Chapter Thirteen: The Forbidden Book

Scriba had given Aella a forbidden book. What she read in it wasn’t answers. It was questions she hadn’t learned to ask yet.

The Lantern Tower’s forbidden section lay at the bottom of the Southeast Tower. Not locked — the door simply wasn’t there. You walked down the stairs, past Document Restoration, past Ancient Binding, past the Abandoned Catalog Index. Then the stairs stopped. You weren’t on stairs anymore. You were in a corridor, bookshelves on both sides, every shelf holding forbidden books. You didn’t know how you got in. But you were in. The way out was the same: finish reading, turn around, walk back. You’d find yourself in a corridor — not the same corridor, the one you entered through. Look back: the shelves were still there. But the forbidden section wasn’t on the shelves anymore. It was in your head.

The book Scriba gave her was an original. Taken from the forbidden section’s shelves. He shouldn’t have been able to remove it — forbidden books couldn’t leave the forbidden section. But Scriba hadn’t removed it. He’d let the book follow him out. A lifetime of trust built in the Lantern Tower maze. The corridors trusted him. The shelves trusted him. The books trusted him. When Scriba entered the forbidden section, he didn’t need to search — the book slid into his hand. Now it was in Aella’s.

She’d been translating in her basement for two weeks. Not the whole book — just chapter one and the passages corresponding to torn-out pages. The forbidden book was written in a language that no longer existed. Not dead. Prohibited. After the Seal, someone had systematically destroyed its textbooks, its literature, its native speakers. Aella had to work from residual grammar fragments and the translation notes Scriba had tucked between the pages. She strung red thread between the translation and the original. Dense threads meant she was certain. Sparse threads — those were guesses.

Today she finished the last passage of chapter one. Not the translation. The understanding.

The Unblemished Thought wasn’t some evil thing dug out of the Rift. It was a tool. Built by seven guild leaders. The original purpose: seamless collaboration between guilds. Valdris forged a piece. Kaelthi gave it appearance. Lythara made it real. Three guilds, three magic systems, collaboration costs astronomical. The Unblemished Thought was meant to eliminate that cost. Strip away everything that prevented different systems from talking to each other. Emotion. Intuition. Ethics. Unquantifiable preferences. The creators believed these were bugs in human thinking. Remove them, and humans could mesh like gears.

They succeeded. Their empathy began to fade. They sealed it themselves.

Chapter two was torn out. Clean cut. Knife. Not just this copy — every forbidden book in the forbidden section had its second chapter removed. Systematic erasure. Someone, about fifty years after the Seal, had entered the forbidden section and removed every record of what happened after. Of the seven creators, two vanished after the Seal. Names remained. People didn’t. One name, struck through in a single line, leaving only K. The other: V.

Aella wrote K on a slip of paper. Then V beneath it. Looked up at the red-thread spiral on her wall. Not a random shape. The shape of deletion. Someone hadn’t added information. Someone had taken it away.

That evening Scriba came to see her. No knock. No floating books today — they waited outside the door like schoolchildren waiting for dismissal. He walked in. Looked at the wall of red threads. Looked at the slip of paper on her desk.

“Chapter five wasn’t torn out. Whoever did the tearing didn’t want to.”

“Why.”

“Because chapter five records the Seal’s failure. Not technical failure. Emotional failure. After the Seal, the creators didn’t become safer. They became lonelier. Someone trying to cover up the history of the Seal — would they tear out the bad news, or the footnote to the bad news.”

Aella thought for a long time. “The footnote.” Because footnotes made the villains less villainous. Made the failure less absolute. Made the erased names — less deserving of erasure.

Scriba nodded. No more words. He walked to the door, his books returning to orbit as he crossed the threshold. At the corridor’s end he paused. Turned.

“K is there. V never left. They’re waiting for the same thing. Not waiting for you to find them. Waiting for you to stop being afraid of them.”

Then he and his books vanished down the corridor. The Lantern Tower’s spires drifted outside the window. Tonight: four towers. One fewer than usual. Not broken. Just hadn’t decided where to go yet.