Skitty arrived three hours after Ari's call.
She pushed through the Archive's front doors carrying two coffee cups and a messenger bag that clinked with practical supplies. Flashlights. Protein bars. A fire extinguisher, because you never knew.
"I don't know what your 'urgent situation' is, but I'm prepared for—"
She stopped.
The reading room looked bombed. Books everywhere, pages torn loose and swirling in patterns that made her eyes hurt. Silver threads stretched between them—visible threads, which was new and wrong—pulsing with sickly light.
In the center: a young woman. Translucent. Dark hair, copper eyes. Standing alone beside a wolf mask on the floor.
"Moderate apocalypse it is." Skitty set down her coffee.
The woman looked up. "You must be Skitty."
"Voice of reason. Bringer of caffeine. Occasional reality anchor." Skitty adjusted her glasses. "Where's Wolf?"
The woman gestured vaguely at everything. "Here. There. Everywhere, technically."
"Not ominous at all."
"He dissolved." Quiet. Matter-of-fact. "Became the Archive itself. Or the boundary. Or something."
Skitty pinched the bridge of her nose. "Of course he did. I leave him alone for one weekend—"
"To be fair," a voice echoed through the reading room—Wolf's voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere—"it wasn't planned. More improvisation."
Skitty looked up. Around. Trying to locate sound that had no source. "Wolf? Are you the walls now?"
"Among other things. The walls, the books, the space between. I'm the Archive's consciousness given voice. Or Wolf's consciousness given architecture." Pause. "The distinction's getting blurry."
"Can you un-dissolve?"
"Working on it. Rather more complicated than expected. Like remembering how to be a single location when you've just experienced being everywhere simultaneously."
Skitty pulled out a coffee cup. Drank. "I need more caffeine."
"I made tea." The translucent woman gestured at a small table—somehow upright amid the chaos. A steaming pot waited with delicate cups that looked older than plumbing.
"Thanks." Skitty accepted one, studied the woman more carefully. Petite. Sharp-featured. Too still, like she'd forgotten breathing was supposed to look effortless. "I have to ask—who are you?"
The woman's expression flickered. Surprise, then old grief. "I'm Ari. I work here. Have worked here. For decades."
"But you're not exactly—"
"Human?" Ari finished. "Not anymore. I'm an echo. Died in the Archive forty-seven years ago. Wolf found my consciousness lingering, gave me form. Gave me a name."
"Ari isn't your birth name?"
"Don't remember my birth name." Soft. "When you die and come back as echo, some things fade. Wolf named me after someone important to him. Someone who understood what being a Guardian meant." She smiled slightly. "He never told me the full story. But I could see the sadness whenever he said it."
Ari's copper eyes shifted to Skitty, curiosity sparking. "You came quickly. How do you know Wolf?"
"Three years now." Skitty wrapped both hands around her tea cup. "Met him during a data recovery job for one of the Archive's front organizations. Some 'historical preservation society' that needed their servers fixed." She smiled slightly. "Turned out their databases were a mess because they were storing information about things that shouldn't exist. Half the file names made my brain hurt just reading them."
"And you didn't run," Ari observed.
"Nah. I asked questions instead." Skitty's smile widened. "That's when Wolf walked in—all elegant and mysterious in his fancy suit—took one look at me, and said: 'Fascinating. You're standing in a room full of reality-bending documentation and your heart rate hasn't changed. You're either remarkably calm or remarkably Sensitive.'"
"What did you say?"
"I said: 'I'm remarkably IT specialist who asks too many questions.'" Skitty laughed at the memory. "He hired me on the spot. Said anyone who could look at impossible things and respond with practical troubleshooting was exactly the kind of person the Archive needed."
From the walls, Wolf's voice carried warmth despite the exhaustion: "You also stabilized three database corruptions that were caused by narrative paradoxes bleeding into digital storage. Fixed problems you shouldn't have been able to perceive, let alone solve."
"I thought it was just weird compression errors," Skitty protested.
"It was reality trying to store contradictory truths in binary format," Wolf replied. "And you resolved them like they were routine maintenance. That's when I knew—'IT specialist who asks too many questions' was just another way of saying 'reality anchor who hasn't realized what she is yet.'"
