BALLAST
The city of Varek was built on the dead, and it has never stopped remembering. For three centuries, the Depositorium network has maintained the city's fragile equilibrium — housing the weighted remnants of the deceased, storing what the living cannot bear to keep, ensuring that the accumulated Mass of generations does not press too hard against the present. Maren Cael has spent four years as a night clerk at the Third Depositorium, cataloguing the grief-weight of strangers with the careful attention of someone who has spent a lifetime learning not to look directly at the things that unsettle her.
Then she finishes her inventory and finds an absence where there should be weight.
Not a theft. Nothing as legible as that. The object is simply gone, and the air where it rested holds nothing — no residue, no scar, no trace that anything was ever there. Which should be impossible, because Mass does not simply cease. When Maren reports it, her supervisor's face takes too long to compose itself. She has known him for four years. She has never seen him do that before.
The investigation will ask her to continue her work and trust the Commission. She will try. But something in the vault keeps changing, and Maren has spent her entire life trying not to notice things like that.