CHAPTER 4 — WEATHER REPORT FROM 1987
In which the past transmits itself, static-wrapped and burning.
---
1. Signal Bleed
The silence between them didn’t break—it bled.
Liora hadn’t moved in almost a minute. Not since Dexi whispered about surviving Marrine like it was a crime. Not since the Codex exhaled something slow and unfinished through the walls—like it had paused, mid-sentence, to reconsider the next edit.
She couldn’t look away from him.
Dexi sat slumped against the lowest shelf of Dead Frequencies: 1985–1989, his ribs still marked by that final glyph—EXODUS MIRRORED. The lines had stopped burning. Now they flickered gently, as if waiting for permission to vanish.
He hadn’t said anything else.
Neither had she.
Not because there was nothing left to say—but because the next thing spoken might count as a rewrite.
And the Codex was still listening.
---
2: Forecast Loop
The hum began like a haunting—not sound, but pressure.
Somewhere nearby, something glitched into visibility. A ghetto blaster, half-fused to the wall like a tumor in the architecture. Its wireframe antenna rusted in mid-air, barnacles opening and closing on loops of magnetic tape.
The air shifted. The machine twitched.
It hadn’t been there a moment ago.
Dexi didn’t flinch. He exhaled slowly, eyes on the floor as though he already knew what was coming. The kind of resignation you only find in people who’ve died at least once.
Liora watched the tape hiss from the deck. Static spilled like fog.
> click
crackle
“Broadcast begins. Weather report from… nineteen eighty-seven.”
Dexi’s breath caught.
> “Forecast: overdose tide incoming. 2 a.m. barometric pressure—morphine and guilt.”
“Radio tower status: glitching.”
“Heartbeat irregular. 57 BPM Sync event projected.”
“Repeat: sync event projected.”
He didn’t move. But the ink beneath his skin did.
It began at the clavicle.
A single dot of ink uncoiled and danced like a static filament. It curved downward, forming a spiraled line along his chest. Then another. Then four more. They glowed faintly with each syllable of the broadcast.
Liora leaned forward, unsure whether to speak or breathe.
Morse code.
She reached into her pouch, fumbling for her notebook and brass nib pen.
Stolen novel; please report.
> “Broadcast begins…”
Dexi twitched.
New symbols now. Two dashes. A dot. Another dot.
She whispered: “L…”
“I…”
“O…”
“R…”
“A.”
Her name.
The Codex had spelled her name onto him.
Dexi gasped.
The sound that followed wasn’t quite human. His spine arched like the signal had punched through him. The glyphs on his ribs glowed.
“Dexi!” Liora dropped the pen and grabbed him. “Dexi, breathe!”
He slumped forward. Steam rose from the glyphs on his chest.
“Gate… was open…” he rasped.
She held him. “You’re here. You’re with me.”
“No,” he whispered. “I’m still tuned in.”
Liora’s notebook flared with heat.
Sea-glass ink seeped across the page, forming a new glyph.
And beneath it, in faint script:
> avael mi
She didn’t recognize the phrase.
But it felt like a bookmark.
A name.
A warning.
---
3: Sync Event (Live Feed)
The air changed.
Not temperature—texture.
Liora felt it the way one feels a blackout arriving—pressure in the skull, light flattening at the edges, time stretching like wet cloth.
Dexi convulsed once.
Just once.
It was enough.
The Codex manifested. Not visibly, but through presence—its logic pressed outward through glyphs, radio static, and blood-ink edits.
---
1987.
Low tide.
Broadcast active.
The first sound was gulls. Then tape static. Then a scream—distorted, stuttering, shaped like Marrine’s voice as if caught in a corrupted voicemail loop.
He was back there. Dexi. On the rocks. Jacket half-off. Pills half-melted in his throat.
No rescue. Just the crackle of a failing speaker beside his head.
> “Dexi?” Liora’s voice—distant, disembodied.
She wasn’t here.
Couldn’t be.
This was Dexi’s memory—hijacked by the Codex.
The sea lapped sideways.
Each wave hissed:
> “Ma…
…rine.”
Then a spike.
His ribs burned. The Codex was editing.
> [2:03 AM]
FONT: Courier
INK: Indigo
ENTRY: “Subject voluntarily ingested.”
ENTRY: “Drowning classified as synchronized loss.”
ENTRY: “Romantic interference with library assets flagged.”
Dexi tried to sit up.
Indigo ink flowed from his own skin—his breath, his ribs—wrapping him in a script-cage. The Leviathan was recording, restraining, rewriting.
Liora, watching in real-time, saw the glyphs fracture across his chest.
They cracked into stanzas:
> i named the sea
in a song she shouldn’t have heard
the tide wrote back
The top line shimmered indigo. The second turned black.
But the third flickered gold—a stabilizing force. A resistance. Not the Codex’s intent.
“Stop,” Liora whispered. “It’s rewriting you.”
Dexi blinked. His eyes flickered with Comic Sans.
Then faded.
“It wants me to forget what I saw.”
“What did you see?”
“I watched her drown while the song looped,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if I sang the gate open… or if the library did.”
“It was the library,” Liora murmured.
She remembered: a mirror years ago. Soap letters on the glass—faint. “The library sang it.” She’d wiped it away, thinking it nonsense.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
The radio buzzed one last time.
Dexi exhaled. Slow. Real.
His ribs finished forming the final line:
> THE TIDEHAVEN ELEGY (unfinished)
FONT: Courier
INK: shifting indigo and sea-glass
---
4: Unwriteable
Liora tried to copy the phrase into her notebook.
The pen refused.
Not clogged. Just denied.
The page flexed. Peeled back. A bead of indigo ink seeped from the margin and vanished.