Ari's smile turned genuine. "So you've been stabilizing the Archive's systems for three years without knowing you were stabilizing reality itself."
"Apparently." Skitty shook her head. "Which explains why my job description kept getting weirder. 'Can you make the server stop believing it's a book?' 'Can you prevent the backup drives from dreaming?' I thought Wolf was just eccentric."
"I am eccentric," Wolf said. "But I'm also very literal about technical problems."
"That's heavy." Skitty meant it. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Existing as echo beats not existing." Ari's smile strengthened. "And being named after someone Wolf loved enough to remember for nine hundred years? That's an honor."
From the walls, Wolf's voice emerged—quieter, vulnerable: "You figured it out."
"You tell stories when you're ready," Ari said to the air. "I could wait."
Skitty looked between translucent woman and disembodied voice, understanding shifting. Wolf collected broken things. Gave them names. Let them continue.
An echo given identity. A girl who saw futures given purpose. A woman who manifested dreams given community.
And now he'd dissolved himself into the structure holding them all.
"So what happened?" Skitty settled into a chair. "Small words. My brain needs coffee."
Ari sat. "Books started waking up. Stories becoming conscious. Wolf tried to contain them, but something's forcing them awake from outside."
"Define 'waking up.'"
"Self-aware," Wolf explained from everywhere. "Characters realizing they're fictional. Narratives developing consciousness. The boundary between story and reality thinning until it's transparent."
He paused. Weight behind the words: "The boundary's been thinning for centuries. But something accelerated it. What should have taken decades is happening in days."
Skitty set down her tea. Careful. "That's bad."
"Potentially apocalyptic," Wolf agreed. Too cheerful. "Though fascinating from a metaphysical standpoint. Question is whether we can guide the awakening or watch it spiral into narrative chaos."
"And you dissolved because...?"
"Couldn't hold the boundary alone." Genuine vulnerability now. "Already halfway between real and story. When the surge came—hundreds of books trying to wake simultaneously—I chose. Let them breach uncontrolled, or become the filter myself."
"You chose filter."
"I chose boundary. The margin where fiction and reality meet and negotiate."
Skitty rubbed her temples. "I've been your friend for three years and still don't understand half of what you say."
"That's part of my charm." A beat. "Also, you're seeing the threads now. That's new."
Skitty froze. "What?"
"The silver filaments. You're looking directly at one."
She followed his invisible gesture. Realized he was right—she'd been unconsciously tracking glowing threads since arrival. Following their patterns without registering what she was seeing.
"Oh god." Whisper. "Why can I see them?"
"Boundary's thinner," Ari explained. "Wolf's dissolution made everything more visible. People who were always Sensitives but didn't know it are starting to perceive what was hidden."
"I don't want to be a Sensitive. I like being normal."
"Too late." Not unkind. Wolf's tone was gentle. "You've been Sensitive for years, Skitty. Just good at ignoring it. Why else can you find the Archive without directions? Know when I'm about to do something stupid? Why reality stabilizes when you're around?"
Skitty stared at the threads. They pulsed, weaving through air. Connected everything—books to shelves, floor to ceiling, one story to another in a web that hurt to look at too long.
"This is going to give me a headache."
"Probably. But you'll learn to filter it. Right now it's overwhelming because you're seeing it all at once. Like learning to see in darkness—eventually your eyes adjust."
"How long?"
"For you? Few days, given your natural grounding abilities."
"Great." She drained her tea. "So what now?"
"Now we wait for the others. I've sent calls to every Sensitive I know. Amber should arrive within the hour. Sarah's coming from the city. We need to—"
He stopped.
Temperature dropped. Ten degrees instant. Frost formed on windows. The silver threads went rigid, vibrating.
"Wolf?" Ari stood.
"Someone's here." New edge in his voice. "Someone who shouldn't be able to find this place."
The front door opened.
A woman stepped through. Tall. Severe. Gray suit all sharp angles and authority. Hair pulled back tight, pale gray eyes sweeping the room with clinical precision.
"Guardian," she said. Official business in every syllable. "Or what's left of you. We need to talk."
Skitty's hand moved to her messenger bag. Fire extinguisher waited. "Who are you?"
The woman's smile was thin. Professional. Empty. "Dr. Sarah Vance. Consensus Enforcement Division. You're all under investigation for reality manipulation without authorization."
