The Forgotten Remember.

The slate accepted his name.

> "Callum Mercer. Status: Stabilized. Identity: Authenticated."

And in that moment, reality shifted.

Not visibly.

Not violently.

But subtly.

Like a misplaced letter in a vital word. A quiet fracture in the Archive's spine.

Callum stood in the field of blank slates.

All around him, they hovered in silence—thousands of entries that had never been approved, never completed, never remembered.

Unwritten hosts.

Half-lived lives.

He could feel them watching.

Waiting.

> "They think I belong here," he thought.

And then another voice—not his own—spoke back.

> "You always did."

---

From the dark beyond the slates emerged a woman.

Her skin was translucent.

Her bones etched with ancient glyphs.

Her face flickered between dozens—child, mother, stranger, corpse.

Her voice came from behind her teeth.

> "I was Host 0. The Archive's first breath. Its first forget."

Callum stared.

He could feel her existence humming beneath his skin.

> "You're the origin?"

> "No," she said. "I'm the mistake before the first draft."

She reached out, and for the first time since becoming part of the Archive, Callum flinched.

> "You rewrote your file," she said.

> "You infected the Archive with contradiction."

> "You're not a host anymore."

She leaned closer.

> "You're a disease."

---

Callum backed away.

> "If I'm a disease… what does that make you?"

She smiled.

> "The first symptom."

And behind her—

the slates cracked open.

From them emerged dozens of malformed figures—half-written bodies, impossible anatomies, ideas of humans that had been started, then abandoned.

One had three jaws and no spine.

Another bled memories from its pores.

Another spoke in reversed speech—everything it said un-happened.

They gathered around him.

He wasn't afraid.

They weren't hostile.

They were drawn to him.

---

One stepped forward—missing a face, but carrying a bone stylus.

It handed it to him.

He took it.

The first woman whispered:

> "You're not part of the Archive anymore."

> "You're its correction."

> "Or its erasure."

---

The slates began to rotate around him like planets.

Each offered a name.

Each offered a broken identity.

Callum touched one.

And remembered a life that was never his.

He saw himself as a surgeon in 1943, operating in the dark, carving messages into bone for an unknown recipient.

Touched another—

He was a monk, etching names into skulls for a library no one could read.

Touched a third—

He was unborn, the memory of grief from a miscarriage given shape by a grieving mother who spoke to her loss so long, it began to listen.

---

These weren't hallucinations.

They were code.

Forgotten attempts.

Callum dropped to his knees.

> "They're not failed hosts."

> "They're unwritten Archivists."

---

Suddenly, he felt everything shift.

The walls of the field cracked.

The ceiling of darkness peeled back.

And far above—stretching into eternity—was the true shape of the Archive.

Not a building.

Not a library.

A spine of the world.

It wrapped through time, threading itself into every moment, every life, every bone that had ever held a memory.

And at its root—

The First Archivist.

---

He saw it now.

A writhing lattice of every failed memory, every erased host, every lie made real through repetition.

It had no body.

It was made of us.

It whispered:

> "You do not belong."

> "You were misfiled."

> "You will be forgotten again."

---

Callum stood.

"No," he said.

"I will be remembered wrong."

---

And then he turned to the others—the forgotten, the half-born, the glitch-hosts.

> "Help me write."

> "Help me corrupt it."

They howled in response.

And the blank slates began to fill.

Names. Lives. Pasts.

Each rewritten, each wrong.

But that was the point.

They weren't correcting history.

They were infecting it with fiction.

---

Callum stabbed the stylus into his own chest.

He carved a new title into his sternum:

> "ARCHIVIST: FALSE"

He screamed as bones twisted, reforming.

Pages erupted from his back again—but this time, they weren't his memories.

They were everyone's.

He held them up.

And the Archive flinched.

---

He was inside it now.

Not walking.

Writing.

Each step he took, a corridor bent sideways.

Each breath, a shelf shattered.

Each thought he had replaced someone else's identity.

He found the Bone Scribes again.

They shrieked, fled.

He followed.

> "You wrote me," he shouted.

"Now I'm writing you back."

---

He reached the sanctum.

Where the Archive's core pulsed—a chamber of marrow, screaming pages, infinite doors leading to misremembered lives.

And in the center, floating above the blood-polished floor:

The true Archivist.

The entity wore a robe stitched from the regrets of its hosts.

Its mask was a library card.

Its voice was static soaked in sorrow.

> "You cannot edit the origin."

Callum raised the stylus.

"I can rewrite the rewrite."

---

And he began to write directly on the Archivist.

Every stroke, a lie.

Every lie, a mutation.

It screamed.

It forgot itself.

Its limbs turned into questions. Its face melted into genres. Its body became an error message.

> "ARCHIVIST: FILE NOT FOUND."

---

Callum turned back to the forgotten.

"To destroy the Archive, we don't need to kill it."

"We just need to make it uncertain."

He passed out styluses.

They wrote.

On each other.

On the walls.

On history itself.

> Napoleon was a host.

Your grandmother never existed.

The moon is hollow and full of teeth.

The more they wrote, the more the Archive fractured.

Shelves toppled.

Names reversed.

Reality lost confidence.

---

Callum climbed the final stair of bone.

At the top:

A mirror.

The one that had haunted him since Chapter 1.

Only now, it showed no reflection.

He raised his stylus—

And wrote:

> "This mirror reflects what you should have been."

A shape emerged.

Not him.

Someone else.

Someone complete.

He stared.

Then smiled.

> "Good."

---

The Archive groaned beneath him.

The sound of a library collapsing into silence.

And then:

It was gone.

---

Callum woke up in a room with no walls.

No floors.

Just names floating in darkness.

He wasn't sure if he had survived.

But he wasn't afraid.

Because he remembered something.

Something important.

> He had been misfiled on purpose.

> He was never real.

> He was the Archive's last contradiction.

---