Dexi’s voice behind her: “It’s not meant to be copied.”
She turned.
“It’s not even finished,” she said.
“It’s shared,” he murmured. “With Marrine. And someone older. Someone who sang first.”
Liora blinked.
The phrase on the page—avael mi—had changed.
Sharper angles. Like a code unfolding.
She whispered it again. Then backward.
> im leava
Something pulled at her memory.
Eleanor.
A mirror pane between the shelves glinted. No reflection—only words:
> “She drowned for saying the name too soon.”
Liora stepped back.
“What is that?” she whispered.
“A warning,” Dexi said.
She didn’t write again.
Not yet.
---
5: Reflected in Reverse
The ink had quieted.
Dexi leaned against the shelf, head tilted like he was listening for static that hadn’t started yet.
Liora crouched beside her notebook. She hadn’t closed it. The glyph—avael mi—still sat there, calm now, no longer pulsing.
But she knew what it meant to have something dormant instead of dead.
“Does it always feel like this?” she asked.
Dexi blinked. “Like what?”
“Like you’re being watched by your own memories.”
He didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice was quieter than fear.
“Only when they’re not mine anymore.”
The air shifted again.
Far behind them, a call number sign peeled off the wall and fluttered down, face-up.
> 512.19 — Elegiac Records, 1842–Present
(Access via inverse corridor)
Dexi stood slowly. Legs shaking, but holding.
Liora looked down at the call number.
“Inverse corridor?” she murmured.
Dexi turned to the aisle that hadn’t existed seconds before—spiral-shaped, backwards, mirrored.
“Backwards path,” he said. “Makes sense.”
“For what?”
“For a story we’re not allowed to read straight through.”
They stepped into the new corridor.
The floor creaked like old wood. The air shifted. A scent blew through—chalk, roses, and salt.
Dexi inhaled. “That was Marrine’s scent.”
“No,” Liora corrected. “Marrine smelled like gunpowder and lavender.”
They froze.
That scent… was older.
It lived in her memory. Beneath death certificates and forgotten things.
The smell of chalk, roses, and salt was older than grief. Older than Marinne.
Ancestral.
> “Eleanor,” Liora whispered.
A shelf nearby exhaled condensation:
> “You are not the first to try and catalog a ghost.”
Liora didn’t breathe.
Because for a moment—just a moment—she remembered being eight years old, smelling that same perfume at the funeral where no one had mentioned Marrine’s name. Her mother’s gloves were damp. Her father looked through her, not at her. And no one had asked who left the gate open.
Not even her.
A tear slipped down her cheek before she knew it had formed.
It fell onto the margin of her notebook.
The sea-glass glyph hissed.
A thin vein of indigo ink boiled upward, spiral-coiling into steam. The page warped, then pulsed, then refused to curl—as if some force beneath the paper had pushed back.
Dexi stared. “It felt that.”
Liora closed the notebook slowly.
Not out of fear.
Out of confirmation.
The Codex wasn’t just rewriting memories anymore.
It was watching for grief it hadn’t caused.
They kept walking.
Behind them, the Codex flipped a page.
And waited.
Notes on Chapter 4: Weather Report from 1987
This chapter marks a turning point—not just for Liora and Dexi, but for how the Codex reveals itself.
Dexi, introduced in Chapter 3 as a lyric-haunted remnant of a rewritten life, is now shown as something far more tragic and powerful: a living memory looped through the Leviathan’s editing process. His body is not just haunted—it’s written upon. Tattoos, lyrics, and haiku fractures become active code as the Codex tries to rewrite him, exploiting his grief, guilt, and lost love.
The radio broadcast and “Weather Report” is a metaphor woven into Tidehaven’s magic system: the library doesn’t just eat memories—it transmits their distortion. Think of Dexi’s overdose in 1987 and Marrine’s drowning as not separate events, but synchronized edits in the Codex’s master script. The moment Dexi hears static, we are listening in on a living rewrite. He becomes a witness—and a page.
The Codex, meanwhile, is not merely a book. It is a living extension of the Leviathan—a mouth, through which the creature speaks, judges, and restructures grief. It manifests when sorrow sharpens, edits in real time, and waits to see who breaks first. And the fonts it uses (Courier, Comic Sans, Old English) aren’t aesthetic—they’re judgments, inflections of Leviathan’s voice.
A few symbols to ponder:
Indigo ink = Leviathan’s voice
Sea-glass ink = resistance, memory fragments that slip the Codex’s grip
Gold ink = moments of stabilization—truth pressing through edits, even if the source remains hidden for now
These symbols suggest that there’s more than one force at work in Tidehaven’s architecture—something that resists the Leviathan’s manipulations. Glyphs shimmer where they shouldn’t. Some stanzas resist deletion. Readers will meet the source of this resistance in time. For now, think of it as a struggle between devouring and remembering.
Liora’s recognition of Eleanor Vale—triggered by a specific scent older than Marrine—is no accident. That moment opens a wound buried deep in her family tree, and signals that ancestral memory is pushing back. Her recognition is not just uncanny—it’s a tether.
Dexi’s moment of confusion over Marrine’s scent? That’s not sloppy memory. It’s proof that even his personal details have been tampered with. When Liora corrects him, she reclaims a small but vital truth from the Leviathan’s hunger.
Lastly:
“The Codex wasn’t just rewriting memories anymore.It was watching for grief it hadn’t caused.”
This is the key. The Codex isn’t just feeding—it’s hunting.
Thanks for reading, annotating, and cataloguing alongside Liora.Your comments and theories help breathe more meaning into the margins.
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Next Chapter: The Gate Left Unlatched
Let the ink guide you forward: ???KayElle