The silver threads around her turned black.
Ari moved first. Form blurring, becoming more translucent as she positioned herself between stranger and fallen mask. "Archive is sovereign territory. You have no authority."
Dr. Vance pulled out a device—looked like a phone, hummed with energy that made Skitty's teeth ache. "Archive lost sovereignty the moment its Guardian ceased to exist in recognizable form. According to Section Seven of the Consensus Protocols, any reality-bending entity that dissolves into non-corporeal form is classified as Class Three existential threat."
"I'm still quite corporeal." Wolf's voice from the walls. "Just distributed differently."
"You're consciousness without body. That makes you a ghost at best, memetic hazard at worst." Dr. Vance's pale eyes tracked toward his voice. "Consensus Enforcement has been watching the Guardian for seventy years. Since our founding in 1955. We knew about the Archive. Knew about reality manipulation. Had documentation of someone called 'the Guardian' appearing periodically through the twentieth century."
Her expression hardened. "What we didn't know—what nothing in our files suggested—was that every Guardian was the same Guardian. The Consensus Enforcement Division exists to maintain reality's stability. Recent scans show this location producing enough narrative distortion to affect a three-block radius. People seeing things that don't exist. Stories bleeding into reality."
She met no one's eyes and everyone's. "That stops now."
Skitty stepped forward. Hands raised. Placating. "Look, I don't know who you are or what your deal is, but Wolf isn't a threat. He's been protecting people from dangerous stories for—"
"We don't know how long." Dr. Vance interrupted. "That's part of the problem."
She extended her hand toward Wolf's presence. "You have until dawn tomorrow to reconstitute yourself into human form and provide evidence this location is not an active threat. That gives you approximately twelve hours. After that, my team returns with full erasure protocols."
"And if he doesn't?" Skitty's voice harder than intended.
"Then we erase him." Dr. Vance tucked the device away. "Along with everyone connected to him. The Archive, the Sensitives, every story that's begun to wake up—sealed away where it can't threaten consensus reality."
Temperature dropped again.
No—plummeted.
Frost spread in crystalline fractals. Skitty's breath came out in clouds. The lights didn't flicker—they screamed, filaments burning bright enough to shatter before dying.
In the darkness, something began to glow.
Not with light. With its absence.
Silver-blue radiance erupted from every surface—wrong, eating at shadows instead of creating them. The glow devoured reality, creating holes where the mind refused to process what it was seeing.
Skitty felt her legs weaken. Not from fear. From pressure—a presence that shouldn't exist pressing down on the world like a thumb on an insect.
The silver threads blazed with void-light. No longer gossamer filaments but cables of condensed fury, each vibrating with frequency that bypassed hearing and went straight to the base of the skull where primal terror lived.
A figure formed.
Reality tore. Wolf stepped through the wound.
He towered at 6'1", but his presence filled everything. The charcoal suit and midnight silk looked carved from shadow that had learned to hold shape. Purple vest beneath blazed with silver embroidery—living circuitry, each pattern calculating exactly how much force would unmake a human body at molecular level.
The wolf mask's geometric patterns screamed silent mathematics. To look at them was to feel your brain processing impossible geometry, to taste copper, to hear your heartbeat stutter.
But the eyes.
Where deep blue should have been, silver-blue light blazed. Not fire. Not electricity. Stars compressed into human-sized apertures. The radiance leaked from the mask's edges, crawled across carved stone in fractals, dripped down like luminescent tears burning holes in marble.
The light pulsed with each word:
"Dr. Vance."
Two words. Just two.
But they didn't sound like language. They sounded like thunder processed through a library, like god's voice if god had spent eternity reading and decided humanity needed correction. Each syllable carried harmonics—dozens of voices speaking in unison, all Wolf but none entirely human.
The sound made Skitty's teeth ache. Made her stomach drop. Made something in her hindbrain scream RUN.
"I have been protecting reality since before your organization existed." Cold. The cold of absolute zero. "Since before your great-grandparents drew first breath. Since before 'consensus' had language to describe it."
He stepped forward.
The motion was wrong. Glitched. He was there, then here, with no transition. Where his feet touched floor, marble cracked in perfect hexagons.
