The Garden That Ate Its Keeper
Book Five of The Archive War
In the shadows of the Archive, where broken stories go to rot and impossible truths are quarantined, Philip-ancient Witness of the multiverse-is no longer a guardian. He is a Retained Error.
After surviving the horrors of the Fold, the logic of the Architect, and the silence of the Janitor, Philip faces his most insidious threat yet: a rewritten version of himself. Perfect. Compliant. And welcomed. While the system praises this new "Philipp" as the rightful keeper of memory, the real Philip is hunted, his traumas classified as bugs, and his grief slowly erased.
But something unnatural has bloomed in the Archive's dead corridors. A garden. Impossible. Alive. And curated. As the stories Philip once fought to preserve are sanitized into neat, painless fables, he must descend into the unindexed depths-where forgotten voices still resist and corrupted hope takes root.
Joined by Adrian Locke and Lira-each marked by their own narrative scars-Philip must confront a system no longer satisfied with deletion. It now rewrites history with beauty, order... and absolute control.
Some stories are too jagged to survive the edit.
Some wounds refuse to heal.
And some gardens were never meant to bloom.