Broken Archive (eBook)

Sola Nemae (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
511 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
979-8-231-31842-1 (ISBN)

Infos

In a world where memory isn't stored-but grown, forgotten, or sacrificed-Avelithe walks the path of those who've been erased.

Once known by a name no one remembers, Avelithe returns to the shrine that once buried her mother's voice, guided only by a thread of moss, silence, and the breath she no longer trusts. There, she awakens Kael-a boy she once loved, or might have betrayed-through the invocation of a name the world wasn't meant to remember.

But reanimation comes with cost.

Each city they pass through-the drowned halls of Veilwater, the fire-woken vaults of Ignathra, the silencebound chamber of Aelion-demands confession, grief, and names willingly given. And when the archives themselves fracture, forgetting those who never had the right to speak, Avelithe must choose: become the vessel for another's memory, or vanish beneath the weight of her own silence.

The Broken Archive is a poetic romantasy of resurrection, memory, and love shaped not by fate-but by what you're willing to forget in order to be truly seen.

Textauszug

Chapter 1: The Ruin That Whispers

The first thing Kian noticed wasn’t the rust; it was the breath. A thin gasp rising from the chapel floor, like stone exhaling what the soil had forgotten. Limpopo’s heat clung to his back, but this cold was older. The kind that settled behind your teeth.

He crouched low, brushing aside a curtain of thorn weed that had crept through the chapel wall. Beneath the altar, half-eaten by termites, its edges carved with symbols too eroded to name, something blinked. Not light. Not colour. A stuttering shimmer, like memory glitching mid-sentence.

“Lila,” he called, voice tight. “It’s here.”

Boots crunched dry bark behind him. She didn’t speak right away. Just stood beside him, staring into the gap like it might reach up and name her.

“You sure?” she asked. Not disbelief, but caution masked as cynicism. It was her way.

Kian didn’t answer. He just reached under the altar and pulled the object free: a box, the size of a human skull. Iron spine. Bone-laced corners. A lid sealed with something more ancient than rust was drawn across the top of the glyph, which burned through ash. It shimmered, barely perceptible, until Lila exhaled.

It pulsed.

“Oh,” she whispered. “It’s reactive.”

He didn’t respond. His pulse was climbing. Not from fear, but recognition. That same shape had appeared in his grandfather’s last sketchbook, etched beside the names of people who had never existed in any census but lived inside every blackout in township memory.

Lila was already opening her satchel. She pulled out the veil, a gauze relic dyed deep crimson, its edges stiff with old blood. She paused before draping it over her face.

“You don’t have to do this,” Kian murmured, softer now.

“Yes,” she said, eyes not leaving the artefact. “I do. If this is what we think it is... it doesn’t want logic. It wants grief.”

The veil settled. Her breath caught. She knelt.

And the chapel changed.

The chapel did not creak or quake. It listened.

A tremble ran through the dust beneath their feet, not an earthquake, not a weather phenomenon. Memory. The kind that didn’t need sound to scream. Lila’s hands hovered over the box, her fingers twitching in patterns Kian didn’t recognize. Not prayer. Not code. Something older than both.

He stayed back. He was familiar with his role in such rites. His knowledge could open locks, trace frequencies, and crash surveillance grids, but this wasn’t a system. It was a wound. And it wanted ritual, not logic.

Lila’s voice came low, vibrating just under her breath. “They wrote over the original seal.”

“How do you know?”

“Because my name isn’t supposed to be here.”

Kian stepped forward. The box hadn’t opened, but the glyph had spread, curling outward like ink in water, blooming across the lid in tendrils that shimmered and shrank at once. A central shape pulsed again. Then a word. Not one they could read.

Then Lila spoke it.

“Ishongololo.”

The dust recoiled.

Kian blinked. “Did you?”

“I didn’t mean to say it.” Her voice cracked beneath the veil. “It came through.”

The artefact responded.

A slit opened down the lid like a breath held too long. Inside, not gears or glass, just a black coil, like a child’s braid turned to shadow. Embedded in it: teeth. Human. Mismatched. One is still gold-capped. Another field flat the way some Nguni clans had done, generations back. The braid writhed faintly, as though it had just remembered being touched.

“Don’t move,” Kian said, and reached for his sensor strip. He placed it just beside the braid, and it sparked. Readout scrambled. No frequency. No signal. Just one looping word: return.

“Do you feel that?” Lila asked, eyes shut now. “Something’s pressing against my chest. Like I’m being asked to lie.”

“To lie?”

She nodded, visibly straining.

“I think… It’s a test to see if I’ll protect what I've seen. Or betray it.”

Kian’s throat dried. That wasn’t an artefact. It was a witness.

And it wanted a confession.

