breathed.

Good. Hidden.

She took one last look at the shelf. The gap where the folder had been was narrow, easy to miss. Maybe nobody would notice. Maybe Alteea would. That was a problem for later. Maybe she'd understand. Or scold the living hell out of her.

Right now, another problem had a face.

Raizen.

He had stood in front of a mountain and made it move. He had been closer to whatever went wrong up there than anyone else alive.

If anyone could look at this and see more than she did, it was him.

"If this gets me punished, or if Alteea starts shouting at me, I blame you" she told an imaginary version of him. Then her cheeks became red, in profound embarrassment and dissappointment in herself.

Her fingers found the rail. The archive felt different now. Less like a quiet marvel, more like a throat that could close at any moment.

Saffi started up the stairs, every step way too careful. The folder stayed cold against her, like a secret that did not want to be warmed.

The hidden door above sighed open to let her out.

By the time it closed again, she had already decided - if this was a mistake, she would make it anyway.