After the orchard of family apple trees, Elian stopped hoping that another death would simply let him begin again. Every new Draft changed the palace, the laws and the lives of his witnesses. There was no returning to the world he had known.
Orm had been lost: the system no longer recognised him as a witness in one of the Drafts. But Elian remembered the executioner, and even in his sleep he heard his formula: "I kill only by a recognised formula."
The next morning Tavel came to him carrying an empty book. From his red eyes and dusty clothes, the archivist had not slept all night.
"I found it," the archivist said.
"What?"
"Not a record of Mayra. Something worse. A record made by your father."
They went down to the archive of the old collapse without Miran or Vestra. Elian trusted them both, but anyone who learnt the secret of the name might become the Empty Throne's next target.
Below, the air smelt of damp stone, old leather and iron. Tavel led him between the rows. Since the last correction, the shelves had moved closer together, the aisles had narrowed, and the lamps barely gave enough light.
"There are no family registers here," Tavel said. "Only minutes of decisions the Council later ordered everyone to forget."
"A convenient part of history."
"The most honest part."
He stopped beside a low recess. Inside lay an unbound book. Its cover had been pasted together from layers of scraped pages. Fragments of the destroyed lines were still visible along the edges.
Tavel did not open it with his hands. He placed a knife, a bowl of water and a small stone token bearing the dead king's arms beside it. "These are the minutes of a closed Council," he said. "They were drawn up the day before you were born."
At the thought of Mayra, Elian's chest tightened.
The book opened by itself.
The words on the first page had not been written in ink, but pressed into the paper:
"The first heir must not be recognised."
Elian read the line three times.
The words did not change.
Tavel looked away.
Below it were the signatures of the councillors, representatives of the senior branches and Savern, who was not yet regent. The king of Astern, Elian's father, had signed last. The hand was firm: no tremor, no corrections, no trace of coercion.
"He did it himself," Elian said.
"Yes."
"He struck me out himself."
"Yes."
Elian stared at his father's signature for a long time. There was no dismissing it as a mistake or the product of coercion.
Tavel turned the page.
It showed a diagram of the Empty Throne as a pit beneath the roots of the family. Fine lines ran from it to the names of children recognised too late, hidden until after a marriage, or born to women with no place in the family register. Many of the names had been crossed out. Beside each was a note: "consumed".
Elian ran a finger over one place.
Mayra.
The name had not been crossed out. It was circled in black.
"What does that mean?"
Tavel swallowed.
"Bait."
Elian did not grasp the word at once.
Tavel began to speak more quickly, plainly afraid he would be unable to continue otherwise:
"The Empty Throne does not want just anyone who goes unrecognised. It wants those who almost gained a place in the bloodline and lost it at the last moment. Your father saw the Throne reaching for Mayra and for you. If he had recognised you as the first heir, you would both have disappeared. If he had rejected you entirely, no one would have preserved your name and the result would have been the same. So he kept you at court and close to the family, but denied you the rights of an heir."
Elian gave a single laugh. Dry.
"How kind. I wasn't abandoned. I was left hanging over the pit."
"So the pit would not close over you."
"You say that as though it should comfort me."
Tavel did not answer.
Wisely.
The page beneath Elian's fingers grew warm.
At first he thought his hand had warmed it. Then the paper blackened at the edges, and from the depths of the archive came the laboured breathing of a dying man.
The dead king's voice said:
"Elian."
Tavel recoiled. The shelves around them trembled, and several books fell to the floor.
Elian did not move.
"Father?"
When Elian was a child, the king had rarely spoken to him except in commands: study, be quiet, do not enter, leave. Now his father's voice sounded older and more broken. It came not from Elian's memories, but from the Empty Throne above.
"I left you the only path."
"You left me an execution."
"I gave you the chance not to be devoured at once."
Elian gripped the edge of the table.
"Mayra?"
Silence.
Then the voice said:
"I was too late."
The Empty Throne spoke in the king's voice, but what it asked of him now was not asked as a father.
"Die once more. Close every Draft and restore a single world. Lissa will be alive there, Savern will preserve order, and the servants will forget their pain. Mayra will remain a loss, not a passage into another world."
One by one, Elian remembered the preserved names: Shani, Miran, Tavel, Vestra, the lost Orm and Lissa.
"And those who were erased?" he asked.
The king's voice softened.
"Son, the world cannot remember everyone."
Only then did Elian fully understand his father's decision, but he could not forgive it. The king had not been a monster. He had simply decided that, for the sake of a few people close to him, he had the right to sacrifice everyone else. What Savern had inherited from him was not the throne, but that calculated cruelty.
Elian closed the book.
The voice cut off.
Tavel had gone pale.
"What now?" he asked.
Elian looked at the blank cover.
"Now we find the person the world recorded the same way in every Draft."
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