Three sealed records claim three different versions of Ciaran Venn's life.

LIFE A. LIFE B. LIFE C.

None of them can be trusted as history. None of them can be ignored.

After the Last Reader record leaves Ciaran with impossible alternatives, independent custodian Iona Creed sends him an origin-index page meant to explain how writer, reader, witness, and institution first became entangled. Before she can give her supervised statement, Iona dies inside a sealed Saint Orison conservation annex.

The scene looks like an archive accident. The trust calls it an emergency purge failure. Gideon Wren, legal trustee