Chapter 32 — Echoes of the Broken Codex

Silence fell like ash.

The storm of yarn cascaded gently, unpicking until memory shreds wafted in the breeze. Yusuf lay on the ground, chest heaving, the Codex heavy in his hand. Its radiance had declined, but the pages still trembled with an independent life, the writing squirming across the vellum, reconstituting itself before him.

The faceless child knelt beside him, small hands pressing against his arm where the Harvester's claw had nicked him. Beams of light seeped into the gash, sewing skin with painful precision. Yusuf winced.

"You came so close to losing yourself," the child panted, voice gentle but sharp. "The Codex came so close to claiming you."

Yusuf clenched his teeth and sat up. His body screamed in protest as if it had been rent apart and crudely stitched back together. "I had no other option. It was the only way of keeping them away.".

The battlefield was lost. There remained only a half-world, shattered into drifting slabs of stone and limitless sky. The Harvester had vanished into nonexistence, but its ghost lingered—an echo of hunger eating at the edges of being.

The hooded man, too, was gone. There remained only a single thread where he had stood, white as snow and trembling faintly in the air. Yusuf reached out to stroke it.

The moment his fingers made contact with it, a whisper entered his mind:

"Preservation is death, Yusuf. You cannot save the past—you can only rewrite it."

Yusuf jerked back, acid burning in his throat. The voice was too close, too intimate. It wasn't only the hooded figure's—it had a resonance of his father's voice, the same crisp economy, the same scorn for weakness.

He clenched his fists. "He knows me. He knows my father."

The child tilted his head. "He knows because he has walked where you have walked. He may have been what you are becoming once."

Yusuf's breath burned. "An Archivist?"

The child said nothing. His silence was proof enough.

For a moment, Yusuf heard nothing but the gentle rustling of the Codex's pages. They flipped by themselves, revealing to him fragments of worlds he had touched—Rae's face rendered in shrinking ink, the crumbling riverlands, the sunlit kingdom stuck in its endless day. All of them now carried the mark, the wounds of the Harvester's touch.

He wanted to close it, to shove it shut and leave it that way. But the Codex would not be silenced, pounding like a living heart.

"Today you said it almost consumed me," Yusuf snarled. "What if it does finish it?"

The boy's voice trembled. "Then you will no longer be Yusuf. You will be mere Archivist—the book's capricious wish incarnate."

His gut dropped. He shoved his palms to his face, tugging down hard. The memory of the duel still burned him: the sensation of cradling the Codex, of fighting not as quarry but as with power. And that same power had flipped the line between him and the book.

He shuddered at the thought.

But there was one truth that cut through the fog: the robed man wasn't just an enemy. He was a warning.

Yusuf planted his feet firmly, wobbling. "Then I can't let him take the lead. If he's encountered my father—if he's walked this path—then he knows what I need to know."

The faceless child looked up at him, their tone soft. "And if those answers kill you?

Yusuf closed the Codex. For once, it let him.

“Then I’ll take that risk.”

He turned toward the edge of the broken world, where threads glowed faintly in the distance like stars in a dark sea. The next path awaited. He didn’t know what world it would open onto, or what enemies lay beyond—but he knew one thing:

This was no longer just about saving memory. It was about surviving it.

The vacant space yawned wide, the hairs tugged tight. Yusuf stepped ahead, and the world broke wide again.