Misfiled.
Callum had no name.
He remembered the sensation of having one—a syllable like bone cracking, a sound people once attached to his presence.
But now, when he reached into his mind for it, there was only static.
And beneath the static, whispers.
> "You were filed wrong."
"You are a misprint."
"You remember what you were never meant to."
---
He stood among rows of bone shelves that stretched into infinity, each one filled with spines—not books, not scrolls, but literal human spines, stacked like entries in a divine, grotesque archive.
Some pulsed faintly.
Some twitched when passed.
Some wept marrow.
Each was labeled with a name… a date… and a status.
> "Host 07: Corrupted."
"Host 11: Reversed."
"Host 12: Inverted. Non-viable."
"Host 14: Misfiled."
His.
---
He wandered.
Not forward.
There was no forward here—only deeper.
He stepped over ossified tiles that clicked with each footfall, as if the bones beneath remembered being walked on. As if they knew every path before he chose it.
And they whispered when he passed:
> "He forgets incorrectly."
"His shape is recursive."
"A host that edits the Archive."
---
Then he saw them.
The Bone Scribes.
Dozens—no, thousands—suspended in the air by long threads of vertebrae and knotted sinew. Their bodies were thin, almost insectile, crafted from many ribcages fused into long, fingerlike appendages. Their eyes were hollow, mouths sewn shut with words.
Each held a quill.
Not a pen.
A phalange—a finger sharpened into a writing point, dipped in black marrow.
They wrote constantly.
On skin.
On glass.
On pages of teeth.
And as they wrote, reality around them twisted—rooms restructured, doors vanished, faces changed.
One looked directly at Callum.
And began writing him.
---
He felt it instantly.
A tug—not on his skin, but on his past.
A memory he'd always believed:
His first encounter with Dr. Greaves in university.
The long conversation about anatomy over black coffee.
It vanished.
Replaced.
Now, he had always known Greaves from the Archive.
No coffee.
No campus.
Only bone.
He screamed—
And the scribes screeched in return, their sewn mouths bursting open, spewing black letters into the air like ash.
He ran.
---
Every corridor was new.
Or old.
Or both.
Reality looped sideways, collapsing into itself like vertebrae grinding in a broken neck.
He passed a hallway of lungs suspended in jars—each one breathing in rhythm.
A corridor of mirrors showing a future where he had never existed.
A room filled with doors made of faces—each door unlocked with a scream.
He reached a chamber of spines carved into musical instruments, each plucking its own vertebrae like harps.
And in the center: a body.
His.
Or something like him.
---
The body was still alive.
But backwards.
Its limbs bent in reverse.
Its jaw hinged from the top.
Its eyes faced inward.
It was bound to a slab of teeth with cords of tendon, and upon its chest was carved:
> "Version 14.3. Corrupted. Archive Exorcised."
It opened its mouth—and instead of words, Callum's memories poured out.
His first cut as a medical student.
The moment he saw his father's funeral.
The taste of copper in the air before the hallucinations began.
All of it, pouring out of the wrong version of him.
---
And then it stopped.
The corpse whispered:
> "They filed you under the wrong name."
> "You were never Callum Mercer."
> "You are the Archive's dream of him."
---
Callum collapsed.
His mind fragmented again.
Not from terror.
From disbelief.
He remembered being a child.
He remembered skin.
He remembered warmth.
But what if those memories weren't his?
What if they were implanted pages, scrawled by a scribe who'd misread someone else's bones?
He stared at his hands.
They didn't look like his anymore.
---
The walls of the chamber cracked.
And the Archivist returned.
Not the one with the mask.
The original.
It no longer had a body.
It was a mass of floating vertebrae, a lattice of memory and logic, pulsing with failed hosts, bound together in a storm of screams.
It hovered above the slab and spoke into his bones:
> "There is no Callum. Only the file named so."
"You are misfiled truth."
"A typo made real."
He begged.
> "Fix me."
The Archivist replied:
> "There is no fixing.
There is only rewriting."
---
Callum was lifted into the air.
His spine detached from his flesh—not physically, but symbolically.
Every memory he held was reevaluated, cataloged, corrected.
His childhood was removed and replaced with blank paper.
His body's origin now read: Prototype: Host 1 echo.
His identity:
> "Non-existent. But persistent."
And that made him dangerous.
---
The scribes circled.
They began writing a new version of him.
Not a person.
A myth.
A creature in the Archive who haunts misfiled hosts.
A warning etched in marrow.
A glitch.
He felt his body warping again—teeth growing along his ribcage, new eyes forming on his chest, hair falling away in sheets.
He was becoming what the Archive needed:
A legend it could blame mistakes on.
A ghost of error.
---
Then came the true horror.
He saw it.
On one of the bone shelves.
A spine marked:
> "Callum Mercer – Original."
It was tiny.
Child-sized.
Labeled: Stillborn. 1996.
He understood.
He had never been alive.
He was a corrupted fragment of grief, pulled from an infant that never lived, grown inside the Archive until it thought he was real.
> He was grief with lungs.
Bone with memory.
Fiction mistaken for fact.
---
He laughed.
A dry, clicking sound.
The scribes stopped writing.
He stood.
Broken.
Transformed.
And spoke the one truth they couldn't erase:
> "You made me.
Now I'm writing you."
---
He stole a quill from a scribe.
Began carving into the walls of the chamber:
> "The Archive was born broken."
"Every host is an echo."
"I am the error you can't forget."
Reality around him shuddered.
Shelves collapsed.
Pages bled.
The Archivist howled.
---
He escaped through a door labeled "Do Not Open."
Inside: a field of blank slates, floating in darkness.
One hovered toward him.
It asked:
> "Name?"
He replied:
> "Callum Mercer."
The slate glowed.
Accepted it.
Filed it.
He smiled.
> "Now I'm real."
---