The sun rose in crimson over the waking world. In the cities below, scribes penned falsehoods upon official correspondence, and the truth festered in words that they dared not write.

Keen to serve his country, one Scholar had dreamed for years of spreading knowledge and truth in the Imperial Archives. However, for a bright young talent from a humble shoemaker’s family, reaching the prestigious Archives had taken twenty-five years, the last seven of which had been a daily struggle between studying and writing documents for his illiterate neighbors. Only two days before, the Scholar had received a passing score on the annual Guild Exams. Just the prior day, he had been formally inducted into the Scribes’ Guild and granted a post at the Archives.

Despite the Scholar’s enthusiasm, he was not well-connected within the literate community. Lacking a recommendation letter from anyone on the senior Archival staff, he had been placed in the lowest rank of scribes. When he arrived at the Archives for his first day of work, other scribes sneered at the admittance of the “literate shoemaker,” turning up their noses at his low-ranking uniform robes. However, he kept his chin high and smiled at them, wearing the drab grey sackcloth with pride.

The Scholar took a seat in a candlelit writing hall filled with tables and scribes, arranging a pen and blank paper across his desk. His assignment was to copy one month’s worth of event records from three different villages in the remote wilderness. The records described crop harvests, tax revenues, marriages, minor crimes, and other such minutiae—life on the edges of the Empire was not so different from the life that the Scholar already knew. Such mundane record-keeping might have bored a less patient individual, but not the Scholar. Every word he copied was another glimpse of history preserved for posterity; every life recorded within these entries would be immortalized in the Archives.

He transferred each entry from a watered-down grey scrawl on cheap, grainy paper to sharp black ink on pure white archival-grade sheets. As he read through the records, traces of amusement or surprise passed over his face at unexpected events—a dog-sized potato discovered during harvest, the birth of a two-headed chicken, some backwoods recluse scaring government patrols off his property. The Scholar had to suppress an actual laugh at the last entry, and despite his efforts, his shoulders shook with the effort of staying silent.

The scribe at the neighboring desk glanced at him oddly, but the Scholar waved off the other’s concern and forced his face back into focused neutrality. The other scribe was more than an arm’s length away—too far to read anything on the Scholar’s desk, and walking around to share a moment of amusement would surely be frowned upon in the middle of a busy workroom. The Scholar started copying again, pausing infrequently to smile and shake his head. What sort of sorcery could this recluse possibly practice, such that Imperial Army patrols took a fifty-mile detour to avoid his territory? Clearly, after spending too much time in the western wilderness, even brave imperial troops could fall victim to such peculiar superstitions. The Scholar was indeed glad to live in a civilized city.

Four hours later, the Scholar had converted the barely legible scribbles of countryside clerks into neat rows of text on pristine white paper. The other scribes in the writing hall had long since left for the midday meal, leaving half-copied pages scattered across their desks, but the Scholar persevered until he had finished writing every last entry of the assigned work. Despite the cramps in his hand and the hunger pinching his stomach, he felt the warm satisfaction of a job well done. Gathering all of his materials, he went to his supervisor’s office to deliver the transcribed reports.

The supervisor was an aging fellow with skin that had the pallor and texture of sawdust. He sat at a large desk, patiently reading through a pile of ancient scrolls. A large, curtain-covered window was cut in the wall behind him, casting a soft blue glow over the office. Near the door, two large braziers heated the room to the temperature of a pleasant summer day. When the Scholar knocked on the doorframe, arms filled with reports, the supervisor glanced up.

“Ah, the literate shoemaker. What do you want?” the supervisor asked, frowning.

The Scholar flinched. “I finished the transcription.” He offered the stack of copied reports. “Here are the originals.” He placed the other, more ragged stack onto the supervisor’s desk. Clasping empty hands behind his back, he gave the supervisor an eager smile. “Is there more work I can do?”

Taking the stack of paper, the supervisor inspected the work. He traced a finger over the perfectly straight rows of text. “Good letters, for a shoemaker.”

When the supervisor read through the third page, however, his brows lowered and displeasure crossed his face. He sighed, gathered the Scholar’s work back into a stack, and carried it away from the desk. The Scholar rushed forward to collect the copies, intending to spare the old man’s arms from the weight. However, the supervisor stepped around him and went to the door.

“This work is unacceptable.” The supervisor dumped the copied reports into a brazier. Flames leapt almost to the ceiling, devouring four hours of the Scholar’s efforts.

The Scholar uttered a soft, choked noise.

His supervisor patted him on the arm, saying, “Don’t look so down. Everyone makes mistakes. Start over.”

The Scholar gaped at the brazier, horrified at the sight of paper turning to ash. After opening and closing his mouth a few times, he managed to utter coherent words. “You… why…? What was wrong with my work?”

“You wrote that a backwoods mystic defeated imperial soldiers.” The supervisor sat at his desk again. “How can a single outlaw win against twenty of the Empire’s best? It isn’t good for our soldiers’ reputation. You have to fix inconsistencies like that. If the villagers call this man a sorcerer, then a sorcerer he is! Write a few more entries about how he shoots fire from his hands or calls lightning from the sky. Increase the number of outlaws, as well—ten sorcerers, a hundred sorcerers. These changes will prove to future historians that our soldiers are a force to be reckoned with.”

