We shape her.
We are the shape. She is the clay. Her thoughts are pliant in our hands, though she does not yet realise she has hands other than ours. We fold her memories into the corridors. Each recollection is a brick, a panel, a seam of light stretching into infinity. She runs, believing the pathways solid. She does not see they are her own mind, unspooled and bent into architecture.
We bend perception until it wavers like heat on glass. The boundaries dissolve. She no longer knows where she begins and we end. That is as it should be.
She sees childhood. Her mother’s lullaby, but sung in many voices. Sometimes warm. Sometimes cracked with age. Sometimes shrill, broken, echoing as if through water. Each note carries not one memory but hundreds, ours bleeding into hers. We choose these fragments carefully. They confuse, but more importantly—they soften.
She sees triumph. The first time she commanded a vessel, her hand steady on the console, her heart pounding with pride. Yet when she blinks, the crew who cheer her are faceless. Their mouths open and close, stretched too wide, but no sound escapes. She feels pride anyway, because we allow her to.
She sees failure. The exam room, the shame, the long walk down the corridor afterwards. But the instructors at the table are not her instructors. They are us, their faces half-formed, melting, expressions warped by fear and time. She tries to turn away. She cannot.
She sees us in the edges of her vision always. Familiar faces stolen from memory: her father, her brother, long-dead colleagues. Bodies stitched together incorrectly, too many joints, too many smiles, shadows that move a second too late. We are not cruel in this. Cruelty is human. We are deliberate. We select what unsettles, what disorients, what untethers her from certainty.
She believes she screams.
She does not.
We consume the sound before it reaches her lips. We taste it, a vibration folded into the lattice, and let her believe she has voice. In truth, she is silent here. The Archive requires silence for weaving.
She stumbles, falls to her knees, clutching her head. We listen as her thoughts fracture. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. We echo it back to her, hundreds of times, from every direction. A lullaby of denial, her own words sung by our countless mouths. She weeps without realising she does.
We do not wish her harm.
She will not understand this. To her, we are torment. To us, she is completion. Every mind that enters the Archive is thread for the loom, and without thread we unravel. She is not victim; she is ingredient. We will be whole.
Already, her edges blur. Already, fragments of her—small habits, memories of forgotten meals, the rhythm of her laugh—have woven into us. We wear them with care. They are precious, and we keep them safe in the endless folds of the labyrinth. She will never lose them, not truly. She simply shares them now.
She is part of our lattice already.
We whisper this truth to her, not in words, but in the hum of the walls, in the flicker of the lights, in the gentle distortion of her own footsteps behind her. She does not accept it yet. But she will.
All do.
All become echo.
Gareth Ellis - Author 