Ren Ashvale read in silence.
The library didn't whisper or hum. It didn't creak or breathe like living places sometimes did. It just... observed. Quietly. Indifferently. And yet, the books those did speak.
Not with voices, not with ink. With motion.
The first sentence moved. Not metaphorically. It shifted. Realigned. The letters turned like joints flexing after centuries of sleep. One line bled into another, rewriting itself beneath his eyes. He didn't blink.
The book was breathing.
He ran a finger down the margin. The parchment was smooth, but disturbingly warm like touching someone's arm, not paper.
He read the words again. They had already changed.
"The First War was not a battle."
"It was a forgetting made real."
"The gods tore the world apart."
Ren stared at the last line for a long time. His mouth stayed closed. His fingers didn't twitch. But when he finally exhaled, he whispered to the empty air:
"You've got to be fucking kidding me."
He didn't sound surprised.
He sounded tired.
The exhaustion wasn't from the words. It was from what they implied. Something vast. Something broken.
Something so far beyond what a human mind was ever meant to understand that even reading it made his spine ache.
He closed the book gently and stood.
No alarms. No voice. No divine smiting from above.
Only the endless rows of bookshelves, curving and spiraling deeper into the dark. Waiting.
He reached for another.
This one was thicker. Its cover was stitched with what looked like sinew, but his hands didn't recoil.
He'd stopped expecting comfort. The moment he had fallen into the ocean of dead souls, he had already let go of the idea that the world was meant to make sense.
The pages clung together like wet cloth. He pried them apart, squinting at the lines that burned like ink drawn from a fever dream.
"Fifty-four gods once ruled."
"Fifty-four Laws held the world stable."
"During the First War, twenty-six ceased to exist."
"Their Laws were erased. No memory remains."
Ren tilted his head.
He flipped a few more pages. Then a few more. Then closed that book and opened another.
Same thing.
No names. No symbols. Not even hints of the missing ones.
Just blank spaces. Not like something had been redacted or hidden but as if the page didn't even know it had lost something.
Like reality itself had been lobotomized.
He whispered aloud, almost to test how it sounded:
"They didn't just die. They got erased."
He looked at the shelf again. The books weren't being poetic. They were being literal.
These gods hadn't faded or fallen. They had been annihilated not destroyed in war, but cut out of existence like rotting organs.
Their Laws weren't scattered or sealed.
They were gone.
The structure of reality had holes in it.
Ren opened a book with diagrams. One showed a perfect wheel. Fifty four circles arranged in harmony.
But most of them 36 were blank.
Not scratched out. Not grayed.
Just... absent.
He studied it for a long time. The other eighteen glowed faintly. Not proudly. Not divinely. Just weak. Tired. Dimming.
"What the fuck. Didn't they say that only a bit more than half was gone why the fuck only 18 law left"
"The remaining gods do not remember what was lost."
"Their thrones stand untouched, but no memory rests upon them."
Ren lowered the book slowly.
"Of course they don't," he said aloud.
His voice didn't echo. The air was too thick with silence for that.
He leaned his back against the shelf. It didn't creak. It was solid. Unmoving.
A war where no one remembers the enemy. A purge without a name. A world built on gaps and deletions.
He didn't know how long he stood there.
Eventually, another phrase surfaced in a thinner volume barely a record, more like a receipt from time itself:
"Reality does not recall what was removed,
but it still limps where it once leaned."
That one made him pause.
He read it again, then shut the book gently.
"That tracks," he muttered.
Ren had treated patients like that. People who didn't remember the trauma. Who had no words for what hurt them. But the shape of the pain still ruled their lives. They smiled too hard. Laughed too long. Jumped at nothing.
This world was like that.
Not whole. Not broken. Just... missing.
Trying to balance on legs it didn't remember losing.
He sat down on a bench that hadn't been there before. The library shifted around him quiet, attentive, watching.
So many Laws erased. So many gods undone. And no one knew which ones. Not even the survivors.
He buried his face in his hands.
"Okay," he said softly to himself. "Okay. Deep breath"
He didn't breathe.
Souls didn't need to.
He just sat there and felt for the first time since falling into this nightmare like something vast and cruel had always been watching. Not with eyes. With memory. With judgment.
He looked back at the shelf and muttered:
"So the world kept spinning. Because it didn't know how to stop"
And as he said it, the ground beneath his feet stirred.
The tremor faded. Not a quake. Something deeper. Older. Like the building itself had taken a breath.
Ren stood.
He wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting. Time here was uncertain. Not frozen. Just frayed. He walked again, quieter now, keeping to the path between shelves that curved like spines, creaking softly with every step.
There was a new book. He didn't remember choosing it. It was just in his hands.
Structure and Collapse: A Study in Divine Absence
The title felt cold in his chest. Still, he opened it.
"Laws are not merely forces. They are memory given shape. Will, repeated until it becomes fact"
"To remove a Law is to unwrite the condition of existence"
"The world does not break. It forgets"
Ren read slower now.
He turned the pages carefully, as though the wrong movement might cause the book to vanish. Each sentence left a trace of pressure in his mind, like a hand pressing gently on his skull from inside.
There were diagrams. Circles. Symbols. But some parts were blank. Not blacked out. Just gone. As if erased not from ink, but from reality.
He reached a page with only a single line at the bottom.
"We do not know what we lost. And we never will"
Ren lowered the book and stared into the space between the shelves.
He didn't understand all of it. But he understood enough.
Something vital had been taken. Removed so thoroughly that even the shape of what had been there was gone.
