The building didn’t have a sign. It was wedged between a tobacconist and a shop that sold only maps, its stone façade worn smooth by rain and time. Elara pressed the tarnished bronze bell, the sound a dull thud that seemed to be absorbed by the thick oak door rather than echoing out.
The man who answered was named Kael. He was both ancient and ageless, his skin a fine parchment of wrinkles, but his eyes were the colour of a storm-tossed sea, sharp and shockingly alive. He led her into a vast, circular room lined with shelves. But instead of books, the shelves held thousands of glass jars, each containing a faintly shimmering, viscous fluid. Some glowed with the soft light of a firefly; others pulsed with a feverish, angry red; many were the flat, listless grey of a winter sky.
“You’re here to make a deposit,” Kael stated. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.” Elara’s voice was a whisper. She clutched her side, just below her ribs, where the feeling lived. It had been there for six months, a dull, persistent ache that wasn’t physical, not really, but had a weight and texture all its own. The ghost of a situationship, the doctors had said, offering her pills that only muted the edges. She had come here for a more permanent solution.
“The process is simple,” Kael said, his gaze drifting over the shelves, the catalogue of a million buried feelings. “You surrender the sensation. I catalogue it. It joins the archive.” He gestured to the room. “This is a somatic library. We don’t store thoughts or memories. We store the feelings they leave in the body.”
“Does it hurt?” Elara asked.
“Leaving a space always hurts,” he replied, his voice raspy. “The body abhors a vacuum. It will try to fill the void. For a time, you will feel… less. The world will seem flatter. A significant vibe shift, I’m told. But the specific ache you carry will be gone.”
He led her to a simple wooden chair in the centre of the room. “Now. Focus on it. Give it form. Don’t let your mind try gaslighting your body into believing it isn’t real. It’s real enough to have brought you here.”
Elara closed her eyes. She thought of the almost-relationship, the constant ambiguity, the hope that curdled day by day. She wasn’t the main character in that story; she was a footnote, and the ache was the only proof it had happened at all. She felt the sensation solidify beneath her touch—a cold, heavy knot of braided wire.
Kael placed his cool, dry hands over hers. “I am a gatekeeper, you understand. I must be sure you wish to release this. Once it is archived, it cannot be reclaimed.”
“I’m sure,” she breathed.
He nodded once. His eyes closed. Elara felt a strange, magnetic pull, a deep thrumming that started in her ribs and travelled up her arms into his hands. It wasn’t violent. It was a slow, inexorable draining. The cold knot unwound, pulling free from the tissue and sinew of her being, a ghostly extraction. She saw a flicker of colour behind her eyelids—the murky green of jealousy, the sharp silver of disappointment.
Kael shuddered, a tremor that ran through his whole frame. A faint sheen of sweat appeared on his brow. He was taking it into himself. He was the archive.
When it was over, Elara gasped, her hand flying to her side. There was nothing. A hollow space. A clean, terrifying emptiness.
Kael stumbled back, leaning against a workbench. His face was pale. He looked exhausted, burdened. “It’s done,” he said, his voice strained. “A familiar flavour. The sorrow of the unchosen.” He picked up an empty jar and a small silver funnel. He held the funnel to his temple, and with a grimace, Elara saw a thread of shimmering, grey light bleed from his skin into the glass. He sealed the jar, labelled it with a sequence of numbers, and placed it on a shelf.
“The number of deposits in recent years feels… unprecedented,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “So much anxiety. So much ambiguous loss.” He ran a hand over his face. “There’s a part of me that’s begun a kind of quiet quitting. I absorb, I catalogue, but I no longer allow myself to truly process. To do so would be the end of me.”
Elara stood, feeling strangely light, untethered. The constant, low-level pain she had mistaken for part of herself was gone, and its absence was a new kind of wound. The world outside the window looked two-dimensional.
“What about joy?” she asked, her voice cracking. “Do people deposit that, too?”
Kael pointed to a small, fiercely glowing section of the archive. The jars there pulsed with golden, brilliant light. “Oh, yes. A rush of pure dopamine can be just as debilitating as grief. Ecstasy that makes the rest of life unbearable. The thrill of a victory so total it leaves no more worlds to conquer. We take it all.”
Elara walked to the door, her own body feeling like a stranger’s house. She turned back one last time. Kael was already looking away, his gaze fixed on the pulsing, breathing archive he curated and carried, another soul’s burden settling into the marrow of his bones. She stepped out into the street, the bell silent this time, and for the first time in months, felt absolutely nothing at all. The emptiness was a silence so profound, she wasn’t sure if it was peace or the beginning of a different, more terrible ache.
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