Blending in didn't mean drifting.
It meant choosing where to stand so I could see without being seen.
The town was called Hearthroot. I learned that on my second day, after asking three different people and getting three slightly different explanations. It sat where old routes met new ones, built around deep stone foundations and thick-rooted trees that never quite died. Initiates passed through. Veterans rested here. Residents stayed because it was stable enough to survive and small enough to notice changes.
That made it useful.
I started with work that matched me.
Freelance scribing. Record running. Copying notices, logging transactions, delivering sealed records between shops, guild desks, and the town registrar. Nothing glamorous. Nothing dangerous. Exactly the kind of thing people trusted you with when they didn't know you well enough to worry.
The first person to hire me was a human woman named Lessa who ran a supply ledger near the square.
"You write clean," she said, skimming my sample. "And you don't ask unnecessary questions."
"I ask the necessary ones," I replied.
She smiled. "That's better."
From there, it spread. A beastkin tanner who needed delivery confirmations. A small Wayfarer group that wanted their contract terms copied properly. A shrine caretaker who needed old prayers cataloged and indexed.
I moved through Hearthroot with purpose.
Archivist work didn't look like much from the outside. To most people, I was just another quiet worker with a slate tucked under his arm. But every task put me in rooms where people talked freely. Every errand carried me past shrines, guild boards, and half-forgotten markers etched into stone.
I listened.
People talked about gods the way they talked about weather. Not with devotion, but with awareness.
"High gods don't answer directly," an older Wayfarer told me while I waited for a document seal to dry. "They don't need to. If they move, the world feels it."
"Then how do people reach them?" I asked casually.
He shrugged. "They don't. Gods notice."
That answer came up often.
I copied shrine records next. Not the big ones. The quiet corners. Shrines that no longer received offerings. Names half-scratched out. Deities no one prayed to anymore.
Failure Converter stirred faintly when I read those.
Places abandoned by belief still carried weight.
At night, I organized what I'd learned. Patterns. Names. Locations. Gods that hadn't answered in decades. Contracts rumored but never confirmed. Mentions of pacts that went wrong.
No instructions.
No maps.
Just absence.
And absence, I was learning, mattered.
By the end of the week, people in Hearthroot knew me as if I'm one of them.
Not by name. By function.
"The scribe," they'd say. "The runner. The quiet one who finishes work."
That was enough.
If gods noticed anything at all, it wasn't prayers shouted into the sky.
It was imbalance.
And I was starting to understand where Hearthroot's balance was thinnest.
I tightened the strap of the pouch at my waist and stepped back into the street, slate in hand.
Blending in was working.
Now I just had to wait for something to fail.
~~~
My room in Hearthroot was barely larger than a storage cell.
One narrow bed. A desk pushed against the wall. Shelves stacked with borrowed ledgers and half-deciphered tablets. It wasn't uncomfortable, just temporary, the kind of place meant for people who didn't plan to stay long.
I was only able to afford it because of the coins Elder Caelum placed in my belt pouch. For someone like me, who had nothing except the few coins we were given before the assessment, it was a small treasure.
I sat at the desk, scanning a thin book with cracked binding, copying symbols into my slate and cross-checking them with two other texts. Shrine dialect. Old. Fading. The kind of work no one wanted because it took patience more than skill.
A knock broke the quiet.
I looked up. "Come in."
The door opened and Nyra stepped inside.
She was a cat-type beastkin, short dark ears flicking once as she took in the mess of papers and books. Her tail swayed lazily behind her. She wore fitted town clothes and carried herself with the ease of someone who knew people noticed her and didn't particularly care.
Nyra was technically my assistant. In practice, she handled clients, payments, and reminders while I handled the work.
"I've got something new," she said, nudging the door closed with her foot.
Behind her, two town workers strained in a heavy wooden crate before setting it down on the floor with a dull thud. Nyra waved them off and crouched, tapping the lid once.
"Someone passing through from the capital," she said. "Part of the Royal Family's personal Wayfarer unit. Just returned from an expedition."
My pen paused.
"That's… high profile," I said.
"Mm," Nyra replied, unimpressed. "They wanted someone discreet to sort through this before bothering the palace archivists. Interpret symbols. Identify relic functions. Record provenance. That sort of thing."
She glanced at the crate like it was already boring her.
"They don't want it touched by anyone loud," she added. "So they came here."
That alone told me enough.
Nyra straightened and pointed at the stack of documents on my desk. "Finish your current project first. Once both are done, we can demand payment properly." Her tail flicked. "I need that extra gold."
I nodded. "I'll prioritize it."
She studied me for a moment longer than necessary.
"You're doing fine," she said at last. "For someone not from Aetherfall."
I looked up. "Is that supposed to be reassuring?"
She shrugged, lips curving slightly. "Take it how you want."
Nyra turned toward the door, waving once over her shoulder. "Don't stay up all night. Or do. Just don't miss deadlines."
Then she was gone.
The room fell quiet again.
I stared at the crate on the floor.
Capital. Royal unit. Expedition.
Whatever was inside hadn't been meant for someone like me.
Which meant, inevitably, it would be,
if the Failure Converter stirring in its active mode was any indication.
~~~
The crate waited until night.
Not because I planned it that way, but because Hearthroot grew quieter after sunset, and I needed the quiet. Lamps lit the streets outside in soft amber lines. From my window, I could hear distant voices, laughter fading as doors closed.
I set aside the book I had been working on and knelt in front of the crate.
