The glass kingdom

Hehe you have to read it for the summary!

The Archive smelled faintly of smoke and lavender. Smoke from the oil lamps that burned through the night, lavender from the sachets hung above every shelf to ward away insects that might eat through paper and cloth. Elara had grown up with that scent until it became a second skin, a perfume she could not wash away no matter how long she stood beneath the cold spray of the bathhouse pumps.
To most of the kingdom, the Archive was a place of legend. It was whispered about by the old women in the markets, by the students who tried to guess its secrets. They spoke of it as though it were a temple, sacred and unreachable. But to Elara, it was her prison, her inheritance, and, though she hated to admit it, her pride.
Her father had worked here before her, and his father before him, both archivists sworn to silence under oath of blood. The Archivists were guardians of memory. They catalogued, preserved, and, on command from the Crown, erased.
And in the Glass Kingdom, memory was everything.
Each bottle in the Archive contained a piece of a person's life: a first kiss, a final goodbye, the terror of a battle, the laughter of a child. The bottles stood stacked like soldiers in their niches, each glowing faintly with the shimmer of captured recollections. If one were careless enough to unstopper a bottle, the memory would spill into the air, filling the lungs like smoke until the experience became your own.
Elara had been warned never to touch the stoppers unless instructed.
But warnings were flimsy things, especially when one was seventeen and already burdened with secrets.
She carried the lamp carefully down the narrow stone aisle, its flame painting light across the bottles. Her shift was meant to be routine, check the rows, dust the shelves, update the ledgers, but she could not stop her gaze from straying toward the forbidden section, the row sealed off by a gate of black iron.
The Crown Vaults.
She had heard the whispers, of course. Every archivist had. The Crown Vaults were said to hold the memories of kings, the secrets of queens, the sins of generals. Some claimed entire battles had been erased from the kingdom's history by order of the king, their memories locked away where no one could reach them. Others said the bottles contained things worse than war, sorcery, blood rituals, perhaps even the memories of the gods themselves.
Elara told herself she had no intention of looking closer. She told herself this every night. Yet still, her feet carried her toward the gate as though pulled by invisible strings.
She touched the iron bars, cold and slick beneath her fingers. Beyond them lay row upon row of shelves, stretching into the dark. Unlike the common shelves, which glowed faintly from the bottled memories, the Crown Vaults were dim, their bottles muted. As if the memories within had grown tired of shining.
"Elara."
The voice made her jump. She nearly dropped the lamp.
It was Master Corin, her mentor, his face emerging from the shadows like a mask carved from stone. His hair, once black, had thinned to threads of silver. His robes smelled faintly of dust, as though he had been sleeping on the shelves themselves.
"You wander too far," Corin said, his voice even.
"I was only dusting," Elara replied quickly.
His gaze lingered on her hands against the gate. Slowly, she drew them back.
"You are curious," he said. "That is dangerous. An archivist should guard against curiosity. Curiosity is the seed of treason."
Elara swallowed hard. "Yes, Master."
He did not move, but his eyes, pale as old glass, softened for just a breath. "I was curious once too."
"What did you do?"
Corin's lips twitched, almost a smile. "I learned to stop asking questions."
The silence between them stretched, filled only by the faint hum of bottled memories. Finally, he gestured back toward the main hall. "Come. There is work tonight. The Crown has ordered an extraction."
Elara followed him, though her mind still burned with the words she dared not speak aloud. She wanted to ask what he had seen when he was young, what curiosity had led him toward, and whether it had truly died as he claimed. But she bit her tongue.
Archivists learned early that silence was safer than speech.
They returned to the main hall, where the extraction chamber waited. It was a small stone room, its only furniture a high-backed chair and a table filled with tools: crystal needles, siphoning tubes, and rows of fresh glass bottles.
In the chair sat a woman. She was dressed in a servant's uniform, plain brown cloth, her hands tied to the armrests. A gag covered her mouth. Her eyes were wide and wet with fear.
Elara froze. "She is... alive."
Corin gave her a sharp look. "Of course she is. How else would we extract a memory?"
"But, I thought"
"You thought memories came to us willingly? That they leap into the glass like obedient birds?" His voice was cutting. "No. Memories must be taken. And some must be taken by force."
Elara's stomach churned. She had studied extractions, of course. She had copied diagrams into her ledgers, memorized procedures. But she had never seen one performed on a living subject.
Corin motioned her forward. "You will observe."
The process was cruel in its efficiency. Corin slid a crystal needle into the woman's temple. The servant arched in the chair, muffled cries spilling from her gag. The needle glowed, the siphon filling with pale blue light that shimmered like liquid moonlight. Slowly, it funneled into the waiting bottle.
When it was finished, the woman sagged, her eyes dull and vacant. Elara stared at her in horror.
"She is not dead," Corin said, noticing her look. "But she has lost something precious. A memory the Crown wished gone. Perhaps her love for someone inconvenient. Perhaps the knowledge of a crime. Perhaps a dream that might have led to rebellion. Whatever it was, it belongs to the king now."
He handed the bottle to Elara. It was warm in her hands, humming faintly, as though alive.
"Catalogue it," he said.
Elara swallowed bile and forced herself to nod. She carried the bottle to the ledger table, her hands trembling as she wrote the record.
Subject: Female servant, age approx. twenty. Extraction ordered by Crown. Content: Classified.
When she finished, she set the bottle on the shelf. The glow faded, dimming into silence among its brothers.
Elara did not sleep that night. She lay in her narrow cot, staring at the ceiling, the woman's eyes haunting her. She told herself this was her duty, that archivists were meant to obey, that she had no power to question.
And yet, a whisper lingered at the back of her mind, a whisper she had never heard before.
If the king could steal one woman's memory, how many others had been stolen?
And what if among them lay the truth of the kingdom itself?
Elara closed her eyes, but the whisper did not leave her. It only grew louder.