The Registry of Affections

Every citizen in the city registers their love. Fill the white form, speak your name to a clerk, press the seal — unregistered love doesn't count, and a thing that doesn't count might as well have never happened.

Eleven years into his post as an archivist of the fourth stack, a quiet, careful man has read ten thousand declarations without feeling a thing toward any of them. Then he finds her name — Liora, bound to three thousand and forty citizens across sixty years, loved by soldiers and bakers and clockmakers, and never once the one who climbed the hill to lodge a love of her own.

Every record confirms she existed. Every living witness swears she never did.

What begins as a clerical inconsistency becomes something he cannot file away — a woman who stands in the dark of the stacks when he reads her, warm and real and kept by an institution that has perfected the art of preserving a love by erasing everyone who ever arrived to claim it. The deeper he goes, the more he understands: the Registry was never built to preserve love. It was built to keep her. And the building has already spent eleven names finding that out the hard way.

The Registry of Affections is a standalone novella of institutional horror — about a system that works exactly as designed, a ledger that keeps the evidence of its own appetite, and the one discipline strong enough to survive what the building takes.

Contains explicit sexual content. Intended for adult readers (18+).