It was heavier than it looked. Old wood reinforced with metal corners, scratched and dented in places that told stories better left unspoken. There were no seals. No locks. Just a lid that resisted slightly when I pressed my fingers against it.
I hesitated.
Then I opened it.
The smell came first. Not rot. Not dust. Something dry and cold, like stone that had never seen sunlight. Inside, layers of cloth wrapped several objects, each separated carefully from the others.
I unwrapped the first.
A shard of black metal, no longer than my palm. Its surface was dull, but when the light caught it just right, faint lines shimmered beneath, shifting and then disappearing. I marked it mentally and set it aside.
The second item was worse.
A fragment of bone.
Not animal. Not human. Too smooth, too heavy for its size. Symbols had been carved into it, shallow and deliberate, but they refused to settle in my mind. I could see them, yet every time I tried to understand their meaning, my thoughts slid away.
I frowned.
That wasn't normal.
Archivist memory didn't fail.
I tried again, slower this time.
The symbols still refused me.
A faint pressure stirred in my chest. Not panic. Not fear. Just awareness. Failure Converter shifted, reacting not to danger, but to something that did not behave the way it should.
I wrapped the bone back up carefully.
The third object was sealed in a glass case.
Inside lay a thin disc of stone etched with a circular pattern. The center had been scratched out violently, as if someone had tried to erase it with a blade. The edges were smooth. The erasure was not.
I stared at it for a long moment.
Names were supposed to be preserved in records. Scratched out meant someone had gone out of their way to make sure it could not be spoken.
I tried to record it.
The System hesitated.
That alone made my breath catch.
A thin ripple passed through my vision, then the record failed to complete. No error message. No warning. Just refusal.
I sat back slowly.
This crate was not meant to be sorted quickly.
It was not meant to be sorted at all.
I closed the lid and leaned against the desk, heart steady, mind racing. Whatever expedition this had come from, it hadn't gone as planned. And whoever brought it here had known the palace archivists would not accept it quietly.
The expedition group knew.
They had known from the start.
If they hadn't, the items would have gone straight to the capital. Straight to the palace. Straight to people who could handle dangerous things with authority and silence.
Instead, they brought it here.
To Hearthroot.
To a small town. To a freelance scribe. To someone easy to overlook.
My stomach twisted.
They hadn't come here because the crate was harmless.
They had come here because it wasn't.
Whatever lay inside carried something more than history. A residue. A consequence. Something that responded to attention itself. Reading it. Naming it. Trying to understand it.
A curse, maybe. Or something worse than a curse.
A responsibility.
If someone in the capital opened it, the fallout would be loud. Political. Impossible to contain. If something went wrong there, questions would follow.
Here, it would be quiet.
An accident. A lone scribe who touched something he shouldn't have. An unfortunate incident before proper evaluation.
I opened my eyes and looked at the crate.
They hadn't wanted answers.
They had wanted distance.
I swallowed and stepped closer, resting my hand lightly on the lid without opening it. The pressure in my chest eased slightly, like the room acknowledging restraint.
I didn't need faith to recognize it.
I was already certain that what lay inside the crate was tied to a divine being. Not a spirit. Not a powerful relic. A god. Fallen, broken, or reduced to fragments, but divine all the same.
Archivist clarity did not arrive as a sudden realization. It settled piece by piece.
I reopened the crate, this time not to touch, but to compare.
The black metal shard, the bone fragment, the defaced disc. They did not share material, origin, or age. What they shared was absence. Each item carried a gap where meaning should have been. Not missing by decay, but removed deliberately.
I focused and let Archive Mark take hold.
Details sharpened.
The cloth around the bone was shrine linen, but not dedicated to any active god. The weave pattern matched records from minor shrines that had been abandoned long before Hearthroot was founded. Shrines people went to when no one else answered.
The metal shard carried stress patterns unlike weapons or tools. It had not been forged or broken by force. It had been separated. Cut away from something that was not meant to be divided.
Then there was the disc.
The outer symbols were intact. Titles, not names. Words meant to describe function rather than identity. I copied them slowly, letting Recorded Replay pull from every similar script I had ever studied.
Answerer of last vows.
Bearer of unwanted truth.
Listener when all others turn away.
Those weren't roles gods claimed proudly.
They were burdens given.
I sat still, breathing evenly, and tried to assemble the record the way it should have existed.
That was when Failure Converter stirred again.
Not violently. Not urgently.
It reacted to a collapse in logic.
If a god held a domain like this, they would attract prayers no one else wanted. Confessions. Regret. Requests that should never be granted. That kind of god would not grow stronger. They would wear down.
If they broke.
If they fell.
Then their name would become dangerous.
Failure Converter supplied the missing step without emotion.
The expedition team had not triggered a curse by touching the items.
The curse was the attempt to finish the record.
They had interrupted something unfinished.
Something that still expected an answer.
My fingers tightened slightly against the edge of the crate.
This wasn't a dead god.
It was a god who had been pushed past usefulness and left incomplete.
Someone had taken them apart, scattered what remained, and scratched out their name so they could not respond even if called.
And yet.
The artifacts still existed.
The record still resisted closure.
Which meant they did too.
I exhaled slowly.
"So that's it," I murmured.
Not a relic problem or a political problem.
A broken divine presence that no one wanted to acknowledge, but no one had fully ended.
Archivist confirmed what was missing.
Failure Converter confirmed why it mattered.
Whatever they had been, they were not done.
And now that their remains were here, neither was I.