Chapter 20: The Fifth Bell

He didn't recall having walked there.

His hand was on Hina for a moment, and she was trembling with names she couldn't remember, and the next instant-- anything-- everything stood as silent as cold death. Not at ease. Something old, as a guilty thing a-waiting. Light was muted, useless. It did not drop so much as hang. Air was stalest, though not cloying. It was as quiet as in church or an open book or there between the ringing out simultaneously of a bell and its reverberation.

Haruto was deeply alone on a flat rock. Towering piles of books, scrolls, shreds of memory-- of books-- draped over him, as if time had stopped mid-breath. Others curled into whorls, and he was forced to recite parts that he didn't know: dad blowing away crumbs of a lunchbox, a student apologizing to the empty desk, a child screaming at a mirror.

The world was halved to rococo in remembrance.

Boundless and chaotic.

Above his head were bells that were as large as buildings. One of the bells was silver, one of demented porcelain, one of corroded copper, one of what looked like glassy mirror, the largest--blacked bronze scored with liberal tarnish.

That one tolled.

Dong. No rope, no visible machinery,--merely a dribble of damp sweet lute singing directly behind the eyes of Haruto.

He stumbled. The fall had somehow come back to him. But he didn't fall. Rather, he gazed at the fifth bell as it was slowly swaying as if it had been struck.

"Early." That voice had been spoken behind a drifting shelf of burning scrolls. Then came some learned person, not stepping, but gliding quietly and with viscose-free ease. She wore gowns of frayed linen that were inscribed upon in text. Her curls were knitted hair. She wore the old inky eyes. She possessed no tools of any kind, but wherever she left the trace of the self-inscription of what she touched. The Librarian.

Haruto didn't say anything. He was afraid that, in speaking, was losing something. She stood beside him and looked at him with a face devoid of expression.

I wished you not to grow so deep a-while, with Gray, she said. But you have the best idea of all about how to remember. That's always been your downfall."

"Who are you?"

He who spends writing, she told me. And I eschew the expense of the Path tread by the Cartographer.

Haruto looked about at the spires of aid for memory, and every single one of them was trembling in its death.

"Then you know what I've done."

I know what you have kept, I said. And how it which falls upon you.

His eyes continued to wander toward the bells.

"What are those?"

"Anchors," she answered quietly. Whenever you create one good enough a bell rings. Not cheering,--because it will be cheated out of--but because the system has been cheated.

Haruto glanced at his watch. The numbers were still rolling in hours but not in days. The bells had lent short of their length--one anchor after another was tightening the Archive towards breaking point.

Haruto's lips were dry. "How many tolled?"

She need not have pointed. He already knew.

it was Yamazaki, the first, he said. "Then… the girl in the hallway. My younger self. And…"

He faltered.

The night of which my father did not come home.

The Librarian nodded once.

Haruto felt the burden of such memories hardly once--the sensation, but the effect. His chest tightened. The poetry of the burden was gone. It was form.

I didn't forgive him, Haruto told himself. "I didn't do it for him."

"You didn't have to," she said. "You did it for yourself. That's why the bell answered."

His legs were shaking. Closing his eyes he remembers about the boy in the waiting chair. The can of soda. The corridor that never passed.

As he slammed them wide the fifth bell swung from side to side. It never tolled because of an echo. It tolled because of him.

"What does it mean?"

The Librarian spoke softly, but not low.

That the world is starting to recall that you are a stubborn exception and that you are not passing through. Countdown mode is unusual in the sense that you no longer simply exist in Archive but are actually building it yourself. Everything that you've anchored is accelerating the system to work against you. Where previously your time left was to be measured, now a measurement could be of how long the system can sustain itself in its condition around you. Haruto whirled about. But I don't need to break things.

"You do," she said. Because you have too vivid a memory. This city was built to be forgotten. You've refused to be forgotten along with it."

He backed away. "I didn't ask to be here."

"But you remained. And that has consequences."

There was a silence.

Haruto paused. So pondered halfway to himself:

Why Hina dissipates?

Librarian stood on the edge of the platform.

"You've noticed," she said.

"I cradled her," Haruto said. "I hugged her tight. I saw her shatter and convulse. But she keeps returning to me."

"She does," said the Librarian. "Of keeping what thou kept worming."

Haruto frowned. "What does that mean?"

"Not a single echo," the Librarian said. "She's your whole mix. The incredible breath that the people that you wish to hold in between, like a house that is made up of borrowed rooms."

He blew the words out of his lungs.

"No."

The Librarian said, "Your memory. Echo of an echo. And the deeper down you can get in here, the more you mend her and the less she holds on to what she once was.

Fists clenched at Haruto's hands.

"She's real."

"She is."

"Then I won't let her vanish."

The Librarian nodded it already does.

Above them, a bell cracked.

Not the fifth.

The second--the one that is bound to the bullied girl.

It broke along a hairline down its middle with a slow, chime of weep.

Haruto looked up in horror.

"I anchored her."

"And you pegged it where you liked," said the Librarian. "Nothing Grounded still remains the same. Memory is not conducive to preservation. It's alive."

Haruto looked back at her with a gaping mouth.

"What do I do?"

It was the first time that the Librarian winked.

"You keep going."

"That's it?"

"Or you quit. You gave the system everything that was left of you. Let Hina fade away peacefully. Let the bells ring no more."

Haruto said nothing.

His heart was loud enough.

Then the sky went over them dark.

There was a shape, gigantic in diameter, spherical in shape, starting to be bounded above the bells. Like an iris unfolding. Not observing—remembering.

And the platform trembled.

Her hand came down on the Librarian. A little rectangular book smaller than any hovered in her hand.

No title. Just a lock on its face.

She did not offer it to him. She shelved it.

In mid-air.

An empty space yawned and the book disappeared into it as if it had never been.

"What was that?" Haruto asked.

"Your path. Shelved."

He gazed upon her heart beating.

"Then what comes next?"

She turned to leave.

"The unshelved."

And vanished into fog.

Behind him, Hina stood.

Her legs were too wobbly and her posture too silent.

But she met his gaze.

"You came back," she said.

"I never went away," Haruto said.

"You look… older."

He nodded.

"So do you."

She took his hand.

Fingers touched.

And the world contracted to half.

The fifth bell was vibrating now above them--not yet a ring.

But a resonance.

And an unnamable storm waiting.