Chapter 16 – The Forbidden Indice
The passage to the Forbidden Indice was not a doorway.
It was a memory.
Buried in Kael's mind, nested deep within a recollection of rain, a cracked window, and a woman reading aloud to him from a book that had no title.
"Where stories fear to go," she'd whispered. "The Indice remembers."
Now, with the Scribeling's notebook in his satchel and the glyph still pulsing faintly on the Page, Kael spoke those exact words.
The rain returned.
Not around them—within them.
And the wall before them, made of tangled paragraphs and half-rhymes, melted like ink on skin.
They stepped through.
The Forbidden Indice was not a place. It was a structure of forgotten truths.
Floating lexicons orbited impossible staircases. Sentences crawled across the sky like serpents. And everywhere: silence, except for the rustle of phantom pages turning.
"This is where all erased knowledge ends up," Liora murmured. "Ideas that were too dangerous to be written. Names that unmade worlds."
A librarian stood at the gate.
But not like the others.
This one was faceless, cloaked in parchment robes stitched with redacted verses. It held a lantern with no flame—just a flicker of unresolved plot.
Kael stepped forward.
"We seek the Author."
The librarian didn't move. But a whisper filled the air, spoken in a dozen tongues all at once.
"Then you must read what was never written."
It led them inward.
Through halls where concepts screamed behind locked margins. Past broken pens impaled into walls. Along a corridor where every footstep rewound their memories for half a second.
Bran stumbled. "I don't like this place. It... edits us."
Kael opened the Scribeling's notebook. A fresh line had appeared.
"The Unwritten waits beneath the Index Root."
And next to it—handwritten in shaking ink:
"One of you will not leave."
They exchanged glances. No one spoke.
At the core of the Indice, they found the Index Root: a twisting pillar of rejected stories, branching into a dozen realities.
And in its base: a sealed volume.
No title. No author. Just a lock made of spoken doubt.
Kael touched it—and felt every insecurity he'd ever had threaten to unravel him.
Liora gripped his shoulder. "Let me try."
But the book responded to truth, not strength.
Kael took a deep breath, leaned forward, and whispered:
"I was never meant to be the hero. But I'm here anyway."
The lock clicked.
The volume opened.
Inside—no pages.
Just a mirror.
And in it, Kael saw someone watching him. Pen poised. Smiling faintly.
The Author.
But as the image came into focus, Kael gasped.
The Author had his face.