Bellamort. Shadow of alchemy

Chapter XI - The Page That Forgot Itself

It had been a morning of ashes, and the air smelled of wet grass and old parchment. Louis, Julien, and Elian rummaged through their father's office, determined to reconstruct, page by page, Antoine's diary. The untitled book was gone, but traces of it remained: fragments of sentences printed on the corners of burnt paper, spots of ink that still pulsed, like the blood of a wounded animal.

But Sofia wasn't looking for anything. She felt. The trace of the book vibrated at her fingertips like a cold current. It led her to the secret drawer in the office—the place where her father had once kept his correspondence with the Order. The drawer was empty... almost: stuck to its bottom, with extinguished wax, lay a single page. The paper, thick as tanned leather, had no title, no number. It didn't even have straight edges: the corners were rounded, the outline slightly jagged, as if it had been cut from another page.

— "I found it." Sophie's voice was barely audible, but in the dust-saturated silence of the room, each syllable fell like a bell.

Louis approached. He reached out to tear off the sheet, but the paper rippled, flashing a bluish spark. It seemed to refuse his touch.

— Don't touch it, Elian whispered. It's alive.

Julien took a thin silver blade and, with a surgeon's gesture, peeled away the remaining wax. The page slid into Sophie's palm of its own accord. At that moment, black words burst out on the surface, growing like roots, only to fade and disappear.

— What did you see? Louis asked, but Sophie shook her head.

Nothing. The page kept nothing; it erased its own sentences before the human eye could retain them. It was a memory that was canceled every time it was born.

Julien took a deep breath.

"It's a page that looks at itself," he said. Her father had isolated it as if it were a danger.

Sofia raised the sheet to the light. Where there should have been text, a single line now pulsated, written in negative light—letters of a cut umbrella:

"Either you accept the memory, or you lose it forever."

Suddenly, the room was bathed in a cold wind. The window opened, although it was closed with a bar. The parchments flew, and the page—as if attracted by something outside—rose slightly, ready to be carried by the current.

Sofia closed her hands over it. The wind stopped.

"We must read what refuses to remain," she said. But to read it, we must let it forget us.

Louis understood first. He cut his finger with the silver blade and, without hesitation, let a drop fall onto the paper. Instead of staining, the blood was absorbed, and the curve of the clot drew the silhouette of a key.

Julien made the same gesture. His drop traced the outline of a door.

Elian hesitated. Not because he was afraid, but because his blood was not like his brothers'. Finally, he squeezed an old wound on his wrist. His drop drew nothing: the page darkened in a complete circle, like a new moon.

Sofia brought the sheet to the lamplight. The three symbols—the key, the door, the black moon—superimposed perfectly, forming an unknown, hypnotic sign. In the middle of it, a paragraph appeared, clearly:

"No one of Bellamort blood can carry all memory without burning. One must forget, another preserve, and the third watch over the silence. The fourth—born outside of time—will be the ladder between oblivion and fire."

The page vibrated—alive, breathing. But the words did not fade. They had remained, for the first time.

"Now he knows that we know," Sofia murmured.

And, as confirmation, the lamp flickered violently, almost going out. From the short shadow cast on the wall, a contorted figure emerged—the shadows of the page, perhaps—and disappeared into the floorboards.

Louis folded the sheet with an almost religious reverence.

"We must decide who forgets, who preserves, and who watches," he said.

No one answered immediately, because all three of them understood the weight of that choice: in a family bound by secrets, forgetting was sometimes harder than knowing, and watching fiercer than remembering.

Elian, silently, put his hand on Sofia's shoulder.

"I will be the ladder," he whispered, in an inhumanly calm voice.

The silence that filled the Bellamort library then was not an absence of sound, but a pact. A pact written on a page that—for the first and last time—had refused to look at itself.