Stepping through the hidden subway passage into the Archivum feels like entering a different world. The air is heavy with the scent of old paper, iron, and faint traces of blood. The chamber is vast, but its ceilings feel low and oppressive, arched stone reinforced by steel beams that look more like ribs than supports. Every sound echoes — footsteps, whispers, the quiet hiss of vitae running cold.
The Archivum itself is organized like a library, but one stripped of warmth. Black iron shelving rises high, packed with ledgers bound in leather, steel, and bone. Each tome contains records of debts, boons, and blood oaths stretching back decades. No titles adorn the spines; the books shift and reorder themselves nightly, guided by the Beasts of those who enter. A Kindred searching for a record feels an instinctive tug toward the shelf they need, but never the same one twice.
At the center lies the Elysium chamber proper: a wide, circular floor of polished black marble, etched faintly with symbols of each Covenant. The Prince’s seat — not a throne, but a heavy, iron-backed chair — rests at the far end. Arrayed around the circle are smaller seats for Covenant representatives and the Black Court, making the chamber feel less like a council hall and more like a tribunal. The lighting is dim by design, with lamps hooded in red glass, casting everyone in the color of spilled blood.
Above it all, the ceiling is painted with a mural barely visible in the gloom — New York’s skyline rendered as if it were burning, the skyscrapers dissolving into smoke and ash. Some claim the mural wasn’t painted at all, but appeared after the St. Mary’s Massacre, bleeding through plaster and stone.