Archive Entry 001

Some stories are written for the world to see. Others survive in margins, sealed records, unfinished testimonies, and pages that were never meant to leave the archive.

Forgotten Pages is where those pieces live.

There was only one place to begin.

LIRAEL VOSS

Age: 18Height: 1.61 mOrigin: The Fallen Temple of ElyriaNature: Vessel • DhalvariEssence: The Burning Half of ThalyssaraStatus: AliveThreat Classification: Unknown

What follows is in her own words.

WHO I AM

I was raised in the Fallen Temple of Elyria. I knew prayers before I knew roads, obedience before choice, stone corridors before I knew there were cities, taverns, forests, an ocean, or anything that could be called a life belonging to me.

Then I ran.

What I found didn't simply hand me power. It rebuilt the architecture of my body, woke something that had been lying in me the whole time, and set me down in the middle of a history far older than anything I'm equipped to understand.

I carry the burning half of the essence of Thalyssara, the lost Sovereign of the Seventh Throne.

I am not possessed. I am not a channel. She isn't sleeping inside me like a coal in a box.

It's worse than that, and stranger.

I'm a Dhalvari. A vessel that doesn't merely hold what's put inside it.

A vessel that eats it.

WHAT YOU'D SEE

I'm small. At 1.61 meters, nothing about me should feel like it takes up room.

It does anyway. There's something condensed about how I'm built, as though too much was forced into too little space and the space gave in first.

My skin is very pale and never looks dead — there's always heat under it, an ember behind porcelain. I flush at the cheeks and the throat without asking myself first. My hair is long and dark brown, loose down my back, and under any warm light the copper in it catches and the brown goes almost orange. Fire hidden inside something dark.

My eyes are green. Bright, almond-shaped, watchful. I'm told nobody can decide what they're looking at — that there's real innocence in them, and a hunger nobody taught me, and neither one wins.

And my mouth, which I'm told is the part people look at last and think about longest.

My face is young. That matters more than the rest of it. There's something ancient buried in me somewhere, but the person carrying it is eighteen and seeing most of the world for the first time.

THE ONE THING I'VE NEVER SEEN

My eyes are green. Most of the time.

There are three occasions when they aren't: true fury — not irritation, fury. A fight. And the last moments of a drain.

Then the green goes out under a pale, cold blue. Not blue like pigment. Blue like light behind glass.

Here's the part I hate.

I can't feel it happen. No warning, no heat, no sensation at all. I find out from other people — a conversation stops, someone steps back, a hand lets go of my arm, a face changes and won't tell me why.

Everyone in the room learns it before I do. Every time. And sometimes it comes and goes and nobody says anything at all.

I have never properly seen my own face. There were no mirrors where I grew up. So the single strangest thing about me is the one thing I've never once witnessed.

MY SKIN TELLS ON ME TOO

My skin doesn't change colour. What changes is the light in it.

After I feed, or after I heal, the warmth underneath rises closer to the surface and I start to look lit from inside — almost gold, if the room is dark enough. It fades as I spend what I took.

So there are two tells on me, and I control neither:

Skin lit — I'm full.Eyes blue — I'm working.

When both happen at once, I'm told that what people are looking at is no longer easy to call human.

WHAT I CAN DO

I feed on desire

Not as a figure of speech.

When someone wants me, I take something out of them through the wanting — through touch, through nearness, through surrender, through obsession. In the beginning I didn't know I was doing it. Most of them never notice it leaving.

Some of them thank me afterward.

I take more than life

Life-force is only the first thing. I can absorb qualities — strength, physical traits, and things stranger than either. Once I walked away from a night with more weight in my own bones than I went in with, and it took someone else to point out that I was standing differently.

Nobody knows the limits of this. Least of all me.

I heal

Bruises go in minutes. Cuts close while you're still watching them. Damage that would cripple or kill an ordinary person turns temporary on me.

The energy has to come from somewhere. It always comes from somewhere.

I'm difficult to be near

Even when I'm holding it down — tired, in daylight, actively trying — something gets out. It isn't a smell and it isn't a spell. It's closer to pressure. Eyes stay a second too long. Attention drifts. Instinct starts making decisions before reason catches up to ask why.

When I stop holding it down, it stops being a second, and it stops being their choice.

I'm learning that this doesn't have to be an accident.

WHAT A DHALVARI IS

This is the part that matters, and I only learned the word recently.

A vessel carries power. A Dhalvari assimilates it — consumes what it holds, digests it, makes it part of itself.

So the honest description of what's happening to me isn't there's an ancient being inside her.

It's a question, and it gets worse every time I change:

Where does Thalyssara end and I begin?

I don't think anyone is going to answer that for me.

THE GIRL UNDERNEATH

Power isn't actually the most interesting thing about me, and I'd rather say that myself than have someone say it later.

I'm eighteen. For almost all of those eighteen years I barely had a life.

So while demons and kingdoms and forgotten history start moving around me, I'm also finding out about food that tastes like something. Clothes that aren't a habit. Money. Taverns. Cities. Sleeping late. Deciding where I go. Wanting a thing for no better reason than that I want it.

I'm observant, and sharp, and I notice more than is comfortable for the people near me.

I'm also impatient. Petty. Curious past the point of good sense. Argumentative. Easy to annoy. Perfectly capable of being fascinated by something completely useless while the world comes apart three feet away.

I'm not an ancient thing wearing a young woman. I'm a young woman who found out that an ancient thing is becoming part of her.

THE THING I DO WITHOUT DECIDING TO

I watch.

Always. Shifts in posture. Words people go around instead of through. Questions nobody answers. The small change in a face right before a lie.

Even when I'm the one who's cornered, some part of me is still awake and taking inventory. That's not me being distant. That's what I am.

You can measure me by how much I'm talking. When I have hold of a situation I get funny, and sarcastic, and I say the thing everyone in the room is working to avoid saying.

When I lose hold of it, my sentences get shorter.

Eventually I stop using more than one word at a time.

THE MARK

There's one permanent mark on a body that refuses to keep scars.

Low on my right side, below the hip bone, where nothing I wear would show it. Dark, nearly black. Organic, curved — something between a horn, a claw, and handwriting from a language nobody alive can read. It doesn't look put on me. It looks like it was always there and I only just noticed.

It wasn't there before that night. And I didn't see it arrive.

That's all these pages are going to say about it for now.

ARCHIVIST'S NOTES

Observations recorded alongside the testimony. The subject was not shown these.

01. She cannot perceive the change in her eyes. Others can. Given time, those close to her will learn to read her more accurately than she can read herself.

02. Green is not the diminished state. Green is the subject at rest. The blue is what surfaces when something further down takes over.

03. The luminosity of her skin is a gauge. Anyone who knows what to look for can estimate how much she is currently carrying — and therefore how dangerous she is at that moment.

04. She describes herself as being consumed by what she carries. The evidence suggests the opposite direction of travel.

If I'm going to be the last one to know what my own face is doing, then I'd better be the first to know everything else.

— L.

END OF ARCHIVE ENTRY 001

Some pages were forgotten. Others were hidden.