The Curator of Regret

It was a sudden and profound transformation. Where the Grove had engulfed him in a gentle, oppressive light, the little corridor plunged him into an impenetrable darkness. Entering the stifling, airless walls of a long-forgotten, sepulchral archive was like stepping out of the bright, sterile grounds of a sanatorium. A weird, almost electric calm settled over Zen's skin, a noticeable hum in the otherwise quiet air, and the air was thick and still, heavy with the unmistakable fragrance of centuries past—a dry, musty aroma of brittle ink, forgotten dust, and decaying paper. The incessant, repeating clang and groan of the outer construction, which had been so noticeable moments before, faded here to a distant, almost imperceptible thrum, as if the building were a hollow structure holding this silent, unsettling heart.

At the threshold, Zen paused, allowing his eyes a few precious seconds to begin gradually acclimating to the intense blackness. A short hallway that slopped gently, almost imperceptibly, downhill was the corridor in front of him. The constant, steady pulse of the data chip's signal throbbed more intensely on his reader, like a lighthouse leading him farther into the unknown. His free hand extended and touched the cold, smooth wall of the corridor. Like tightly packed paper or ancient, treated hide, it gave slightly yet seemed uncannily resilient.

Rather than stepping out into a small space, he entered a room so big it took his breath away. He was overwhelmed with a profound, incredulous awe, not fear, which is why his breath caught. He stood on a tiny promenade, a slender road ribbon that encircled a massive cylindrical void. Above, the space soared to unthinkable heights, swallowed by a dark emptiness that showed no signs of a ceiling. It plunged below into equally unfathomable depths, a seemingly limitless void of darkness. Furthermore, every surface imaginable—including the gracefully curved walls, the far, invisible base deep below, and even, it seemed, the air itself—was composed of or covered in paper.

Sheets of material, old, yellowed, brittle, and greyed with age, were gathered into tall, unsteady columns that swayed gently in some unseen current, like sentient reeds in a silent wind. Scrolls with fragile, faded ribbons that had lost their color over time were kept in innumerable alcoves carved into the paper-covered walls. He saw the same meticulous, incomprehensible script on the pillars outside, and the pages of open ledgers hung in mid-air as if frozen in mid-turn by an invisible hand. The letter itself pulsed with a faint, internal glow that gave a ghostly gloss to the whirling and eddieing motes of paper dust in the still air. The lettering itself appeared to be the source of the scant illumination. It was an inconceivably vast library, a quiet, orderly repository of lost knowledge, or perhaps more accurately, a graveyard of accumulated tragedies.

And at the precise geometric center of this vast repository, a dais floated there, suspended with unfathomable beauty. A single, tiny bridge, seemingly composed of tightly folded, interwoven parchment, connected it to the walkway where Zen stood. A person standing atop the dais.

Zen experienced a profound shock beyond anything he had ever experienced. This was not merely strange; it was the manifestation of something entirely alien, something so deeply ingrained in its own incomprehensible, mad logic that it throbbed on a primitive level of disbelief. He had wrestled with uncertainty, faced anxiety, and faced the unfamiliar, but nothing had prepared him for this.

She was made of paper. Not clothed in it, but made of it by nature. Her tall, willowy body appeared to be a lovely arrangement of innumerable overlapping sheets, with their edges arranged like the delicate, layered petals of an ethereal flower or the time-thinned, fragile pages of a priceless, ancient book. Her flowing robes were adorned with a writing that shimmered and reconfigured themselves with her slightest tilt, a live, moving tapestry of unintelligible decisions and announcements. The real robes fell around her like loose scrolls, rustling with a sound less loud than a sigh. Her face was serene and the hue of the palest vellum, with the exquisite stillness of a ceremonial paper mask. But when her eyes slowly opened to stare at him like pools of shadow, they revealed an aged, weary intellect. They emitted an interior light, like flaming embers safely trapped beneath old parchment. She was surrounded by sheets of official-looking documents that resembled proclamations; the wording on them glowed faintly, and each one had the now-familiar, sharply divided circle on it.

Except for the deliberate, steady blink of her brilliant eyes, she was still. The room fell silent, only broken by the nearly imperceptible rustle of paper, which sounded like a thousand whispered confidences and a collective sigh of years.

As if the ancient stones of a library had found their own language, her voice echoed softly and filled the enormous chamber with a weird carrying effect. It was dry, but it had a distinct, resonant sound, imbued with an enormous weight of years of buildup and an equally incalculable grief, like the rustle of fall foliage or the turning of frail pages.

"Cartographer." Each word hung poised in the electric air, precisely and exquisitely enunciated. Zen felt the vibration more than heard it as it reverberated through the fundamental structure of the archive. Her piercing, unwavering gaze was fixed on his diary, then on his reader, and then on the collection of gadgets he was carrying. "Your goals are exposed by your instruments. Analysis is followed by violation. There is no way someone could ever invade this land, this sanctuary.

Zen stayed motionless on the walkway, the weight of her presence and the entire impossible chamber pressing down on him. The signal, the object of his relentless pursuit, the urgent, blinking light on his reader, pulsed with undeniable clarity from a point directly beneath the paper-formed monster on the center dais. He had reached the origin. He had found the curator of this enormous, silent, paper-bound museum of grief.