The Archivist

The fire crackled. Sparks of ash shot into the air and lit the night sky with their own kind of starlight. It was beautiful, in a way. And yet it was also terrifying. The shadows it cast along the treeline were unnatural. Dark, ominous beasts that flickered out of existence the moment they began to turn into something more. Justice watched them, there and gone in an eyeblink, with the same sense of unease as a ferryman that watches a thundercloud.

“Morning comes, Truth Bringer.” Marcus said, pulling her from her thoughts. “We must go.”

Justice offered only a nod.

They doused the flames, stomping out the most stubborn embers before they departed. In the dewy light of morning the world felt new. Mist replaced the shadows and danced beneath the sunlight, and through it Justice could just make out the hint of a tower.

Of the Archive.

“What happens when we get there?” She asked, hauling her bag over her shoulder.

Marcus glanced back at her. He wore the bloodred robes of the Archive and it made his hair more starkly yellow. Like an unnatural outcropping of wheat that had sprouted atop his head. He had a memory of his own, else he wouldn’t be wearing the Archive’s robes, though Justice had never thought to ask what it was. If it had been of any real significance he’d be inside the walls still, not spending days searching for more who remembered.

“You transfer your knowledge, Truth Bringer.” He said quietly.

The Archive was all that remained of the Old World, and as they drew nearer, Justice thought she could hear the echoes of what it once had been. Whispers and birdsong danced across the fog. It was taller even than the trees, and formed of white stone. Large, square openings marked its facade, though they had been covered in swathes of fabric to keep out the night, and above she could just make out the waning light of the Ever Flame. There were words etched into the stone. Large and sprawling, as if their creator had intended them to be read from the sky. It mattered little, now, not when only one person knew how to read them.

“Seattle Children’s Hospital,” Justice read, and Marcus stared at her with a reverence that made her skin crawl. “Is that where we are? Seattle?”

“I suppose so.”

Oftimes in stories, it is the moment of greatest peace that attracts the greatest misfortune. And Justice Paullus had experienced a great deal of misfortune. It had begun, as so many great stories do, when she had been but a child. When she had peered at the words of the Old World, scribbled across a slab of wood her father had used in his fence. When she had the misfortune of understanding them. She had heard stories, of course, of the Archive and its collection. The people who had somehow managed to cling to a memory of the Old World. The people whose brains had not been addled by the chemicals that had destroyed what the earth had once been.

So when Justice peered up at the Archive once again, saw the way the Ever Flame guttered and died on the wind, it was not fear that gripped her. Simply acceptance.

The morning stillness was broken by a thrum of arrows. In the distance, Justice could hear screaming, and she wondered suddenly at the men and women of the Archive. Perhaps, buried in the memories of their collection, someone remembered the art of combat.

“Run!” Marcus grabbed her hand and yanked her off the path just as a dozen figures broke through the mist.

They were ragged creatures. Half starved and mostly naked. So gaunt and frail that Justice couldn’t tell the men from the women, despite the way their bodies shone in the early morning light. Somewhere in the Archive, there might’ve been a seamstress who remembered how to stitch and sew, but their knowledge had not yet reached the people beyond its walls.

Marcus ducked behind a bush, pulling Justice along with him. “I don’t know how they found us.”

Justice said nothing, only flinched as the horde reached the gates of the Archive.

“No one but the Archivist should know that we’ve found the Truth Bringer.”

From the sullen walls of the Archive, gunshots rang out. Justice heard a sharp, angry bang a mere heartbeat before blood and flesh splattered across the path. More than the sight, Justice was shocked at the smell of it. The metallic stain that clawed at her nose and scrambled down her throat.

Beside her, Marcus was crouched in the dirt. A slender, silver knife clenched in his fist.

It was only then that she considered that Marcus’ memory might’ve been important after all.

“Stay with me, Truth Bringer.” He said.

“Always.”

A man barreled over the bush, knocking into Marcus with a grunt. The angry red of the Archive robes were discordant with the man’s dirty flesh. Too clean. Too soft and billowy.

