Chapter 2: The Archivist’s Counting Hands
Rule Two: Never trust a reflection that moves too slowly.
---
1. Twenty-Eight
Liora Vale's fingers hovered an inch above the cracked leather of a bookshelf, each digit trembling slightly, though she held them still with the rigid discipline of a trained archivist—or an addict performing a sacred ritual.
She didn’t touch. Not yet. Not until the counting was complete.
Twenty-eight steps from the velvet pedestal where Jane Eyre had eaten her mother's embrace. Twenty-eight steps to the next aisle. Twenty-eight seconds of silence before she dared to breathe fully again.
The number pulsed behind her eyes like a metronome stitched to her ribs.
It had been Marinne’s age when she died. It had been the day the gate had swung open and swallowed her sister. It had been the number written in sea-green chalk outside the hospital morgue.
Twenty-eight. Always twenty-eight.
The shelves around her seemed to pulse in time with her heartbeat—breathing, flexing, slow like the flanks of a sleeping leviathan.
She knelt carefully and unfolded her leather catalog pouch on the damp floor. Inside: a brass nib pen, a stitched blue-thread notebook, a spool of antiseptic-dusted cotton gloves. Each glove bore a faded graphite number along the hem.
She chose #7—her mother’s favorite.
As she tugged it onto her right hand, the fabric snagged on her pinky. She grimaced. The tips of her fingers were still numb from touching the velvet. A consequence. A price.
She whispered aloud: "This is just cataloging."
The library stirred in disagreement.
Somewhere, three aisles over, a book slammed itself shut with the force of a snapped spine.
---
Spiral-Bound and Drowning
She rose and stepped toward a crooked aisle labeled in peeling paint:
SPIRAL-BOUND / DROWNING.
A metaphor, or a warning. Maybe both.
Shelves tilted under the weight of spiral notebooks, their wire coils oxidized and crusted with barnacle mouths. Some had titles scrawled in crayon, others were blank, waiting.
Liora let her gloved fingers trail lightly across the spines.
One notebook snagged her attention—swollen, bloated with water damage. The cover slashed with frantic red ink:
THE GATE WASN’T LOCKED."
Her breath caught.
That phrase. Marinne’s last scrawl, found years ago in the attic. Drenched, warped, haunting.
Her hand shook.
She reached for the book.
The moment her fingertips brushed the corroded spiral, the metal twitched—not mechanically, but with intent.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
A thin strip of paper lashed out like a serpent, slicing the edge of her index finger. A bead of blood bloomed.
She gasped—then staggered.
Because along with the sting came a hollowing—
The endless loop she had lived with for twenty years— "I should have checked the gate." "It was my fault." "If only I'd moved faster."
Gone. Ripped out like a thread pulled from an unraveling sweater.
The notebook curled in satisfaction.
It smelled faintly of battery acid and sugared tea.
Without thinking, Liora pressed her bleeding fingertip against the page.
The blood vanished instantly. Absorbed.
A new sentence appeared in writing not her own:
That thought was never yours to keep."
She stumbled backward, colliding with a stack of books stitched from mapcloth and hair-thread bindings.
The library wasn't a metaphor. It was alive. And it was eating her.
---
Indigo Breath
She fled two aisles deeper, falling to her knees on warped stone.
Twenty-eight breaths.
She forced herself to count them, her voice barely a rasp.
One. Two. Three.
The shelves seemed to breathe with her. The floor pulsed.
At her twenty-eighth breath, the nearest shelf gave a wet, splintered crack.
A line of indigo ink bled from the uppermost book, dripping down the spine in slow rivulets.
Where the ink touched the marble, it spiraled outward, forming a snail-shell coil—a tide-pull, pulling her down.
The library was marking her. Cataloging her fear.
Her gloves were soaked with sweat. She peeled them off, chose another—#13.
Unlucky. Appropriate.
---
4. The Codex That Watches
Deeper inside the atrium, the air changed.
It smelled of salt and rotting parchment. The texture thickened, pressing against her skin like wet cloth.
Ahead, the shelves widened into a gallery. At its center stood a pedestal crafted from fused typewriter keys, the letters jammed together into unreadable prayers.
Upon it, the book pulsed—a slow, wrong heartbeat.
The Self-Rewriting Codex.
The floor between her and the pedestal wasn’t stone. It was layers of compressed, rotting newspapers. Their headlines screamed in frozen agony:
"Local Nun Drowns Saving Sailors (1901).""Gate Left Unlatched: Sister Blamed (1987)."
Each step peeled the headlines under her boots, releasing faint hisses of trapped air—whispers half-remembered.
The Codex’s cover was black, but shimmered faintly, words flickering just beneath the surface.
As she approached, the book stabilized.
The title surfaced:
THE SELF-REWRITING CODEX
And beneath it, a subtitle blinked:
MANNER OF DEATH: ACCIDENT // SUICIDE // MURDER
Her heart stuttered.
The Codex peeled open, eager, as if it had been waiting for her all along.
Inside, three versions of the same night unfurled across the page:
Comic Sans: "Marinne Vale: Accidental Drowning."
Old English: "Murder by Reflection."
Sea-glass Ink (handwritten marginalia): "He pushed me. The Librarian lies."
Her gloved fingertips brushed the Comic Sans entry.
The page peeled back, like flesh tearing from muscle.
Beneath the printed lies, another layer emerged—handwritten lines in sea-glass ink, faint and quivering:
"She knew. She opened the gate herself."
Liora shivered. The paper itself wept indigo droplets where she touched it. The droplets twisted into tiny lighthouses before evaporating.
---
The First Reflection
The cracked mirrors surrounding the pedestal twisted her reflection. Her mouth moved a second too slow. Her gloves flickered in and out of existence. Her eyes filled with floating text: 28 28 28.
Behind her, a soft whisper slithered from the stacked books:
"Was it a rat I saw?"
A palindrome. Backward and forward the same. Meaningless—or a key.
Liora’s skin crawled.
The air around the Codex tightened, thick with watching. Not human watching.
Something ink-born and ancient.
Her lungs seized.
The pedestal bled a thin trickle of saltwater where her shadow fell.
She fled.
---
The Aftermath
She collapsed into a broken alcove, knees hitting the marble hard.
Around her, the books whispered, sighed, re-shelved themselves in endless, unseen tides.
Twenty-eight.
She whispered it again. A prayer. A wound.
Twenty-eight steps. Twenty-eight years. Twenty-eight ways this place could undo her.
But also—twenty-eight days since she had stopped pretending she didn’t want to know.
Tidehaven had answers.
And it wanted her to ask.
---
