Archiva Reservata

There exists no civil record of the boy who would become Paladin #3113. What survives is a page of the Order's own expedition ledger for the year 10[██]: a recovery list drawn up on ground the record does not name, in a place the record does not map. Among its entries: «Male child. Sankta. Age: ten years at most, by the surgeon's estimate. Unclaimed.» On the facing page, in the column of the dead, an unbroken row of names struck through in red. Among them: Aurélien Ménard and Léa Guilloux. The archivist notes only that the boy carries both surnames, and that no one appears to have told him whose they were.

Of the community itself the accessible record says little, and says it carefully: a settlement of Sankta, Laterano stock by descent, an island diaspora separated from the mainland generations ago, self-governed, devout in a local fashion, and, by the date the ledger was drawn, gone. The boy was carried back with the returning column and raised inside the Order's walls: a ward first, a novice when he was old enough to swear, and in time the youngest name on the wall of his generation.

The recovery report preserves one observation with the helplessness of men writing down what they did not understand. The boy's wings would not open. Nothing was broken; the chirurgical division confirmed as much twice, and then a third time years later, and could put no name to it. They lay clamped against his back through his whole boyhood, whole and useless, and the Order, having no better answer, recorded it as a peculiarity of the ward and moved on. What it actually was is recorded in [Archive II].

By precedent of the Order, the rite of investiture for a novice of confirmed Sankta lineage is conducted within the inner cloister of «La corona y la raíz», under the supervision of a Cardinal-appointed Legato of the first generation. In Germain's case the supervising Legato was #6 (Memory & Concordance), assisted by the chirurgical division of Forge #6.

The rite consists of three concurrent procedures. First: the sanctification of the candidate's blood, drawn in fixed measure at intervals across three full days and returned to his circulation after consecration. Second: the affixing of the sacred injector to the inner left forearm, by which the sanctified blood may be redeployed at will. Third, and recorded in the rite-book with unusual plainness: the opening of the wings.

On the third procedure this archivist will be precise, because older summaries of this file have not been. For years no one could say why the wings stayed shut. The surgeons found nothing to cut, the Legates found nothing to bless away, and the boy himself, asked directly, said nothing at all. The answer was not found in an examination room. It was found in conversation, late, unofficial, and spread across several years, with an archivist he had gradually decided could be talked to: about the island, about the noise the sky made that day, and about the fact that he had stopped looking up at it. The conclusion this section eventually filed was short. Nothing was wrong with the wings. The wings were doing what the boy could not afford to do himself: refusing, absolutely, to open over a world that had taken everyone. Trauma, in a word, carried in the body. The rite's third procedure was therefore not a granting but a rehabilitation years in the making: a final assisted unfolding, performed by the candidate himself, with steadying hands at each wingtip. The ceremony dressed in gold what was, underneath the vestments, a wounded man being helped to stand.

It is recorded that Germain bore the three procedures in complete silence. Older copies of this file note that the reasons were never discovered; this archivist has since come to understand them, and declines to file them. From this point he bears the title of Paladin, generation XXXI. The wings unfold to a maximum span of   meters tip to tip; their plumage is, per the rite-book, «of the colour of a thing seen at dawn through smoke».

[Rhodes Island annotation, appended at intake review:] The rite described above gave the operator nothing, and this file should stop implying otherwise. The arts in his register are holy-aspected biological arts, present in his blood from birth, of a kind his people carried strongly: turned inward they reinforce the body, turned outward they rise as an aura. Every gift in the register is one of those two movements. The consecration changed the vocabulary, not the blood. Nothing entered it that was not already there.

[The body of this archive entry is REDACTED in its entirety by direct order of the High Council, dated  . The conclusions and recommendations sections of the operation report are preserved verbatim in Archive Appendix B. The descriptive section appears in the present file as a single span of solid black some 1.8 meters in length when the dossier is rolled out flat.

Of the matter the present archivist may write only the following, drawn from records that survive elsewhere: that Paladin #3113 served as co-operation lead together with Paladin #3666; that some forty Custodios fell during the operation; that the Sankta population remaining on the island at the time of the operation perished in its entirety; that the principal hostile entity is filed as INVECO-002-V; that the operation report was approved by His Holiness the Draconic Hierophant in person, and signed «GERMAIN MÉNARD GUILLOUX #3113» in a hand the archivist notes is uncharacteristically firm.

On the question of why the descriptive body was redacted, this archivist offers no opinion.

In the absence of any descriptive record from INVECO-002-V, what survives in accessible files amounts to three registry codes (and three Anathema classifications) appended to the conclusions section of a document approved by the Draconic Hierophant. As of this writing, all three individuals remain at large. It is the private opinion of this archivist that they will never be found by anyone who does not first earn the introduction.

The most proximate witness on record is Paladin #3666, listed in the operation file as co-operation lead and the only other Custode present throughout the full engagement. This archivist has requested an interview with #3666 no fewer than four times. On the first occasion the reply was a single marginal note: «Ask #3113.» On the second: «Ask #3113.» On the third occasion no reply arrived. This entry therefore exists without corroboration, as does this archivist's suspicion that the silence of two men covering for each other is the loudest testimony in the file.

Of the three entities the conclusions classify as VA-N-002-V, VA-N-003-V, and COREHE-005-V, registered respectively as entities of vampiric classification and as a mortal in possession of a sanctified artefact. This archivist records only what the conclusions declare: Exterminatus orders were filed, and #3113 signed the document himself. He has not spoken their names aloud in any venue where a Legado of this section could hear it. This, in this archivist's view, is not indifference.

This page was not in the binder. It is the first page Rhodes Island has added to it, and unlike everything before it, it was written with its subject sitting across the desk, correcting the spelling of his own aliases.

What he will say about the end of his order is brief, and this office has not pressed for more. He discovered that the institution that raised him had built its holiness on a lie he could not live inside. He said so, out loud, to the wrong people or the right ones. He was tried in absentia, excommunicated as a traitor, and struck from the registries of an order that would itself cease to exist not long after. Everything he owned at that point fit in one binder and two weapon cases.

What followed was close to two years of drifting: mercenary escort work, harvest labor, a stretch as a lighthouse keeper he describes with suspicious fondness. He arrived at our gates with his infection untreated and his records self-carried, which tells the story of those years better than he chooses to.

One omission is consistent enough to deserve its own line. The binder is full of a partner: a co-lead on operation after operation, a co-signature at the bottom of the worst pages in the file. Asked about him, the operator, a man who will otherwise talk through an entire meal about anyone he has ever met, changes the subject with the smoothness of long practice. This office has stopped asking. The omission is noted, not pursued.

He reached Rhodes Island the way most of the displaced do: a name heard twice, a landship that was hiring, an intake queue. The interview records note that he asked for exactly two things, treatment, and work that would let him stand between danger and people who could not stand there themselves. The first is underway (see Medical Report). The second, this office is satisfied to report, he has been doing since before we had finished his paperwork.