“The Truth Bringer!” The man screamed. “She’s here!”

It was all he said before Marcus’ blade slashed across his throat.

Marcus scrambled over the body. “Justice, run!”

It was far too late for running. Already, she could see the figures through the fog. No longer moving toward the gates of the Archive, but toward her. Bloodied, rabid creatures that hardly resembled people anymore. And yet, despite their wildness, she couldn’t help but wonder at what they’d been before. At who they’d been.

They poured over the path, and Marcus stood against them. Armed with simply a knife. Justice knew she had no memories to help with this, yet she would not leave him. Instead, she reached into her bag and grabbed the first thing she found.

A book.

A woman flew toward her, and Justice swung. The book struck hard enough to send a jolt of pain up her arms, yet there was no time to rest. No sooner had the woman fallen aside than another appeared behind her. Violent and bloody, though by the way it had splattered across his chest Justice was certain it wasn’t his own.

She managed to hit him square in the jaw, and then she was falling. Rolling through the underbrush beneath the weight of another body. Everywhere, there was pain. She crushed her own fingers as she rolled over them, and moments later her shoulder spasmed as it struck against a tree. There was shouting. The distinctive peal of Marcus’ voice.

And then, there was silence.

Justice gasped, rolling to her side even as the man pushed himself to his feet. Her book was gone. Lost somewhere during the fall. A twig snapped beneath the man's boot, and then he pulled her roughly upright.

“Please…” she gasped.

“Truth Bringer.” His voice was shockingly gentle, and when she looked into his eyes they were not angry and rabid, but full of something softer.

Hope.

“We cannot lose you to the Archivist. We cannot risk another memory.” He said, and it struck her then how young he was. His hair, which she had first thought to be thick with dirt, was a deep brown. His eyes the shade of a misted lake. “You must help us.”

A knife tore through the air and embedded itself deep in the man’s temple.

Justice screamed even as blood, hot and reeking of metal, splattered across her face. It was more than blood. She could feel bits of flesh against her cheek. Some had seeped between her lips and sat with an unnatural weight against her tongue.

“Justice!” Marcus grabbed her before she could fall, but even he was not enough to keep away the bile. Yet he held her anyway. One hand pressed against the small of her back until there was nothing left in her to spit out.

When it stopped, her gaze fell on the man.

We cannot risk another memory.

Marcus’ hand moved to her wrist, and suddenly that same touch that had so comforted her felt unsettling.

“The Archive awaits.” he said. “Are you with me?”

Justice glanced up, where she could still make out the pale tower. The words. It felt eerie, somehow. Tainted by the words of the man who now lay dead at her feet.

We cannot lose you to the Archivist.

When she spoke her voice was but a whisper.

“Always.”

Bodies lined the pathway. The mist that had so overtaken the Archive was heavier. Bled through with the smoke of a hundred gunshots. Justice’s footsteps were harsh in the stillness. Crunch, crunch, crunching over reddened gravel. And her heart, it beat with the same furious rhythm.

We cannot risk another memory.

This time when they approached the tower it was still and silent. When the gates opened it was with a shrill groan that echoed through the trees and startled a nest of birds.

Justice froze at the entrance. “Tell me about the Archivist.” She whispered.

“He will save us.”

When she stepped through the gate, she couldn’t help but look back one last time. At the men and women Marcus had slain with only a knife.

“Truth Bringer!”

The man that spoke was unlike anyone Justice had ever met before. Anyone, that is, beyond Marcus. So many had been ripped from what they’d been in the Old World. Torn from their memories. It had left them wanting. Not human, not really, but some echo of one. A creature that spent so much time simply surviving that there was nothing left for anything else.

But the Archivist, this was a man who lived.

His white hair fell around his shoulders, catching the sunlight so that it shone like a halo. He was not an aged man, not truly, yet wrinkles had settled in around his eyes so that he looked forever amused.

“We have spent many years searching for you,” he said, walking up to place a hand against her cheek. “At last, the knowledge of the Old World can be restored!”

