The stairs down into the archive smelled of old oil and mint. The chamber was a hushed, carved place where memory was kept in shapes meant to be preserved from sunlight and rumor. Lyra lit a thread of moon-glass on her staff, and their single streak of light moved like a scribe's pen across shelves of scrolls and crystal tablets. The deeper they went, the colder the air became, not in temperature alone but in the way secrets settle and wait.
The archives were a place where moonlight learned to sleep. They were below the temple, an incredible labyrinth of shelves carved into the living rock, of scrolls bound in faded leather, of crystal tablets that held words like trapped fire. Torches were not allowed beyond this first landing.
"Here," she whispered, stopping at a low alcove sealed by a slab of slate.
Lyra found the small alcove with the goddess Selene sigil on it before she worked a minor key into the slate seal and murmured a light whisper, then the stone panel eased open like something relenting to an old debt. It responded to Lyra's breath and unfurled like a sleeping thing sliding away on unseen runners before they descended.
The alcove beyond contained a single shelf and, on it, a tablet wrapped in a pale cloth. Lyra's fingers trembled—either from the chill or from the risk of unspooling her goddess's private records.
Daryn watched without breathing as she drew the cloth back with a reverence that made Daryn's throat go dry. The tablet glinted, etched in a script that caught and held light. The script was fine encased in the crystal tablet where the moonlight could touch and illuminate it.
The name at the top was short and Scalding when he read it aloud:
Seris.
The sound hit him like cold water, as he said the name aloud before he knew he could.
He traced the letters with his finger and suddenly the memories returned in a rush—her small hand in his, the scent of jasmine on a summer evening, her laugh like a bell. The tablet's lines told a ledger no god would have wanted him to find, and he finally understood why he had been feeling so hollow.
The tablet recorded an event in a gods' dry administrative voice: a child taken by Hades during a divine dispute and with a notation that Selene had lodged a special claim that would arrange a tether to the child's soul. A soul mislaid between realms...
The promise was noted in the margins, in the looping hand of a priestess who had penned it all. The language was crisp and clinical, as if the scribe had been taught to make grief legible without offering comfort. Using dates and terms and a bureaucracy of divine will to describe an act that had torn a family.
But Daryn could notice that between the lines were smaller marks—annotations laid in a feminine, hurried hand. Seris name was repeated with a little flourish implying that a priestess had wept when the ink dried...perhaps, a symbol Selene's temple used for "debt owed."
Cause these marginalia were not the godly ledger's formalities; they were human scraps—emotion recorded where official cases would normally forbid it.
Daryn's breath hitched as his memories arrived in tides. Lilies in a window, a laugh that fit the corners of his chest. He could now access complete interactions with Seris from his returned memories. The hollow deepened as he wondered how he could have forgotten her so easily. He wanted to know how she was doing. If she were feeding properly, in the realm Hades had kept her.
'I wonder what that god would even be giving her as nourishment,' Daryn's train of thought continued with his hardening resolve. Daryn's fingers flattened against the cool crystal until the rasp of the carved letters felt like a brand.
"Taken by Hades during a claim," Lyra read softly, interrupting Daryn's emotional trail while indicating the tablet's bureaucratic phrasing. "Note here that Selene registered a reclamation, and it was set as a recurring tether that came at a cost."
"She knew."
"She knew," Lyra said again, gentler now. "And she arranged, but that doesn't mean she lied out of malice. Gods make bargains they believe necessary. But she withheld this from you."
Anger moved through Daryn like heat. Not the raw, immediate fury of the arena but the barbed, tight outrage of someone who discovers a map had been folded without them.
"Why keep it from me?" he asked, though part of him already had answers: protection, manipulation, love so fierce it suffocated.
Lyra folded the tablet carefully, her own voice steady. "Because some truths wound more than they help at first."
"Because Selene can be afraid too." Lyra held his hand trying to reassure him. "We will continue to pull at the threads. There are records of other tethers, other reclamations, and perhaps the terms. If we find the margin where the bargain is written out, you might find a way to ask for what Selene has promised and what the gods will resist."