By the time the amber arrived, frost spidered through the seams, needled her soles, and dimmed the mosslamps as she lit them. The dome swallowed the light and turned it bruise-dark.

 

The girl who brought the pouch, maybe eleven, stayed quiet. No name offered. Just silence and a trail of melting bootprints. Her eyes carried the dazed shimmer of descent. She set the velvet bundle down with both hands, as though sound alone might scatter it.

 

Inside lay thirty-one pieces of neural amber, warm and honey-gold. Synaptic traceries spiraled frozen within, glinting with the sheen of consciousness barely cooled. The Archivist passed her fingers across them. The air tightened. The enchantment had grown slow as lichen, feeding on years, on lives.

 

She kept her questions to herself. The dead gave fragments. The living bore the weight in silence. That was the cycle. Cold. Efficient. Nothing sacred about it.

 

She picked up the first piece of amber, pressed it to the neural filament at her temple, and closed her eyes.

 

The outpost vanished.

 

She flew. Or fell backward, too fast, through memory. Wind tore at her skin. Three suns bled into one. A voice called her name, unfamiliar, yet it struck her heart like it had always lived there.

 

When she returned, her fingers trembled. The amber pieces scattered across the table, their internal patterns seeming to pulse in the lamplight.

 

It always began like that.

 

Archivists burned out. Most buckled beneath memory's weight. She carved herself hollow deliberately, pared down to what could hold others. These days, her name slipped in strangers' mouths, unraveling before it landed.

 

The third piece: a blown-glass station beside Neptune, brittle with cold. Breaths were traded. Secrets passed from mouth to mouth. She surfaced choking. The air clawed her lungs, too rich, too sudden.

 

The sixth: a love story scorched across hatchways. Two voices, names drowned in static, drifting past each other. She followed one with her fingertip, pressing hard into the table's edge.

 

The ninth: a woman whispering a name near a heat coil until her voice broke. Iron filled the Archivist’s mouth; grief pressed at her gums. She steadied herself against the wall until the name disappeared.

 

The tenth: a meadow strewn with mirrors. Each showed a self she might've become: tired, kind, cruel, gone. She lingered near one too long. It fractured. Later, when she reached for her teacher's name, it slipped like frost through her fingers.

 

The eleventh: lilac, melted metal, the stillness before snow.

 

The fifteenth: floorboards. A low hum. A door between them. She stayed too long. When she returned, tears slid down her cheeks, the tune clinging like smoke.

 

The seventeenth: a child hiding beneath a collapsing ceiling. Her hands clenched instinctively, shattering the amber. Its synaptic patterns split like frozen lightning. Blood welled sharp in her palm.

 

Some memories burned. Others split and stayed open. None lifted. They dragged through her limbs like ore, slow and anchoring.

 

She recorded what she could, voice even, cadence careful, as if sealing a hatch before air slipped free.

 

Then, the twenty-third.

 

She paused.

 

It was small, chipped, its amber cloudy with age. Dark neural pathways twisted through its core like captured smoke. She turned it between her fingers, then pressed it to the filament.

 

The room swayed. Her hands shrank. Shoulders curled. The dome arched overhead.

 

A girl sat across from her, eyes wide, posture strung tight, as if shaped from a question too long unspoken.

 

She knew that face.

 

This amber held her: the frost-walk, the pouch, the hope braided through every footfall. The hope that someone might see her.

 

The Archivist didn't move. She paused, breath snagging, wrapping itself around a name unlearned but already carried. The other pieces stayed quiet, their internal patterns dim.

 

Outside, the wind leaned harder against the dome.

 

She turned the pouch over. Spread the amber pieces into a rough circle, their honey-gold surfaces catching the lamplight.

 

They weren't tools anymore. Not remnants either. They were offerings. Names she hadn't dared shape aloud.

 

She began again. Without a script. Without a frame. Her voice shook, roughened from what it had been made to bear.

 

You came, she said. I saw you falter. I heard your breath catch. I felt the moment you turned.

 

Still, you crossed.

 

Maybe the girl would return. Not with more amber. Perhaps just with a name, or a question left to steep too long.

 

But someone had to remain, holding open the latch. To whisper, I carried it with you.

 

And in doing so, something in her cracked. Her breath stuttered. A part of her she'd never named — hope, grief, recognition — slipped forward and stayed.

 

She chose that.