The ceiling twinkled with silver lights in its violet–blue night canvas.
We all hung frozen, like a sentence that had forgotten itself before reaching its noun.
My eyes, like the others, were fixed upon the report that lay projected in pale light before us — a record, or perhaps a warning. It was titled simply:
---
The Test of Evans
(A Manifestation of Chaos — Observed)
The following account was later recovered from the observation transcripts.
It remains unclear whether Evans ever wrote it, or whether the Library wrote it for him.
The Lady asked me to read.
Simple enough. A book of pale vellum, unmarked cover, bound in something that should not have held shape.
I remember opening it, though I can no longer describe what "open" means.
The act unfolded me instead.
Every line I read rearranged the syntax of my thoughts.
Words ceased to describe; they began to define.
A dangerous inversion.
I tried to think "I am Evans," but the statement yielded recursive contradictions.
"Evans is a thought."
"Thoughts are property of the thinker."
"The thinker is Lady Alvie Nerys."
Thus concluded the proof.
My voice, when I attempted to speak, echoed in hers.
The resonance was not mimicry but assimilation — as if the Library found redundancy in my existence and optimized it.
My memories were cross-referenced, indexed, reclassified.
Childhood — irrelevant.
Desire —catalogued.
Fear — archived under entropy.
Somewhere during the process, the Lady smiled. Not at me, but through me — the faint amusement of a mathematician noting that another equation resolved cleanly.
"Be at ease," she said. "I keep what I understand."
I tried to protest, to insist upon difference, but my vocabulary had been inherited.
And in her language, "I" and "She" were the same noun.
The final entry in this transcript was not written by hand but by implication.
Its author is uncertain.
— E.N.
---
The air quieted like a graveyard, as though the room itself was agasp at what we had all read.
I looked to Evans, who now seemed to have seen — well, only the gods know what he had seen. He lay on the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut. A puppet that, until moments ago, never realized it was a marionette, nor acknowledged that someone — something — was pulling all our strings.
After several silent minutes, as if in mourning for our own hubris, Lady Alvie Nerys spoke.
Her voice came soft, patient, and exacting — like a teacher who had finally gotten her class to listen.
"I am not all-knowing," she said, "nor all-powerful. But I know enough. I have strength enough. And I am my own self."
I almost looked up — habit, curiosity, or reverence, I could not tell — but fear was thorough in its duty. My head stalled mid-motion, and my gaze fell back to the floor.
With a faint chuckle, she continued, her tone that of a queen unbothered by her court — a queen who had outgrown the need for subjects.
"I would like you all to aid me in answering a question."
The silence drew taut, a bowstring ready to snap.
No one dared speak.
The air was a shared noose around our throats.
"What is Democracy?" she asked at last.
The word itself felt absurd — like asking the sea to define dryness.
It did not feel like a question but a provocation — how far could the idea of democracy bend before it could no longer call itself that?
I swallowed. The sound was loud in the silence.
"One, two, three, four, five," she counted softly, her tone almost playful. "I need you to aid me with answering that question."
No one moved.
No one dared.
And yet, she did not seem disappointed.
"How," she asked, "does one lecture someone who believes they already know enough?"
A whisper of realization swept through us. She wasn't asking about democracy. She was asking about us.
My palms slickened with sweat. "This implies," I thought, "they were the closest thing to omniscient… and likely able to achieve that feat."
Somewhere to my right, Evans began to hyperventilate again.
Then, the Lady smiled — that mild, terrifying smile of someone whose patience was infinite and whose curiosity had found new prey.
"I want everyone to play a game," she said. "The rules are simple: the majority carries the vote, and the suffrage can be anything under the vote."
She paused. "No, you cannot vote yourselves out of my abode — that right belongs to the lady of the house."
Her tone was so casual that it took us a moment to process what she had said.
I felt relief — foolish, fleeting relief — that she did not intend to kill us.
But then I remembered Evans, and how death had never entered the equation.
She stepped closer, though the light around her blurred, as if reality itself was unsure how to define her outline.
"To make the game fair," she said, "I'll make some changes."
The sound of her voice began to stretch — distance folding itself between syllables. The room darkened, and I felt myself falling.
Or perhaps repositioned.
When I opened my eyes, I stood in an open field — vast, endless, grass bowing under a sky too blue to be trusted. The others were there too, all blinking in disbelief.
Wind brushed against my face — real, tangible wind — though the scent of ink and dust still lingered, like the aftertaste of memory.
My mouth opened to speak, but the words froze when I noticed… changes.
Two new bulges pressed against the fabric of my chest. My hands, trembling, traced downwards — absence, presence, alteration. "It's gone," someone said — voice trembling, tone breaking on confusion.
We turned. It was Evans. Or what was left of him.
His body had been remade — smooth, androgynous, uncertain.
"Genderless?" someone whispered.
I recalled her words again. To make the game fair.
A small laugh escaped me. It sounded too brittle to be human. "Fair, huh?" I murmured.
My clothes had changed — gone were the neutral coloured two piece suit, replaced with a simple violet dress. Everyone else had been similarly redressed — garments that felt chosen to mock, to strip away identity until all that remained was pattern recognition.
The sky pulsed faintly. The horizon shimmered, as though waiting for instructions.
We were no longer in her house, but we had never left it either.
With a sigh that felt borrowed from someone wiser, I smoothed the hem of my dress and looked up. The sun — her sun — stared down with mild warmth, patient and unblinking.
---
The wind whispered across the plain.
And somewhere, beyond hearing, Lady Alvie Nerys laughed.
It wasn't cruel. It was delighted.
Like a god discovering that even perfection could still be… improved.