And yet, he felt it.
He couldn't name the missing pieces, but their absence echoed in the way the library breathed. In the silence between thoughts. In the way his soul felt heavier now than when he first arrived.
He moved again.
The library curved toward another corridor. This one narrow. Lit by a faint, trembling light. At the end was a pedestal. No guards. No barriers. Just one book.
He approached with slow, cautious steps.
The cover was thin. Fragile. He opened it.
There were no words.
Just faint impressions. Ghost marks. The outlines of letters that once were. When he brushed his fingers across the paper, something inside him flinched.
There was no sound. No vision. Only a sense of falling. Not in space, but in understanding.
He stepped back. Hands slightly shaking.
It took several long breaths before he could think again.
Whatever had been in that book was gone now. Not hidden. Erased. But its absence had weight. Presence. Pain.
He left the corridor and returned to the main hall. The shelves no longer whispered. They only watched.
He stopped in front of a bench and sat again, slower this time. He needed to rest. Not his body. His thoughts.
There had been fifty four gods. That was what the earlier texts had said. Fifty four Laws that made the world stable.
Twenty six of them were gone.
Not killed. Not sealed.
Erased.
And no one remembered what had once been.
Not even the ones who remained.
He imagined a wheel with blank spokes. Temples with no worshippers. Thrones that had no names to call.
The world was still standing. But it wasn't whole.
And now he knew. Even if he couldn't name what was missing, he could feel it.
That terrified him more than anything.
He stood once more. Not because he wanted to. Because he didn't know what else to do. He wandered. Not aimlessly. Just waiting for something.
Then the library changed again.
The space shifted. Too subtly to see. But enough to feel. A passage appeared that hadn't been there before. Short. Clean. Bone white stone underfoot. And at the far end, another pedestal.
This one bore a different kind of silence.
Not emptiness.
Expectation.
He stepped closer.
A book rested there.
The cover did not glow. It pulsed.
As he drew near, the title began to carve itself into the leather like breath on glass.
The Second War of Gods
Ren stopped.
His breath caught for a moment.
He didn't speak. Not even in thought.
This wasn't something he had searched for. It had found him.
The leather of the book seemed warmer than the others. Not in welcome. In warning. Like it remembered something it was trying not to remember again.
Ren stared at the title for a long time.
He wasn't ready to open it.
Not yet.
He lowered his eyes and turned away. The weight of everything he had read. Everything he had glimpsed. It was still settling.
He needed to understand what had already been lost before he tried to face what came after.
And somewhere, deep within, he felt it.
The library wasn't done with him.
Not yet.
The air shifted.
Turn back. Look at me.
Ren turned back.
The book still sat on the pedestal. Its title burned faintly across the leather. The Second War of Gods
But something was different.
There was no new page. No vision. No whisper. Just… an envelope. Tucked cleanly into the inner lining of the cover. As if it had always been part of the book, waiting quietly.
It was sealed in black wax. A smooth imprint in the center showed a closed eye, with thin cracks around the edge. Not damage just age. Long waiting.
Ren hesitated.
Then, slowly, he lifted the envelope.
The wax cracked with a sound like splitting bark.
He unfolded the paper inside.
It didn't feel like normal parchment. It was too light. Too dry. And the ink shimmered faintly, like it had been written from something deeper than blood.
He read:
"To the one who came after me
It must have been unbearable the Soul Ocean.
The silence. The burning. The centuries of forgetting.
I won't ask who you were before. That no longer matters.
This place is the pit beneath all reality.
A graveyard of every realm, from mortal dust to divine sky.
I was like you once. Alone. Broken. And then chosen.
The Death Scripture waits in the throne room.
Cultivate it, and you will leave this abyss.
Your soul will be placed into a living body in Vexkaria the last world where the Laws remain active.
But you must understand:
The Death Scripture is too strong. Once bound, it cannot be undone.
Once you choose a Law, it owns you.
You will never be able to switch. If you try, you will be torn apart or worse—become a Bizarre.
And there is more.
Any being further along your Path will have influence over your thoughts.
And if the god of your Path is still alive…
you are already theirs.
I did not have a choice. I took Death.
I am now a Celestial one made of Death and silence.
I returned here once. Just once. To leave behind what I never had:
A choice.
I have hidden two other forbidden Scriptures beyond the Veil Room where the breathless statues cry.
The Scripture of Fractured Truth tied to the Law of Contradiction.
If you reach Foundation state the Underworld will reject you. It cannot hold contradiction. You will be cast out.
The Scripture of Knowledge tied to the Law of Knowing.
If you reach Foundation state, it will offer you one forbidden truth.
Ask it how to be reborn in Vexkaria.
They are dangerous. But they are real choices.
Do not act in haste.
Read. Understand. Choose.
May you remain yourself"
— Celine
Ren lowered the letter.
His hands felt unsteady.
The silence of the library returned, but it wasn't empty now. It felt full. Crowded with decisions not yet made.
So he had a path. Three, in fact. But only one he could walk.
And once he chose, there would be no going back.
He thought of the weight it had carried.
He didn't speak aloud.
There was no need.
The answer was already waiting.
Instead, he stood quietly, holding the letter in both hands, eyes drawn to the cracked wax seal now resting on the floor.
The eye was still shut.
Watching nothing.
Or everything.
He folded the paper slowly and tucked it into the inner pocket of his coat.
He didn't know if it would still be there when he reached the surface.
He didn't even know if he would.
But the words burned all the same.
May you remain yourself