Chapter 4 - Evelina

A week into the semester, the archive had finally settled back into something resembling routine. Or, at least, the performance of it. Students wandered in under the pretense of last-minute research, professors requested texts with false urgency, and the faculty oversight board sent me the usual stack of “approved” edits they expected me to file without question. I ignored half of them. 

But the transfer request on my desk this morning wasn’t part of the usual chaos. 

It came sealed in parchment rather than the standard data weave, odd, but not impossible. The sigil stamp was correct, though a little too perfect in its rendering. Not a smudge, not a stray flick of ink, not even a vibration along the fold where most students’ magic would’ve shaken just slightly. I’d seen enough real paperwork to know the difference between confidence and precision. This wasn’t just polished. 

It was rehearsed. 

The name on the application meant nothing to me, Jalen Vey. No house affiliation listed, only a note about “private study sponsorship through minor bloodline benefactors.” Which meant someone with power didn’t want their name attached to this. Obscura had seen an influx of those lately. Transfers from scattered bloodlines, orphaned magic, obscure coven branches claiming sudden interest in archival theory. 

But Jalen hadn’t requested the usual foundational texts or restricted family histories. 

No, this one wanted access to fragmented relic records, specifically, Umbraen and Thornveil entries tagged as “disordered,” “disproven,” or “lost context.” The kind of material we didn’t display openly because it wasn’t meant to be consumed without guidance. Pieces of rituals with no known end. Partial accounts of experiments that left stains on reality. Names that didn’t belong in any lineage chart but kept resurfacing when you traced the blood far enough back. 

It wasn’t illegal to ask. 

But it was specific. 

Too specific. 

And too careful. 

The attached reasoning was textbook. Curious about conflicting theories. Seeking clarity on historical contradictions. Interested in inter-house collaboration and unbiased interpretation. I’d read this kind of language before, straight out of a faculty handbook. 

But this wasn’t written by a scholar. 

This was written by someone who knew what would get past the first layer of screening. 

I sat back in my chair, the request hovering in front of me, pulsing softly with the archive’s sigil recognition. Most would’ve approved it by now. The details were all in order. There were no obvious flags, no missing information. Even the aura trace was clean. 

Which made me trust it even less. 

No one applying for fragmented relic access came in clean. 

Not unless they had something to hide. 

I tapped a sigil on my desk, sending a copy to my private review list. Not the official one. The one only my blood could see. 

If Jalen Vey wanted inside my archive, I was going to find out why. 

Because this wasn’t curiosity. 

This was infiltration with a scholar’s handwriting. 

The request might’ve been flawless on parchment, but the archive itself never lies. 

Every person who enters leaves behind a trace, no matter how careful they are. The air carries aura residue, and the shelves, enchanted centuries ago by my predecessors, retain a whisper of every signature that brushes past their runes. The marks fade quickly for most students. Stronger for faculty. But when someone doesn’t want to be seen? 

That’s when the archive gets talkative. 

I waited until twilight, when the main floor had emptied, and the torches shifted to their dim, perpetual glow. Then I activated the echo lattice. It was a layered network of spells, part of the Nyx protocol, meant to track magical imprints in the air like heat trails. You had to know the right cadence to call it forward—too hard and the lattice scattered. Too soft, and it stayed dormant, deaf to your voice. 

But it always answered me. 

I murmured the activation chant, and the archive responded with a low hum under my feet. Thread-thin strands of light began to shimmer between the shelves, revealing patterns of movement over the last three days. Blue for students, green for faculty, violet for magical constructs. 

And there, just beyond the scrying history terminal, red. 

A single strand. Faint. Almost translucent. But there. 

Red meant cloaking. 

Someone had masked their signature while moving through a monitored zone. Not erased it, that was harder, nearly impossible without consequence, but distorted it enough to avoid standard detection. A cloaked visitor in the upper archive wasn’t necessarily criminal. But cloaked and unlogged? That was something else entirely. 

I followed the red strand as it snaked between the west stacks, circled the north wing, then doubled back, an irregular pattern, like someone scouting rather than searching. Then it turned, cutting across the central atrium floor toward the very place I’d been denied entry earlier this week. 

The restricted lower vaults. 

Of course. 

The trail stopped at the obelisk guarding the stairwell. Not a sudden end, not a fade, just cut. Severed mid-motion. 

Someone with that level of cloaking knew how the archive tracked movement. They knew when to let their trace show and when to conceal it completely. More importantly, they knew how to mimic idle browsing long enough to look innocent if someone checked the surface logs. 

But they hadn’t counted on the lattice. 

I crouched near the last visible point of the red strand, pressing two fingers to the stone. It was still warm. Not in temperature, but in magic. As if someone had touched it with intent. And intention leaves residue far longer than accident. 

Whoever they were, they weren’t a first-year student with too many questions. 

They were trained. 

And that trail had a familiarity to it that twisted something in my stomach. 

I stood, the lattice fading as I withdrew my power. 

No official entry. No signed archive visit. But they’d been here. 

