First things first; he needed to treat these injuries before they got infected. And food! He needed to eat.
He limped toward the cottage's small bathroom, flipping on the light. The mirror showed him exactly how bad he looked.
His hair was a greasy, tangled mess. Dark circles hung under his eyes like bruises. His face was smudged with ash and soot. And his arm...
Jesus.
The burn stretched from wrist to elbow—angry, blistered, and already showing signs of the kind of scarring that would never fully fade.
But beneath the burn, glowing faintly through the damaged skin, was the mark.
The Custodian's brand.
Just then, a window popped up in his vision.
"SIGH; WILL CUSTODIAN ACCEPT THE SKILL "PHEONIX ASH "?"
Elias stopped, shocked at the display. The window was giving him attitude?
He had never stopped to think it had any personality but it sort of seemed exasperated with him. Also, could he gain skills? What was this phoenix ash?
His hands instinctively dragged over to the YES response. As soon as he pressed it, another window popped up.
"ACTIVATING SKILL, PHOENIX ASH."
A green glow wrapped around his being, coursing through every vein. In just a few seconds, he was good as new.
He had never seen anything like it. He quickly touched his body, running his hands all over the spots he knew he had been injured. He was really healed. Then, he caught a glimpse of the brand in the mirror.
Elias turned his arm slowly, watching the tattoo shift. It looked like a full sleeve of intricately detailed books—thousands of them, layered and spiraling around his forearm. Although it looked like tiny inscriptions of ancient letters to anybody else. Somehow, he understood it. In every single language that was written, he understood it.
He touched it gingerly with his other hand.
The moment his fingers made contact, his vision flooded with text.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CUSTODIAN STATUS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ NAME: ELIAS GRIMM
CLASS: CUSTODIAN OF TALES
RANK: NOVICE (LEVEL 1)
ARCHIVE INTEGRITY: 91%
ATTRIBUTES:
INTELLECT: 12
STRENGTH: 6
STAMINA: 6
MAGIC: 2
AGILITY: 10
WILLPOWER: 8
SKILLS:
READER'S EYE (D Rank): Perceive story structure, strength corruption patterns, and narrative paths within story worlds.
PHOENIX ASH (D Rank): Allows Custodian to heal from damage.
STORY SHARDS: 0
CORRUPTION EVENTS ACTIVE: 11
STORIES SAVED: 0
STORIES LOST: 1
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Elias stared at the message.
"Level one," he muttered. "Great. Just great."
His stats were abysmal. Stamina at 6? That explained why he felt like a truck had run him over. And Willpower at 8—he'd literally been paralyzed with fear when that shadow thing had grabbed him.
But something struck his attention. Magic?
That was... something?
He dismissed the status screen with a spice of his hand and turned his attention back to the mirror. There
He splashed cold water on his face, then made for the main room of the cottage.
The Archive door stood at the back, still closed. He had never noticed it in all his time here but now he could see it even when he wasn't looking. Like it was haunting him. He ignored, walking past it as he began searching the cottage properly.
His grandfather had been a collector. A hoarder, really. Books were stacked everywhere, but there had to be something useful among them. Notes. Instructions. Anything.
He found it in the desk drawer.
A leather-bound journal, worn soft with age. His grandfather's handwriting filled the pages.
Elias sank into the desk chair and started reading.
June 3rd, 1982
The Archive chose me today.
I didn't want this. God knows I didn't. But the previous Custodian—my father—died today, and the Archive doesn't care about wants. It needs a guardian.
Father warned me before he passed. "The stories are alive," he said. "And something is trying to kill them."
I thought he'd lost his mind.
Then I saw It.
September 17th, 1985
Three years in. I've saved forty-two stories. Lost eleven.
The losses haunt me. Every single one.
But I'm getting better. Learning the patterns. It targets cornerstones first—characters or moments the entire story hinges on. If you can identify the corruption core fast enough, you have a chance.
If not...
Well.
I try not to think about the ones I failed.
November 2nd, 1993
Met a rather odd being today. Her name is Soraya Thorne.
She's been running for two centuries. Fighting him for just as long too. I can barely manage a decade without feeling like I'm losing my mind, and she's somehow still sane. Mostly.
She told me something that terrified me:
"It wasn't always like this. The corruption started like her."
She wouldn't tell me more. Said I wasn't ready to know.
I'm not sure I want to.
April 14th, 2003
Elias turned six today.
He asked me to tell him a story before bed. I told him about the Brave Little Tailor.
He loved it.
I wonder if he can feel it. The way stories hum when you're near them. He's always been drawn to books, even as a toddler.
I hope I'm wrong.
I hope the Archive never chooses him.
January 8th, 2025
I'm dying.
The doctors say it's pneumonia, but I know better. The Archive takes its toll. Forty-three years of diving into corrupted stories, breathing ash and shadow—it catches up eventually.
I have maybe weeks left.
And I still haven't told Elias.
How do you tell someone they're meant to inherit a curse?
But I have no choice. The corruption is accelerating. Archive integrity dropped below 95% for the first time in my tenure. If I die without a successor, the failsafe will trigger. The Archive will be left without a defense.
I can't let that happen.
It has to be Elias.
I've watched him his whole life. He's clever. Creative. Stubborn as hell. And he has something I never did—
He cares about stories the way they're meant to be cared for. Not as puzzles to solve or battles to win. But as living things.
God forgive me.
I'm going to trap him in this.
Elias closed the journal, hands trembling.
"You knew," he whispered. "You knew this whole time."
Anger flared—hot and bitter. His grandfather had planned this. Had groomed him for it without ever telling him the truth.