One Chapter Ends

De: Darlene Zagata

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Two Centuries of Certainty

The woman who would become The Founder arrived in Alder's Gate on a November morning in 1824, carrying a leather satchel and a proposal that would transform a dying city into the most orderly civilization in human history.

The city had been broken.

Crime thrived in the spaces between tomorrow and yesterday. Violence was democratic, indiscriminate. Families fell apart because no one knew if their loved ones would return. Merchants cheated. Lovers fled. Children disappeared into streets that promised nothing but change.

The city's leaders met the woman in the grand hall beneath City Hall. Historical records do not name her. The journals would later refer to her only as The Architect.

She opened the satchel and withdrew a bound volume, its leather worn and its pages illuminated with an elegance no local craftsman could have produced. She placed it on the table before them.

"This," she said, "is a promise."

The first journal. Inside its pages: the name of every citizen of Alder's Gate. Every life written. Every death dated.

The records described the leaders' reaction as one of awe. Some accounts suggested reverence bordering on religious fervor. They asked her questions she never answered directly. Who was she? Where did such power originate? How were the journals written?

She told them only this: "The journals do not create destiny. They acknowledge it. Accept them, and your city will know peace. Resist them, and chaos will reclaim what you've built."

Within a month, every citizen had received a personal journal on their birthday. The Founder disappeared. The Curators were established to maintain the vault, verify authenticity, and ensure no one altered the sacred records.

And it worked.

Crime dropped to nearly nothing. Marriages became stable. Suicide rates fell as people accepted their fates with the comfort of certainty. Society organized itself around the journals' promises. Schools taught resignation. Philosophers debated acceptance. Mental health became a matter of preparation for one's final page.

For two centuries, not a single journal's prediction failed.

Alder's Gate became a city of order. Safety. Predictability.

The cost was freedom. But the city had learned to pay it gladly.

Until the morning Detective Claire Reddick opened her own journal and found the ending missing.

And everything else began to change.