And that meant whoever this was, Jalen Vey, or whoever wore that name like armor, had either bypassed every layer of protocol I enforced. 

Or they’d known exactly which ones I couldn’t access anymore. 

The lattice faded, but the wrongness it revealed still pulsed in the walls. 

I stayed after closing, locking the doors under the guise of routine recalibration. No one questioned it. No one ever did when I said the archive needed solitude. Not even Arx. Maybe he thought it was superstition. Or maybe he understood that the library liked to whisper louder when there were fewer ears to hear. 

I didn’t leave. Didn’t go to the dorms. I stayed, silent as the dust on the upper shelves, and waited. 

If they’d come once, they’d come again. 

The archive knew something had been taken from it, rewritten, replaced. It wanted the intruder found just as much as I did. 

And so I hid. 

Not in plain sight. Not with a glamour. But the way a Nyx archivist does when she doesn’t want to be found, folding herself into the seams of the stacks, cloaking her presence between the stones and silence, becoming part of the archive rather than a visitor in it. 

The wait was long. The hours crawled. 

Then, just after midnight, the wards shivered. 

Not like they did when a student snuck in, or a professor stumbled back for forgotten notes. This was delicate. Intentional. A ripple through the detection web so subtle it almost passed for air movement. 

But the archive told me. 

Someone was here. 

I stayed still, breath shallow, eyes fixed on the central column just before the obelisk. The shadows there thickened, not with magic, but with purpose. The shape that emerged was tall, hooded, movements smooth but cautious. He didn’t stumble. He didn’t hesitate. His fingers brushed the edge of the outer ward like he’d done it a hundred times. 

And the wards didn’t fight him. 

They knew him. 

Or rather, they didn’t know what to call him. 

Because when his aura flickered into view, just briefly, caught in the glow of a too-eager illumination crystal, it fractured. 

Not hidden. Broken. 

I saw pieces of bloodlines: the cold shimmer of Thornveil glyphwork, the jagged outline of Draxmere feral threads, a faint pulse of Umbraen flame, and then, just for a moment, a shadow that felt like death magic wrapped in chains. 

Nothing about him held steady. His aura flickered like it didn’t know what species it belonged to. As if whoever he was had been built from too many things at once. 

My heart slammed once against my ribs, a single, loud warning. 

Run. 

But I didn’t. 

I stayed. 

Because something about him didn’t scream intruder. 

It screamed impossible. 

My hand itched toward the dagger sheathed under my coat. I could drop him now. Lash out. Call the archive to defend itself. 

But I didn’t move. 

Because he wasn’t behaving like a thief. 

He was studying. 

Like the walls were whispering to him, too. 

He stepped as if he owned the place, or more strangely, as if he knew it too well for the first time. He ran his fingers across the stone immediately under the obelisk, just at the end of the jagged aura trail. He was not rushed. Not scared. Careful, yes, in that unthinking way that was like checking to see if the vault would see him twice. 

And perhaps it did. 

The obelisk flickered for a moment. A nod. A recognition. Not a key. Not an identity. 

Permission was not granted to anyone. 

My heart stopped. My breathing did not. 

Because I understood in that moment why the archive had been feeling wrong all semester. It wasn’t the spells. Or the overwritten files. Or the denials couched in red tape. 

It was him. 

That was what the archive had been waiting for. Not a presence but an absence. A blank woven through the wards like an illness they could not name. 

He pivoted at the waist, as if he could feel me in the silence. His hood shifted ever so slightly, and I caught the line of his face. 

Sharp angles. A harsh sort of symmetry. Eyes stained with shadow, not from spell use but something else. Inhuman, but not in any way monstrous. Masked like a carapace. Masked like a penance. 

And then he saw me. 

Our gazes locked across the space just outside the ring of crystal light. 

He didn’t flinch. 

Nor did I. 

I had read the histories of outlaw bloodlines. Decoded scrambled identities. Scoured a thousand testimonies of what war and magic and corrupted will could do to a soul. But none of it had prepared me for this. 

He emanated power. 

Yet, there was a hollowness in him I had never seen before. The sort of stillness that lingered after a detonation, before the smoke had cleared, but the ruin was already there. He did not belong here. Not because he was trespassing. But because his presence defied the space. 

I did not need a name. 

The absence of one spoke volumes. 

Whoever he was, he was not meant to be. Not in this place. Not in any place. 

And yet, here he was, looking at me with no fear in his eyes. No malice, but acknowledgment. Not recognition of me, exactly, but of something he had not expected. Something that saw him too. 

And did not look away. 

I did not speak. I did not call for help. I did not even grip the dagger under my sleeve any tighter. 

Because there was something between us in the silence, a statement, but not a threat. 

A breath of two balances on the precipice. 

He nodded once. Barely perceptible. Not obeisance. Not greeting. 

Permission. 

And then he was gone. He turned and blended into the archive’s shadowed depths and vanished without a trace. 

But I knew what I had seen. 

Not a student. Not a member of the faculty. Not even an agent. 

Something older. 

Something changed. 

And whoever he was, he had not just figured out how to live in the archive. 

He had figured out how to vanish from it.