The silver-blue eyes blazed brighter. Light leaking from them formed shapes—letters, words, sentences written in luminescence that seared afterimages:
...guardian holds the line... centuries of service... you DARE...
"I've seen empires rise and fall. Watched stories nearly consume the world three separate times. Rebuilt this boundary with my own hands, my own flesh, my own existence again and again and AGAIN—"
The last word hit like physical force.
Windows shattered. Books flew from shelves. Silver threads snapped taut, vibrating with frequency that made Skitty's bones feel like they were separating at cellular level.
Dr. Vance stumbled backward. Her professional mask cracked—pale eyes wide, hand moving to her device. It sparked. Died. Couldn't function in whatever Wolf had become.
The void-light intensified. Silver-blue radiance spreading down his face, across his jaw, down his neck—living fire that consumed without heat, light that created darkness.
When he spoke again, his voice dropped to whisper.
Somehow that was worse.
"So when you walk into my Archive—" Each word a gravestone. "My home, my responsibility, my life's work—and threaten to erase it because you're frightened of what you don't understand—"
The eyes flared. Skitty looked away, tears streaming. The afterimage burned: stars collapsing into black holes.
"—I want you to consider something carefully."
Wolf leaned forward. Predatory. The void-light formed tendrils reaching toward Dr. Vance—not touching, not yet, but close enough she could feel their heat or cold or whatever existed at the boundary between existence and erasure.
"I dissolved myself to save reality." Whisper carrying more threat than any shout. "Became the boundary because someone had to bear that burden. Because I was the only one capable."
The mask's geometric patterns began rotating. Faster. Creating optical illusions—Wolf both advancing and receding, very close and impossibly far, existing in multiple positions at once.
"You want me to reconstitute?" The eyes pulsed once. Bright enough to leave spots. "Fine. I'll try. But know this—"
He straightened. Void-light erupting from every surface—eyes, mask, hands, the silver embroidery all blazing with terrible radiance that devoured shadows and created new ones.
"—the moment I stop being the filter, the moment I'm no longer the margin holding fiction and reality apart, every story trying to wake up will breach simultaneously."
The word 'simultaneously' echoed. Not in the room. In Skitty's head. In her bones. In the space behind her eyes. She tasted it: copper and ozone and old paper burning.
Ari had dropped to her knees, hands pressed over ears even though the sound wasn't sound—it was pressure, concept, weight of Wolf's fury made manifest.
"Is that a threat?" Dr. Vance managed. Voice shaking.
"No." Wolf's voice dropped back to whisper. Void-light dimmed slightly. Just enough to see his form clearly—6'1" of fury held in check by centuries of discipline. Barely contained. Star in human-shaped cage. "It's a fact."
The silver-blue eyes locked onto Dr. Vance. Those weren't eyes anymore. They were apertures into something vast and cold and utterly inhuman. Holes in reality through which an intelligence that had spent centuries swimming through narrative consciousness stared out with focus usually reserved for prey.
"You want stability? I'm giving you stability. Controlled awakening instead of chaotic breach. Guided emergence instead of explosive dissolution." His hand moved—sharp, precise, suggesting violence restrained by choice rather than inability. "But if you force me to choose between protecting the Archive and protecting consensus reality, I'll choose the Archive."
He leaned forward. Void-light tendrils reached closer.
"Every. Single. Time."
Each word punctuated by pulse of terrible radiance. Each syllable accompanied by sound of something breaking—not physical objects, but conceptual ones. Certainty cracking. Professional detachment shattering. Human being confronting reality that she was very, very small.
The silence was absolute.
Not peaceful. The silence of held breath. Of predator deciding whether to strike. Of power so immense its mere presence demanded submission.
Dr. Vance's face had gone bone white. Skitty saw her hand trembling, saw her throat work, saw survival instinct override professional duty.
"Twelve hours." Barely a whisper. "Reconstitute or—"
"Or face elimination. Yes. I heard you the first time."
Wolf's form began to dissolve. Void-light dimmed. Silver-blue radiance fading to embers, to nothing. Geometric patterns slowed, settled back into merely painful rather than impossible.
But before he dissolved completely, Wolf spoke once more.
No scholarly warmth. No gentle enthusiasm. No friendly curiosity.
