Threadless : A growing novel

"Some memories aren't hidden.

They're buried alive."

Rin didn't knock.

The wall had blinked first. That was the sign.

He stepped through the west courtyard mirror — not shattering it, not even bending it. He just walked, and the glass accepted him.

On the other side: a stairwell.

Black-stone steps leading downward, deeper than the school should allow.

The air smelled like wet ash and old ink. Not rot — something older.

Like silence that had been rewritten too many times.

At the bottom: a rusted archway.

Ink-Mining Workshop

Enter only if you're willing to touch what's still dreaming.

Rin exhaled. Walked in.

It was not a mine.

It was a library that had been carved out of bedrock and then forgotten before it could open.

Columns leaned under their own weight. Faint pulses of bioluminescent script glowed on stone walls. The shelves were uneven, some whispering to themselves in broken languages.

And at the center, a basin of liquid ink — shifting, alive.

A figure stood beside it.

Not masked. Not hidden.

Just… pale. Like he hadn't been remembered in years.

"Welcome," the man said. "You're early."

"I didn't schedule anything," Rin replied.

"You don't schedule this. You're summoned by your own forgetting."

The basin pulsed. The ink stirred.

"You'll be using this," the man said, handing Rin a tool that looked like a pickaxe made from broken fountain pens and threadbone.

"What do I mine?" Rin asked.

The man stepped aside.

Revealing a wall of raw script.

Sentences half-formed. Names half-erased.

Lines like veins in stone.

The man spoke gently now. Too gently.

"You're here to extract the truth.

Just be careful.

Some of it doesn't want to leave."

Rin stepped closer to the stone.

The sentences shimmered faintly. Some were in languages he'd never seen. Others were crossed out by something sharper than ink.

But one line near the bottom pulsed — like it had been waiting.

He raised the ink-pick.

Hesitated.

Then pressed his palm against the wall.

It was cold. Then warm. Then—

Alive.

A line carved itself into the stone beneath his touch.

Familiar.

From a time he couldn't place, but never forgot:"The thread isn't a path.

It's a wound that never closed."

Rin pulled his hand back.

His fingers were stained with ink.

But it wasn't dripping.

It was writing.