Lysa didn't answer the woman.
She passed her like memory through old blood, quiet, certain. Into the dark, where no light followed.
The archive wasn't built. It ossified.
It lay deep beneath Eelgrave, buried under layers of ruin, beyond the city's old sewage lines and the abandoned catacombs. Too far for even the vermin-guilds to map. There were no proper walls. Only layers. Time, pain, grief—each one a crust hardened by years. The deeper they went, the less the place resembled a room. It became a hollowing.
Bone was everywhere.
Not in heaps. Not discarded. Every piece was arranged. Vertebrae stacked like bricks. Femurs shaped into rails. Curved spines served as sconces, holding weak yellow glowerworms. The light from their swollen bellies was dim and sickly, making each corner seem slick.
Shelves leaned under the weight of jars. None held fluid. Only breath—trapped mid-sob, fogging the inside. On lower shelves, tongues floated in resin. Some were tagged in etched bronze: Silenced, Repent, Liar.
The air was thick. Not with dust. With silence. The ceiling sagged with rusted pipe and stretched wire, knotted with old tendon and mold-filament. Some cords pulsed faintly. Others twitched when passed beneath. The smell changed in layers—first sweet, then sour, then like blood that had spoiled.
Ivar's boots sank into the floor.
Not from water.
From weight.
The ground gave way, not in protest but in memory.
"Stay close," Lysa said.
Her voice didn't echo. It belonged here. Not a warning—an agreement. A tone used when speaking to something that listens even after death.
They passed a narrow trough lined with teeth—molars, canines, incisors, laid in order. Some scorched, some still holding pieces of jaw. One had a thread of hair tied around its root.
Lysa didn't look. Ivar did.
He turned his face from the next shelf. Jars of knuckles, each held in a different gesture: peace, prayer, silence, accusation.
The corridor narrowed.
Ahead stood a door sealed in thick beetle resin. It had hardened to a dull crust. Lysa pressed her palm to the seam and whispered something low.
The resin didn't break. It shifted—like something remembering its shape—and opened.
The smell changed again.
The air thickened. Each breath felt like swallowing something heavy. They passed through a curtain of feathers—stitched together with black wire. The feathers were burned, curled, or stained. Their edges dragged against Ivar's face. The heat they left wasn't real, but it lingered.
He flinched. Lysa didn't. She moved as though the feathers remembered her.
The room swallowed them.
It tried to be circular. But its edges sagged. The structure had slumped under time. Light came from everywhere, but gave no comfort. Pale yellow. Harsh.
At the center stood a plinth.
It hadn't been carved. It had grown into place. Its surface rose and fell with a slow pulse. Not alive. Just waiting.
Lysa stepped closer. Her feet made no sound.
The room took even that.
She pulled the cloth away.
Beneath it: a hand.
Not one of her usual pieces—no exposed wire, no rushed joints. This was older. Exact. The bones darkened near black, as if whatever once lived there had sunk too deep to leave. Strands of hair—black, auburn, grey—were twisted around each finger, tightly wound.
At the palm's center was a cage.
Small. No wider than a coin. It didn't look built. It looked grown. Bone forced to remember shape. Inside: nothing.
Or something too small to notice.
Ivar let out a breath that had been sitting in him too long.
"What is it?"
Lysa didn't look up. "The first thing I made that moved. It twitched, once—after I built it. Just enough to know it was mine."
He paused. "Can I touch it?"
She nodded.
His fingers brushed the surface.
Warm.
Not alive. But not dead either. Like warmth left in a bed after someone's gone.
His fingers trembled. Not the artifact's doing. His.
It wasn't fear. It was recognition.
"It's beautiful," he said. The words didn't feel right.
"And rotting," she said.
Her voice cracked slightly, but she caught it before it broke.
"My mother died choking on her own blood."
Ivar didn't speak.
"No one came. The rat-doctors said her illness had a name no one wanted spoken."
She reached toward the plinth but didn't touch it.
"I held her hand. Felt her last movement in my palm. That twitch—it was all she had left. I kept it."
Ivar's mouth opened. Nothing came.
"You built from that?"
She didn't answer. Just stared at the cage. That was answer enough.
"I build to feel," she said. "You don't. You watch. That's what makes you dangerous."
He didn't argue. Didn't look away.
He stared at the cage. No hinge. No key. Just absence, shaped like a prison.
Something in him shifted.
Not insight. Not calm.
Just a deeper awareness of where he'd cracked.
"I think…" he started.
But it slipped away.
Not because it was wrong.
Because it had never been words.
Lysa turned. The light caught her face.
"Things made here don't last," she said. "They break. Or they start asking questions."
"And me?"
She hesitated.
A tremor passed through her—not fear. More like the breath before grief.
"Maybe," she said, "you're the first thing I didn't build that still makes me feel."
The silence that followed didn't settle over them.
It settled inside.
Ivar looked down. The hand hadn't moved.
But something in the room had.
The walls no longer listened.
They waited.
Then came a sound—from above.
A horn.
Low. Hollow. Old.
Not warning.
Calling.
It rolled through the archive like pressure before a storm. The jars shook. One feather dropped from the curtain.
No wind had touched it.
Ivar stood straighter.
Lysa didn't move.
Something had crossed a line. Something old. Something meant to stay forgotten.
Behind them, the hand twitched.
Once.
The cage clicked open.
And whatever had waited inside looked back.
Not with eyes.
But in the spine.
In the ribs.
In the breath Ivar hadn't yet taken.
And it remembered him.