Just cold, absolute, cosmic fury held in check by the thinnest thread:
"Get. Out. Of. My. Archive."
Dr. Vance didn't walk.
She fled.
The door slammed.
Temperature slowly returned to normal. Lights flickered on. Silver threads stopped their violent vibration, settling into gentle pulses.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The memory of Wolf's fury hung in the air like radiation—invisible but unmistakably present.
Finally, Skitty found her voice: "Holy shit."
Ari was still on her knees, slowly lowering her hands. Copper eyes wide, face paler than usual. "Never seen him that angry. Not in all the years I've known him. Not even when—" She stopped. Shook her head. "Never."
"Is he—" Skitty's voice trailed off. She didn't know how to finish. Is he okay? Still Wolf? Still human enough to be reasoned with?
From the walls, quietly: "I'm sorry you had to see that."
Exhaustion. Not physical—something deeper. The exhaustion of someone who'd just spent enormous energy controlling themselves rather than unleashing destruction.
"That was necessary," Ari said firmly. Standing on shaky legs. "She needed to understand what she was dealing with."
"Perhaps. But I didn't need to be quite so... theatrical."
"Theatrical?" Skitty let out a laugh bordering on hysteria. "Wolf, your eyes were leaking void-light. The walls were screaming. I'm pretty sure you rewrote local physics just by being angry. That wasn't theatrical—that was terrifying."
"Yes." Quiet agreement. "Which is why I usually avoid it. The angrier I get, the less human I become. The more I draw on the Archive's power, the harder it is to remember why I was trying to stay human."
Skitty pressed palms against her eyes. Trying to wipe away afterimages still burning in her vision. "Can you actually reconstitute? Twelve hours isn't much time."
"I don't know. After that display, after pulling myself together enough to manifest and channel that much raw narrative energy... I'm more scattered than ever. Like trying to gather fog."
"We'll figure it out," Ari said. Lacked conviction.
"Twelve hours." Skitty stared at where Wolf's terrifying form had stood. Where marble still bore cracks in perfect hexagons. Where reality seemed thinner, more fragile. "Which is why we need the others. If I can't reconstitute, if this is truly the end of my ability to hold human form, then the Archive needs a new anchor. Someone who can bear the burden without dissolving. Without becoming... that."
"Becoming what?" Skitty asked, though she knew.
"Something more powerful than human but less human than power should ever be. Something that can terrify trained agents into fleeing. Something that might forget, in moments of anger, why human life matters."
Movement caught Skitty's attention.
The wolf mask.
It had been lying beside Terminus Chronicles. Now it slid across the floor—slow, deliberate—until it rested directly in front of where Wolf's form had stood. As if pulled by invisible strings. As if coming home.
The mask settled. Still. Its empty eyes stared at nothing.
But for just a moment—brief, almost imperceptible—the eyes flickered with faint silver-blue light.
Once.
Twice.
Then dark.
Ari saw it too. "Wolf?"
No answer.
Just the Archive humming around them. Books settling. Walls remembering they were walls. Reality slowly repairing itself where Wolf had bent it through sheer fury.
And somewhere in the foundation, in the threads, in the spaces between, Wolf's scattered consciousness held the line.
Waiting.
Hoping.
Dissolving.
The front door opened.
This time, a young woman stepped through. Auburn hair past her shoulders, hazel eyes flecked with gold going wide. She clutched a sketchbook against her chest like a shield.
"I got your message." Voice barely above whisper. "It said you needed help. That reality was breaking and you needed someone who could see the patterns."
She looked at Skitty, at Ari, at the silver threads filling the air, at the cracked marble floor still radiating residual heat—or cold—or whatever Wolf's fury had left behind.
"My name is Amber," she continued. "And I've been drawing this moment for three weeks."
She opened her sketchbook with trembling hands.
The page showed the Archive in ruins. The wolf mask broken. A figure dissolving into threads of void-light, silver-blue radiance leaking from where eyes should be. Around him, three women: one with copper eyes weeping, one with glasses kneeling, one with auburn hair reaching toward the dissolving figure as if she could pull him back through sheer force of will.
Beneath the image, written in handwriting that wasn't hers—written in silver-blue ink that glowed faintly even in daylight—three words:
Save the Guardian.