San placed her hand over his. Her claws were sharp, but her touch was light. “Then we don’t forget again.”
They found the source of the amber glow at the archive’s heart: a single iron nail, the size of a forearm, driven into a living stump. The stump was a god—or had been. Its bark-face was locked in an eternal grimace, and from the nail’s head bled the slow, weeping corrosion San had been tracking. It was the first nail. The first wound. The moment a human had driven iron into a sacred tree not for malice, but for measurement —to stake a claim, to draw a map, to begin the forgetting of the old boundaries.
Together, they pulled.
“There’s a door,” he said, pointing to a seam in the largest standing stone, a crack that glowed with a faint, sickly amber light. “Not made by men.”
San looked at Ashitaka. “The archive is still there. Full of every wound.”