There was a sense of unease as he led her through the Archive. Justice had spent very little time wondering at what lay within its walls, and yet she was sure it should’ve been more. It was simply a memory. A ghost of what this place had been before. Padded chairs and wheeled beds sat haphazardly around the halls, abandoned, yet the Archivist had found no reason to move them. Instead, he led them on a winding path through the building. Their footsteps echoed up and down the hallway as if the Archive itself wished to remind them of its vacancy.

“Where are all the people?” Justice asked.

Marcus grabbed her hand and offered a reassuring smile. “What do you mean?”

“The others with memories.”

“You will meet them in time.” The Archivist said.

He stopped before a large doorway. Here, the silence melted into something far more unsettling. It was not voices or laughter that Justice heard in the room beyond, but a gentle hum.

“It is time to transfer your knowledge.” Marcus said.

Justice knew, before the Archivist had even reached for the door, that she would not like what waited beyond.

The room was large and white and lined with computers. Justice knew them only by the books she’d read from the Old World, but never before had she seen one. Not a working one, at least. Fragments of them had found their way into the hovels of the world. Bits of wire that served to hold together sticks or a smooth, white slab inserted as a kind of window pane.

In the room's center there was only a single, white bed.

Justice stepped back, but Marcus’ fingers were unforgiving. Pressing into her skin until blood swelled beneath his nails.

“All must give their memories to the Archive, Truth Bringer.”

“Do not worry,” the Archivist said, “afterward, you will not even remember it.”

“What do you do with them?” Justice whispered.

“Do you know what I was before?” He moved across the room and ran pale, aged fingers along one of the monitors. “A surgeon. I remember the mechanics of it. I can cut into a body and stitch it back together again, yet I look at the books and the records contained here and I have no memory of reading them. There is but one commodity since the fall of the Old World. Knowledge, Truth Bringer. And once I have claimed your memory as my own, once the knowledge of the Old World is mine, I will be as a god.”

Marcus dragged her across the room. “If you resist, it will only hurt more.”

Oftimes in stories, it is the moment of greatest misfortune that attracts the greatest gamble. And Justice Paullus had experienced a great deal of misfortune. So when her fingers closed around the knife that hung from Marcus’ hip, it was not fear that gripped her.

Only acceptance.

The blade did not cut his throat deep enough for a quick death, the kind that he had left scattered along the path to the Archive. Rather, it cut just enough to send a spray of blood across the room. Marcus let out a soft groan, his hands flying to his neck, but Justice was already turning. Already surging toward the Archivist.

“Truth Bringer…”

Pain tore through her shoulder, and it was all she could do not to collapse. Justice spun just in time to see the silvery scalpel clutched in Marcus’ bloody hand. It slammed downward, narrowly missing her throat and slicing instead through the fat of her cheek. He surged forward, pinning her to the clean linen.

“Stay with me.” He whispered. It was not a request, but a command. A demand that she yield her memory to the Archivist’s collection.

“Always,” Justice said, and plunged the knife into his skull.

Even as he slumped to the floor, landing with a strange thud against the clean tile, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he hadn’t fought back.

“Well, that was unfortunate.” The Archivist muttered. He glanced at the body with a tired expression. “His was not an easy memory to find.”

Justice spun to face him. Her fingers shook. The blood so pervasive that she could hardly keep hold of the knife. Even as she lifted it toward the Archivist he only smiled.

“Be wary, girl, there are far worse than me who will seek to claim your memory for themself. Such is the power of words.”

The blood was cool and sticky on her hands as Justice left the Archive. The path beyond had returned to a kind of serenity. Birds chirped overhead, oblivious to the bodies that still lay sprawled along the roadway, and a gentle rain dripped through the treetops. It was odd, to be alone. Without the steady presence of Marcus to guide her.

A flash of white caught her eye. The pages of her book, caught in a chilled breeze. It was torn and muddy but still whole, and when she bent to pick it up there was something reassuring in its weight.

This time when she passed through the gate, she did not look back.