Aldric Thornwood's Arc

Chapter 2 of 10

Aldric spent three days at the records office. He asked questions at every desk, pushed every door, checked every rotation sheet. No one remembered the clerk who'd filed the boot. No one admitted seeing him leave. The office director looked through Aldric with tired eyes and said staff turnover was high, records incomplete, and some people just stopped showing up for work. Aldric wrote down names anyway. He cross-referenced addresses, employment dates, anything that might connect to the forty-year pattern. Nothing fit. The clerk had simply vanished into the same silence that swallowed the others. But on the fourth morning, Aldric found him. The clerk stood at the old ferry dock beyond the records building, hands jammed in his pockets, staring at the water. Aldric moved down the worn flagstone path, keeping his steps quiet. Twenty yards out, he saw the other figure — a man already there, positioned beside the shattered waymarker stone that marked the dock's edge. The stone was split clean down the middle, blackened by old fire, its carved sigil burned beyond reading. The stranger leaned against it like he'd been waiting. The clerk glanced once over his shoulder, saw Aldric approaching, and turned back to the man at the stone. Aldric broke into a run. The stranger pulled something from his coat — a bundle wrapped in broad leaves, bound with the same frayed twine Aldric had seen on his doorstep. The clerk reached for it. Aldric was ten yards away when their hands met. He shouted. The clerk flinched, dropped the bundle, and bolted down the dock toward the water. The stranger didn't run. He bent, picked up the fallen package, and met Aldric's mismatched eyes with a calm that felt rehearsed. Then he stepped backward off the dock into the shallow reeds and disappeared into the morning fog that clung to the riverbank. Aldric reached the edge and stopped. The bundle sat at his feet where the stranger had placed it — not dropped, placed. He knelt and unwrapped the leaves. Inside were copies of case files, twenty years old, marked with the same case number as the box on his doorstep. Annotations filled the margins in handwriting that wasn't his own. Notes about animal behavior. Dates that lined up with disappearances he'd never connected. The clerk hadn't vanished. He'd been watching the same pattern Aldric had, probably longer. And now someone else knew they both were close. Aldric folded the files, turned toward the empty dock, and realized the question he'd been asking was wrong. He wasn't chasing one person who knew too much. He was standing in the middle of a conversation that had been happening without him for forty years.