Velora had heard lies before.
She was raised on them, bathed in them, taught how to bend them like metal over fire.
But this one wasn't whispered. It wasn't coded.
It was screamed.
And it carried a name she wasn't supposed to hear ever again.
The woman's voice echoed through the Council corridor.
"Rael is not dead!"
Guards dragged her through the threshold, but she kept shouting, thrashing like the sound itself could tear open the walls.
"I saw him! I swear to the gods—you think he's gone, but he's waiting—waiting behind the glass—!"
Velora didn't blink. She waited in silence until the last word faded like smoke on stone.
Then she followed them.
They held the woman in an isolation ward three floors below the Archive's heart.
The walls down here were designed to absorb panic. No echoes. No vibration. Just silence.
But inside her cell, the woman still muttered.
Not prayers.
Not pleas.
"He said she'd come. The one who forgot."
Alastor handed Velora a datapad with the woman's file.
Name: Mara Elarin
Occupation: Civilian medical archivist, unranked
Status: Stable. Unremarkable memory profile. No glyph corruption.
Incident location: Corridor 17-B, condemned Archive wing.
Velora raised an eyebrow.
"There are no working corridors in 17-B."
"There shouldn't be," Alastor said. "But she claims the wall was gone when she passed by. She walked into a room that shouldn't exist."
"And?"
"There was a mirror. And in it—him. Standing still. Looking directly at her."
"Rael."
Alastor nodded once.
"She named him without prompting."
Velora entered Mara's chamber alone.
The woman looked like she hadn't slept in days. Her hair was frayed, eyes rimmed with exhaustion. But she wasn't mad. Her breathing was even. Her hands didn't tremble.
Only her voice wavered when she whispered:
"You were there when he fell."
Velora sat.
"I was."
Mara tilted her head.
"Then why is he still speaking?"
Velora didn't respond.
Instead, she studied the woman's hands. On her right wrist, something had been drawn in fading ink.
A coin. Tilted. Etched with a star in the center.
"You dreamt of him before," Velora said. "Didn't you?"
"Yes. But I didn't remember until I saw the mirror."
"What did he say to you?"
"He said I wasn't the one he was waiting for."
Her voice broke slightly. "He said she'd come when the truth started bleeding through the cracks."
Velora's hand twitched.
"What truth?"
"That he didn't die. He was rewritten. Like the rest of us."
She left the cell without a word.
Back in the main Archive, Velora stood before the mirror that had once belonged to Tessa.
The candle beside it flickered sideways—again. Always sideways.
She stared into the glass.
For a moment, nothing.
Then—something behind her reflection.
Not a figure.
A shadow. Just out of frame.
Not moving. Not breathing.
Watching.
She turned, fast. No one there.
But on the mirror's surface, words began to etch themselves into the condensation:
"You saw me fall.
But you never saw where I landed."
She staggered back.
That sentence—she had heard it before.
Not aloud.
Not from any file.
But from a buried memory during the Rebirth.
When Rael stood before the Tower, arms bloodied, voice calm.
He had looked at her—not in hatred, but in grief.
"You'll bury me," he had said, "but you won't know where."
She opened her personal archive. Searched for any recording from that day.
Nothing.
Scrubbed.
But she remembered.
Rael's body had never been found.
The blast from the collapse had incinerated everything.
Or so they said.
Velora accessed the deep vaults. Levels below even Alastor's clearance.
There were rooms in the Archive that remembered things the Council didn't.
The chamber she entered was hexagonal. Cold. Empty. One chair, one terminal, one artifact:
A shard of glass suspended in magnetic field.
She approached it.
The inscription beneath read:
"Origin Echo: Recovered from Tower Collapse Site B."
It was a memory shard.
Untouched. Untapped. Dangerous.
She placed her hand over the crystal and whispered:
"Rael."
The crystal pulsed once.
Then played.
A voice.
Not a recording.
A presence.
"Velora," it said. "If you're hearing this, it means I failed to disappear."
Her breath caught.
"You didn't want this. I know that. Neither did I."
Static. Then—
"I couldn't burn the Archive. So I planted something inside it instead. A flaw. A seed."
"You called me a god. But I was only trying to stay human in a world that rewrote truth."
A long pause.
Then:
"I didn't survive. But I didn't die either."
"I became the question no one wanted to ask."
The shard dimmed. Memory over.
Velora stood in the dark for a long time.
Then the door sealed behind her.
And three words lit up on the wall, carved into living stone:
RAEL REMAINS STILL.