Chapter Eleven: Marginalia
722 Words
I buy the notebook from a stationer three streets from my usual route, pay in coin instead of the Archive's credit chit, and don't give my name. Two of his three days are already gone. I don't know what the third brings, and not knowing is its own kind of teeth at my throat every time I sit down to do this.
The fragments have stopped waiting for me to be caught off guard, so I've started going looking for them instead, cross-legged on my bed with a stub of pencil and a system I build the way I'd build a cataloguing system for any unfamiliar archive. Numbers for the seven lives, in the order I encountered them. Letters for what repeats. W for water. S for snow. F for fire, twice now, different enough to mark separately, F-1 and F-2.
Him, I write, for the face I still can't put a real name to. Present in all seven. Confirmed.
A knock against the window snaps my head up so fast the pencil skids clean off the page.
I'm on my feet before I've decided to move, notebook slammed shut and shoved under the pillow, heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth, certain, in that first raw second, that his three days have run out early and someone's already here to collect whatever Sorin decided I'm worth. I stand flattened against the wall beside the window, breath held, counting the seconds it takes for the shape outside to resolve into nothing more than a branch, wind-thrown, scraping glass.
It takes a long time for my pulse to believe it. Longer than it should.
I sit back down anyway, hands still not quite steady, and reach for the fragment again on purpose, because stopping now feels more dangerous than continuing, and some stubborn, exhausted part of me refuses to let one scare cost me the only ground I've managed to gain all week.
Fire again. F-2, though I don't know that until I'm surfacing, gasping, pencil scrawling half-legible across the page, someone screaming a name that isn't mine into smoke that isn't real, not here, not now.
It's only after, hands shaking, throat raw like I actually screamed along with her, that I notice what it's cost me this time.
I go to write Perpetua's name at the top of the page, to note what I'd tell her if I ever worked up the nerve, and it isn't there. Not hazy. Gone, clean-edged, a blank space exactly the shape of a name I have known for nineteen years, and for one genuinely horrifying stretch of seconds I cannot summon it at all, not the first letter, not the shape of her face attached to it, nothing, and I have to sit with my pencil hovering over the page while my own chest heaves, terrified in a way that has nothing to do with branches against glass.
It comes back. Perpetua. Perpetua Marrow. It arrives wrong first, half a syllable off, before correcting itself, and I sit there afterward with cold sweat down my back, because if it hadn't come back, if it had simply stayed gone the way tonight's dinner has stayed gone, I don't know what I would have done, and I don't know how close I just came to finding out.
Magic is memory. I learned that as a child the way I learned the founding dates of Aurion, so early it stopped sounding like a warning at all. Powerful magic permanently erases memories. Forget enough, lose yourself.
I'm not casting spells. I want that to matter more than it does. But I am hauling seven lifetimes through a door that was never meant to open this early, this fast, on purpose, and something is being taken every single time I do it, and tonight it very nearly took someone I love.
I should stop. I know it the way I know eleven other true things I've ignored these past weeks because the alternative felt worse than the cost.
I don't stop.
I turn to a clean page, hands still trembling, and write the only thing that feels honest enough to survive whatever this ends up taking from me next.
Whatever this costs. I need to know why he's in every single one of my deaths.
- Writer