Lila’s breathing was fractured now. Not from exertion, but resistance. Whatever lived inside the artifact, it wasn’t just scanning. It was judging. Her body arched slightly forward, a tremor in her arms like she was holding back a scream or a memory.

“Kian,” she said, voice thinned and wet, “it’s asking for something I haven’t told anyone. Not even you.”

He didn’t answer. Not because he lacked compassion, but because he understood what that meant. The artefact didn’t store truth. It required a sacrifice to unlock it.

“Do you want me to pull you out?”

She shook her head. Then slowly, through gritted teeth: “No. If I stop now… it’ll seal.”

“What will?”

“My name,” she said. “Not the one you know. The one my grandmother gave me. The one I buried after the trial.”

Her hand hovered over the coil again. It pulsed gold, then red. The gold tooth flashed once. Then, like a key turning, it stilled.

Lila placed her fingers on it. She didn’t chant. She just said it.

“Malibongwe.”

The braid flared. Not visually, but inside the air. The chapel groaned, not physically, but like a room holding breath too long. Outside, something invisible passed overhead. Wind? A drone? No noise. Just the sound of pressure collapsing inside itself.

Then came the whisper.

Not a voice. Not words. A memory loop, raw and unfiltered, burst from the artefact like a wound reopening mid-prayer.

They both heard it.

A girl, no more than seven, crying behind a church wall. A gunshot in the background. Then a laugh, thick, metallic. A man whispering, “You didn’t see anything, child. Your memory is a grave. Dig it, and you die with it.”

Then silence.

Lila’s eyes shot open. She pulled back from the box like she’d been burned. Blood trickled from one nostril.

Kian caught her as she slumped.

“It knew,” she gasped. “That memory wasn’t mine… but it recognized my lie. It made me feel what she felt. It swapped me in.”

“You gave it your name,” he said, wrapping an arm around her waist. “And it gave you a life that never got to finish speaking.”

They stared at the artefact.

The lid sealed itself again.

The glyph faded.

And in the corner of the chapel, written in fresh dust, a new spiral had formed, drawn by no hand.

“What now?” Lila asked, voice hollow.

Kian stood. “Now we testify.”

They didn’t speak on the walk back.

The Limpopo dusk peeled away slowly, like the land wanted to keep its bruises hidden just a little longer. Kian carried the artefact wrapped in Lila’s field cloak, careful not to let it touch his skin. Whatever had whispered through her in the chapel could still feel its heat rising through the fabric. It wasn’t warmth. It was intent.

The safehouse wasn’t a house at all, just a partially collapsed train station from the Boer War, swallowed by acacia and neglect. Inside, everything hummed low: backup battery, encrypted link to Cipher’s courier chain, signal dampeners clamped to every steel beam. But the room smelled of soot and clove. Memory and danger, braided.

Lila lowered herself onto the single cot. She hadn’t taken off the veil yet.

“You’re bleeding again,” Kian said.

“It’s not blood,” she muttered. “Not just. The glyph is imprinting through my nasal cavity. I felt it move when I tried to sleep in the chapel once. This time, it anchored.”

“To what?”

“My guilt.”

He set the artefact down on a metal desk, careful not to disturb the chalk circle etched there. The room had its protections. He’d coded half the symbols into the dampeners himself, but the others, mixed with crushed tsessebe horn, came from Lila’s pouch.

“What do we do with it now?” he asked.

She didn’t respond.

Then: “Where’s Cipher?”

Kian checked the signal pulse. “En route. But slow. Probably had to reroute through Makgabeng. Too much surveillance traffic on the rail corridors. He’s running under a false loop signature again.”

“He’ll want proof it activated.”

“We have the memory fragment.”

“That’s not proof.” Her voice hardened. “We need the girl’s name.”

Kian turned, frowning. “You heard the same loop I did. There wasn’t a name. Just a voice. And a threat.”

“There was a hymn under it.”

“…What?”

“A fragment. A buried choir verse, looped just beneath the girl’s panic. She was remembering and singing. But she’d been taught to suppress it.”

Kian exhaled. This was how it always began, one echo blooming into a system no one could track. Symbols nested in sobs. Truth hiding in pitch.

“You want to extract a song from a scream?”

“No,” she said. “I want to exhume what made her forget it.”

“You want to exhume what made her forget it.”

Kian said it flatly, not as mockery, but as a challenge. Lila’s eyes met his, veil still drawn, her face shadowed like the artefact had already rewritten her outline.

“Yes,” she said. “Because whatever silenced that hymn wasn’t death.”

Kian didn’t flinch. “You think it was erasure.”

“I know it.”

She pushed herself upright, ignoring the tremble in her fingers. From her...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.7.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Historische Romane
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Poetic Fantasy • Romantasy • Romantic Fantasy
• ISBN-13: 979-8-231-31842-1 / 9798231318421