“Look what we have here. A cleaner.” Stellan’s voice, a low rasp, scraped against the cavern's damp stone. The torchlight glinted off the filed points of his teeth, a predatory gleam. Miro’s hand tightened on the scraper, the Seed tucked deep in his coat pocket. He dropped his gaze to the silt, adopting a stooped posture that rubbed against every tailored instinct in his bones. Stellan sought weakness. Defiance meant a throat opened on the stones; fear invited a slow dismemberment. “Just… doing my work, sir,” Miro mumbled, his voice deliberately flat, devoid of emotion. He continued to scrape at a dried patch of Gore, feigning intense focus on the task. His peripheral vision tracked Stellan’s patrol, noticing how their gazes drifted, restless, always seeking a more satisfying target. They were sharks in shallow water. Stellan stepped closer, his boots squelching in the muck. Miro smelled the metallic tang of fresh blood, a faint, acrid scent that clung to the Carver like a second skin. “Your work, little rat? Is that what this is? Scraping other men’s leavings?” A heavy boot nudged Miro’s arm, deliberate and heavy. “The Overseer has a sense of humor, assigning such a critical skill to a… tailor.” He spat the noun into the mud. Miro bit back a retort. His tailor's pride screamed, but survival was a colder, more insistent master. He simply grunted, keeping his head down, working faster. He knew the patrol route, the brief window they spent in this section before moving deeper into the Solum, hunting true game. Stellan craved a spectacle, a breaking. Miro offered only dull, uninteresting subservience. After a moment that stretched into an eternity, Stellan scoffed. “Pathetic. Waste of good air.” He turned, the subtle sheen on his forearms catching the torchlight. “Come on, fools. There are actual threats to carve, not just vermin to squish.” The four hulking figures followed Stellan, their heavy footsteps echoing away into the cavern's deeper recesses. Miro waited, scraper poised, until the last flicker of torchlight vanished. Then, he straightened, a tremor running through his body, not of fear, but of suppressed rage. He pressed his knuckles into the kernel hidden in his pocket. *Vermin, am I? We shall see who squishes whom.* He moved toward the Solum’s periphery, targeting the transit column shimmering between fractured stalagmites. He skirted a sluggish Grime-Slinker, its chitinous shell scraping the shale, and tuned out the distant shrieks of dying novices. Solum 1 was a slaughterhouse, but he had extracted what he needed. Miro stepped into the transit column. Spatial pressure squeezed his ribs, then released him onto smooth obsidian under a dome of pale stellar fire. Solum 2: the Nexus-Vault. Here stood the Grand Repository, a sector spared from immediate fuel conversion by the tower's overseers. The repository was a vast circular hall lined with towering shelves of vellum, iron-clasped scrolls, and crystalline slates humming with violet phosphorus. The air smelled of dry pulp and sharp ozone. In the center, beneath an astrolabe etched into the ceiling, sat an old man in a steam-hissing brass wheelchair: Old Man Borislav. Borislav did not look up. Gnarled, liver-spotted fingers manipulated a pale green light-projection above his cluttered worktable, sliding archaic glyphs across the air with fluid precision. Simple homespun cloth draped his narrow shoulders, offset by a heavy silver medallion resting against his chest. “They call this a sanctuary,” Borislav said without pausing his hands. “A neutral zone. A lie, naturally. Nothing here is neutral. Not even parchment.” He tilted his chin, pale slate irises locking onto Miro. “What brings a cleaner to the vault of the forgotten?” “I found something,” Miro said. He pulled the glowing kernel from his coat. Uncovered, it cast a cool, pristine radiance across his calloused, soot-caked fingers. Borislav froze. He leaned over the table, joints popping under his robes. “By the forgotten stars,” he breathed, staring at the core. “A prime spark. An untainted grain.” He looked up, pupils dilated. “Where did you harvest this?” “It condensed after I applied [Perfect Housekeeping] to a patch of blight left by a Rust-Lich on Solum 1,” Miro said. “The interface called it purified.” Borislav gestured with open palms. Miro laid the grain down beside brass calipers and cracked lenses. The elder did not touch the glow, hovering his palms inches above it. “Purified. Yes. The System sees only the absence of rot; it cannot grasp what meticulous scourging uncovers.” He peered at Miro over bent spectacles. “These were thought wiped from the floors. Relics of an unharvested world, free of the parasite's taint.” “Parasitism?” Miro pressed. “The Adjudicator is feeding?” “It feeds. It re-fashions. The tower is an abattoir dressed as a trial. My task is safeguarding what lore remains unburned, finding items capable of resisting the siphon. Remnants scrubbed of its mark—like this.” He pointed to the luminous grain. “I have searched for decades, but my legs stay in this chair, and my reach ends at the threshold.” The elder studied Miro’s posture. “A tailor given a broom. The machine’s irony is clumsy. What the combatants call trash-removal is an edge against the grand design. You do not overpower the rot; you unpick its threads.” A pattern formed in Miro's mind, clear as chalk on wool. A janitor's brush could scrape away the design itself. “What do you propose?” “A contract,” Borislav said. “Bring me what you scour from the depths. In return, I unlock the sealed scrolls and forgotten craft forms. And,” he lowered his tone to a dry rattle, “I can direct you to an unmonitored blind spot on an upper Solum where you can nurture these seeds beyond the machine's gaze. Somewhere Stellan's butchers cannot smell you.” A workspace, forbidden techniques, and leverage. Miro gave a sharp nod. “Agreed.” Borislav reached to a nearby shelf, pulling down a calfskin tome that hummed with a sick, off-key vibration. He tugged free a loose sheet inscribed with runes that flared an oily amber. “Your proof of concept,” Borislav said, offering the sheet across the desk. “A leaf from the ‘Chronicle of Sundered Souls,’ thoroughly infected by the tower's code. Strip the blight. See what remains beneath.” Miro took the parchment. The contact bit his fingertips like liquid nitrogen. The amber glow imploded, snapping the circular hall out of existence. He stood in a vaulted colosseum drenched in bruised violet light. At the dais, seated upon petrified lightning, was Anya. Her auburn braid was bleached to stiff silver wire. Her eyes stared straight through his chest, devoid of pupil or warmth, fixed on an empty coordinate past the parapet. Her mouth curved into a tight, indifferent sneer—the exact coldness Stellan wore. The hallucination snapped like dry thread. Miro stumbled against the desk, parchment rattling between his fingers, its oily luminescence dimmed to a dull smear. Borislav leaned back in his chair, watching. “The higher they climb,” Borislav murmured, wheels creaking as he settled back, “the more fabric they cut away. You may not recognize what sits on the highest tier.”

The Archivist's Price