**SCENE.** You hurl yourself sideways, rolling across scorched stone as the burning ink-line slashes through the air where your heart was a moment ago. It carves a smoking trench into the anvil behind you, the iron hissing and bubbling. You come up running, vaulting over a river of magma, holy light still crackling around your fists. The Archivist tracks you with those burning quill-eyes, its parchment body unfolding like a predator's wings. **BEAT.** You close the gap and drive your blessed fist into the center of its chest. The impact tears through layers of ancient manuscript — you feel pages crumble and ink sear against your knuckles. The Archivist shrieks, a sound like a thousand books burning at once. Black fire erupts from the wound, and charred fragments of text spiral into the air around you. But it does not fall. Instead, it seizes your wrist with skeletal fingers, and you feel your own prayers being *drained* from memory, pulled into the parchment like ink into blotting paper. The kneeling smiths rise again, hammers lifting in unison. The Archivist leans close, its blank face inches from yours, and whispers in a voice made of rustling pages: "Every blow you strike, I transcribe. Every wound, I archive. You cannot destroy what is *written*."