EPISODE 6: THE ARCHIVES THAT DEVOUR THEIR OWN AUTHORS ## Chapter One: The Fracture of the Fellowship The Shroudlands had finished exhaling. What remained was a silence so absolute it felt like the inside of a coffin nailed shut by God. The wagon—once a sturdy thing of oak and iron—now listed at a forty-five-degree angle against a hillside that had decided to become a wall. Its wheels spun lazily in mid-air, as though the very concept of gravity had been struck from the record. Selene Veyra stood at the edge of the impossible cliff, the Hollow Crown clutched so tightly against her ribs that the map’s living lines left bruises shaped like forgotten coastlines. The parchment pulsed against her heart like a second, colder organ. Every beat sent fresh ink bleeding through the weave of her cloak, staining her skin with latitudes that had never existed yesterday. Behind her, the others argued in voices already fraying at the edges. “You cannot mean to take the boy into that tomb,” Torin Vale growled. The exiled knight’s gauntleted hand rested on the pommel of his broken sword, the blade still weeping black sap from the last ink-wight it had slain. His eyes—once the clear grey of royal steel—had begun to cloud at the corners, as though memory itself were curdling. “The...