The Paper Tomb

The Paper Tomb
Rina Cassius - Senate Archives

The silence was absolute, but it was heavy. It pressed against Rina’s eardrums like deep water.

She was not dead. She knew this because the pain in her left leg was sharp, bright, and immediate, a screaming nerve that anchored her to the world.

Rina coughed, and the sound was swallowed instantly by the darkness. The air tasted ancient—a dry, choking mixture of pulverized stone and the rotting sweetness of decaying parchment. It was the taste of dead words.

She tried to sit up, but her head struck something hard. Wood. Oak.

She reached up, her fingers tracing the rough grain of the surface inches above her nose. It was a shelf. A massive, towering unit of the Archives that had toppled over during the tremor, creating a triangular pocket of air against the stone wall.

She was buried.

Buried alive in the tomb of Seda’s ignored history.

"Fitting," she rasped, the irony bitter on her tongue. She had come down here to find the truth the Senate wanted to bury, and the Senate had simply dropped the building on top of her instead.

She shifted her leg, gritting her teeth against the flare of pain. Not broken. Just pinned.

Her hand brushed against something crinkled and stiff near her waist. The scroll. The shipping manifest from Three-Bridges Crossing. She grabbed it, shoving it into the sash of her dress. It was no longer just evidence; it was justification. It was the only real thing in a world of dust.

If I die down here, she thought, a cold anger overriding her panic, Senator Varrus wins. And I will not let that fat coward win.

She felt along the floor. Dust. Debris. Shattered glass from the lantern she’d been holding. And then... a draft.

A thin, cool current of air was moving near her feet.

Rina scrambled backward, dragging her bruised leg, squirming through the narrow gap between the fallen shelf and the wall. The dust clogged her nose, making her eyes water, but she kept moving toward the draft. Sharp splinters of oak tore at her silk dress, snagging her skin, but she pushed through, fueled by a claustrophobic fury.

She squeezed through a final, jagged gap in the wreckage and tumbled out into the main corridor of the Archives.

It was a ruin. The ceiling had not just cracked; parts of it had come down, exposing the jagged, weeping wounds of the city's infrastructure.

But there was light.

It wasn't the warm glow of sun or lantern. It was a sick, jaundiced yellow light filtering down from the stairwell—the same unnatural color she had seen in the stained glass, now made real.

And down that stairwell came a sound that chilled her more than the silence.

It was not screaming. It was weeping. Soft, confused, pathetic weeping.

Rina pulled herself to her feet, leaning heavily against the wall until the dizziness passed. She dusted the pulverized law from her dress, checked that the scroll was secure against her ribs, and began to climb.

The spiraling stone stairs were cracked, shifting under her weight with grinding protests. As she ascended, the air grew hotter, smelling of sulfur, ozone, and something metallic—the scent of a storm that had nothing to do with weather.

She reached the top of the stairs and pushed open the heavy iron door to the Senate antechamber.

She stopped.

The Grand Hall, the "monument to Seda's aspirations," was gone.

The vaulted ceiling had collapsed inward. The magnificent stained-glass windows, which had bathed the floor in "blood-red and royal-blue" only an hour ago, had been blown out. Shards of colored glass littered the floor like confetti from a massacre.

The chamber was open to the sky, but the sky was wrong. A massive pillar of oily, black smoke dominated the horizon, churning like a living thing, blotting out the sun.

But it was the floor of the Senate that held her horror.

The Senators—the men and women who debated grain prices while children starved—were scattered like dolls in a shaken box.

Some were buried under the marble rubble. Others were wandering aimlessly, covered in white dust, looking like ghosts in their own house. The air was thick with the dust of the collapse, turning the wealthy and powerful into statues of ash.

Near the podium, she saw Councilor Varrus. The man who had fussed with his documents and trembled with fear.

He was sitting on a pile of shattered masonry, clutching a single, severed velvet curtain tie-back as if it were a lifeline. He was rocking back and forth, staring at a patch of empty air.

"The procedure," Varrus was mumbling, his voice a broken loop. "We must... we must table the motion. The motion is... out of order. Out of order..."

Rina stepped over a fallen pillar. She looked for her father.

She found Senator Cassius standing near the jagged hole where the main doors used to be. He was physically untouched by the rubble, his robes still pristine, but he was staring at the pillar of smoke with a look of utter, devastating confusion.

He looked small. He looked like an old man lost in a storm.

"Father," Rina said. Her voice was steady. The fear she had felt in the dark was gone, burned away by the sight of their incompetence.

Cassius turned slowly. He looked at her, blinking through the dust, but he didn't seem to recognize her. "Rina? The... the vote. We didn't finish the vote. The quorum..."

"The vote doesn't matter, Father," she said, stepping closer. She reached into her sash and pulled out the crumpled scroll, holding it up like a weapon. "The war is here."

She looked past him, through the shattered doors, out toward the burning city.

"And you are all out of time."

Cassius blinked, a flicker of the commanding orator returning to his eyes, but it was brittle now. A mask made of glass. "We must convene the emergency quorum. The guards... I must summon Zalim. We need to secure the perimeter of the district. We need to draft a statement..."

"There is no perimeter," Rina said, her voice cold and hard as the stone beneath her feet. She pointed to the smoke rising from the Refinery District. "That isn't a raid, Father. It’s an infection. The city is sick, just like the Sanguine reports said. Just like I said."

"Do not use that word!" Cassius snapped, his voice cracking. "It is a disaster. An industrial accident. The Council will manage it. We have protocols! We have laws!"

He reached out, grabbing her wrist with a desperate strength. "You will stay here, Rina. It is safe here. The walls are thick."

Rina looked at the hand on her wrist. It was the hand that had signed treaties and trade embargoes, the hand that had guided her childhood. Now, it felt like the grip of a drowning man trying to pull her under.

She looked up at the "thick walls" that had crumbled into dust around them.

"The walls are gone, Father," she whispered.

She twisted her wrist. It was shockingly, heartbreakingly easy to break his grip.

"I am going," she stated.

"Going? Where? The streets are chaos! There are rioters! Animals!"

"To find someone who isn't debating while the world burns," Rina said. She didn't mention the scroll. She didn't mention the Three-Bridges. He wouldn't understand. He would just see it as another breach of protocol.

She turned her back on him.

"Rina!" he called after her, his voice rising in a panic that sounded suspiciously like a child's fear of the dark. "If you leave this hall... if you walk out those doors... you abandon your duty! You abandon your family!"

Rina paused at the threshold of the ruined doors. The heat from the burning city hit her face, carrying the scent of sulfur, fear, and the sickly-sweet rot of the Sanguine magic.

"My family," she said, not looking back, "is dead. He died when he chose the law over the truth."

She stepped over the threshold and out of the Senate.

The plaza outside, usually a pristine expanse of white stone and manicured gardens, was a war zone. The statue of the First Lawgiver had been decapitated by falling debris, its stone head rolling into the fountain, the water turning murky with ash.

People—servants, clerks, lesser nobles—were running. Not the organized evacuation her father imagined, but a blind, animal stampede.

Rina tightened the sash around her waist, feeling the crinkle of the parchment against her ribs. She took a breath, tasting the ash, and began to run.

She wasn't running away. For the first time in her life, she was running toward something.

She headed down the hill, away from the ivory towers, descending into the smoke and the screaming, toward the only place that made sense anymore: The streets.