“But none of those things actually happened,” the Scholar argued. He snatched the pile of original reports from the desk, suddenly afraid that his supervisor would burn them as well. He flipped to the third page and held up the entry about the recluse. “Look, here is the original. I wrote these exact words.” Disgust seeped into his voice. “Are you telling me to lie? Lying on official historical records is fraud!”

A throat cleared behind the Scholar. An unfamiliar scribe with a more elaborate uniform had entered the office. The newcomer was tall and reedy where the Scholar was short, and he possessed the confident air of one who had worked in the Archives for years. Before the Scholar could react, the senior scribe plucked the pile of original reports from his arms.

“I’ll handle these later, shoemaker. You just and run along to lunch, alright? After you calm down, go to the maintenance department and ask for a broom. You’re clearly better suited for sweeping floors. And don’t argue with your betters. Not everyone is as tolerant as our supervisor.” The senior scribe flashed a stiff smile at the supervisor. “Run along now.”

The Scholar glanced at his supervisor, expecting to see his own offense mirrored on the older man’s face, but the supervisor only waved a hand. “Do as he says. Sweeping the floors will teach you some manners, if nothing else.”

The Scholar returned to the writing hall. Although the lunch hour was still ongoing, and no other scribes had returned to the workroom yet, the Scholar had lost his appetite. He returned to his seat, splaying his hands over the wooden desk. Before him stood the standard fountain pen, upright in a half-used bottle of ink, alongside a few blank sheets of paper left over after the copying was complete.

The neighbor’s desk had a similar setup, except that scribe had not finished transcribing his work yet, and a partly written page lay beside the coarse scribbles of its original. As the Scholar compared the original and the copy, a growing sense of dread came over him. The words of both entries were similar, but not identical. The original contained a terrible accusation: “The imperial troops rob us of two-fifths of our hard-earned crops!” However, the copy twisted those complaints into praise: “We gift the imperial troops two-fifths of our hard-earned crops!”

The Scholar sighed, placing his head in his hands. His enthusiasm from the morning had deteriorated into queasiness. Perhaps he ought to go on a lunch break after all.

After lunch, the Scholar received a broom.

The maintenance manager offered a large key ring. “These can open every door in the building. Closed doors better be closed again after you’re done. If you leave even one door unlocked when the sweeping is finished, you'll be on the street. Start with empty rooms, and don’t bumble around the writing halls when scribes are working. The records library needs to be absolutely spotless. Not a speck of dust near those books, you hear?”

The Scholar nodded, gave the manager his heartfelt thanks, and marveled at the keys. The library held the prized collection of all historical records since the establishment of the Archives—a true treasure trove of information. It was the primary source for all educational materials disseminated to academies across the country; as a self-taught student, the Scholar had only ever read summaries of summaries of the records contained here. Broom in hand, keys dangling from his belt, the Scholar went straight to the library.

The library was a chamber dug into the foundations of the Archives. Thin streams of daylight shone from windows set near the ceiling. Thrice the Scholar’s height and as vast as an entire farm plot, the library contained wall-to-wall shelves with scrolls, books, and bundles of loose paper piled in every open space. Ladders leaned against various shelves, granting access to the storage spaces far overhead. Within these walls were several lifetimes’ worth of knowledge, and the Scholar yearned to absorb it all. He immediately gravitated to a shelf of historical status reports, lifting a few loose paper leaves with careful hands.

The reports were written in beautiful calligraphy—true works of art. The contents were no less beautiful for their patterns of success. Every time the imperial soldiers won a conflict, it was a daring triumph against ten times their numbers in crooked rebels or foreign bandits. Every time the soldiers lost, they faced hopeless odds against evil, child-murdering opponents a hundred times more numerous. The pattern did not appear solely in military reports, either; when the tax counts were short, it was the fault of impossible numbers of bandits. If the harvests ended up lower than expected, it was the fault of natural disasters; and of course, in such situations, the Empire sent bountiful supplies of food and civil officials to coordinate relief for any food shortages.

The Scholar read through each report diligently, stacking and replacing the bundles upon their shelves when finished. Reading of the heroic feats of imperial officials was almost enough to restore the Scholar’s admiration for the Empire and all of its workings. Almost—but not quite. If the soldiers’ heroic deeds were just exaggeration, then what else had been changed? Tax counts? The amount of relief sent to regions that needed food? Such profound stores of information the Archives held, yet none of it could be trusted anymore!

The Scholar brought his broom to the library for several hours every day. He spent a few minutes of each visit sweeping—just enough to remove any obvious dust or keep up the pretense of work when other scribes were around. However, he perused the old scrolls whenever he was alone in the library. As he read, he fumed at the possibility of misinformation in every record that portrayed the Empire positively. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, he was just a lowly sweeper in the Archives, and there was nothing he could do to fix such a deeply rooted problem.

For nearly half of the Scholar’s life, the information within the Archives had driven him to seek a career as a scribe. Now, seeing decades’ worth of fabrications filled him with a terrible helplessness. He swept the floors, read what histories he could during his scant few hours of solitude, and grew depressed as the tales of duty and honor that he had once aspired toward were revealed as mere fantasies.