Write from inside the story.

The words come out steady and clear and wrong.

Room.

You said room. The correction arrives before the final consonant has finished dying against the ice—the Seventh Alcove is not a room, has never been a room, is a widening in a compressed glacier corridor with a ceiling that forces you to hunch and a blind wall of fused ice where a back door should be. You have corrected this kind of imprecision before. Vault. Book. Now room. Each time the wrong word tells you something about where your mind thinks it is, and where your mind thinks it is, increasingly, is anywhere but here.

You break the seal.

Your brass thumb finds the thickened bead at the left end and presses down. The wax resists for less than a second—a brittle, definitive snap that travels through the prosthetic and into the socket with the clarity of a bone breaking. Then the line fractures along its length, dark-red fragments scattering across the shelf edge and the ice floor like seeds from a split pod, and the sound they make is very small, and it is the loudest thing you have ever done.