The rain that fell on the city of Veridia wasn't real.
Elias Thorne knew this with the same certainty he knew his own name, which, on some days, was the only thing he was sure of. He stood under the flimsy awning of a closed bookshop, the scent of wet pavement and ozone thick in the air. People hurried past, their faces buried in collars and shielded by umbrellas slick with water. They felt the rain. They saw the puddles ripple and distort the neon glow of the streetlights. To them, it was just another Tuesday evening downpour.
To Elias, it tasted of ash.
Not the acrid, chemical burn of a house fire, but the fine, silken ash of something ancient and grand that had been turned to dust. It was the taste of a dead star, of a library burned by a sun that had never existed. He closed his eyes, and for a terrifying second, the city sounds—the hiss of tires, the distant wail of a siren, the murmur of conversations—were replaced by a chorus of whispers in a language of pure static.
It's bleeding through again.
He forced his eyes open, his knuckles white where he gripped the worn leather strap of his satchel. The world snapped back into focus. A woman with a bright yellow umbrella glanced at him, her brow furrowed with concern, before quickly looking away. He probably looked like a madman, standing there, trembling slightly, his gaze fixed on nothing. He offered a tight, humorless smile to the empty space she had occupied. If you only knew.
He was the Archivist. A title of profound importance that meant absolutely nothing. There was no grand institution, no hallowed halls of knowledge. There was only him, a twenty-seven-year-old man who worked a dead-end job cataloging municipal records and who was haunted by the ghosts of worlds that no one else remembered.
He was the sole librarian of a library of smoke.
The taste of ash intensified, coating his tongue. It was a strong bleed this time. He pushed himself off the grimy brick wall and started walking, his steps hurried. He needed to get back to his apartment, to the lead-lined box and the relative silence it offered. Bleeds were unpredictable. Sometimes they were just sensory echoes like this one—a phantom smell, a sound from an impossible place, the emotional residue of a billion forgotten souls.
Other times, they were more… substantial.
He turned a corner onto a quieter side street, the glow of the main thoroughfare fading behind him. Here, the buildings were older, their brick facades stained dark by a century of real rain. A flicker in the corner of his vision made him freeze.
Under a sputtering gas lamp halfway down the block, the world was… wrong.
The rain, which should have been falling straight down in the still air, was curving. It bent around an invisible point in the middle of the sidewalk, the drops sizzling and vanishing into steam a few feet from the ground, leaving a perfectly dry circle of pavement. In the center of that circle stood a lamppost that wasn't theirs. It was wrought from a metal that seemed to drink the light, its design ornate and alien, carved with sigils that made his eyes water and his head ache.
A fragment. A piece of a forgotten reality, punching its way through the thin skin of the present.
His heart hammered against his ribs. This was more than a sensory bleed. This was a physical manifestation. Dangerous. He should have turned, walked away, and pretended he hadn't seen it. That was the smart thing to do. That was the sane thing to do.
But sanity was a luxury he couldn't afford. He was the only one who could see it for what it was. To everyone else, it would just be a weird new piece of city furniture, there one day and gone the next, leaving behind a nagging sense of… wasn't there something here yesterday?
He took a hesitant step forward, his hand reaching into his satchel. His fingers brushed against a cold, smooth piece of obsidian. A tool of his trade. A focus. Reaching for the memories was always a risk. They were a tidal wave, and he was a man in a rowboat. But he had to know. Which world was this from? What was it?
He pulled his hand back. No. Not here. Too exposed.
He scanned the street. It was empty. The windows of the apartments above were dark. No one was watching. He could just… leave.
But the lamppost pulsed with a soft, internal luminescence, a deep violet light that seemed to call to a part of him he kept locked away. It was beautiful. It was a gravestone for a world he could almost remember. He felt a pang of profound, soul-deep grief for a place he'd never known.
That was the curse of the Archivist: he was the world's only mourner for the funerals no one knew had happened.
He took another step, drawn in against his better judgment. The air grew warmer, the taste of ash replaced by the scent of blooming nightshade and something metallic, like charged air before a lightning strike. The whispers returned, clearer this time. They weren't just static; they were voices, overlapping, pleading, angry, sorrowful.
…remember us……the gardens of Nyx……where the twin suns died…
His head swam. He stumbled, catching himself against the wet brick of the nearest building. The memories weren't just his; they were the world's. And they were poison.
Suddenly, a new sound cut through the whispers. A clean, sharp, rhythmic tap… tap… tap…
Elias's blood ran cold.
He looked toward the end of the street, where it met the main road. A figure had just turned the corner, stepping into the dim light. They were tall and unnaturally still, wrapped in a long, grey coat that seemed to absorb the shadows around it. They held a simple, black umbrella, but the rain wasn't touching them. Like the lamppost, a perfect circle of dryness surrounded them.
The tapping sound was the silver ferrule of their umbrella striking the pavement with metronomic precision.
Elias couldn't see their face, hidden as it was in the deep shadow of a wide-brimmed hat, but he didn't need to. He knew what they were. The clean, sterile aura that pushed back against the chaotic energy of the bleed was unmistakable. It was an aura of absolute order. An aura of erasure.
A Librarian.
They had come to clean up the mess. To erase the fragment. And if they found him here, the only person in the city who could recognize it, they would erase him, too.
Panic, cold and sharp, seized him. He flattened himself against the wall, trying to melt into the shadows. The Librarian paused, their head tilting slightly as if listening to a sound only they could hear. The tapping stopped.
The silence that followed was worse than any noise. It was the silence of a predator that had scented its prey.
The Librarian took a slow, deliberate step in his direction. Then another. They knew he was there.
Elias's mind raced, scrambling for an escape. The alley behind him was a dead end. The street ahead was blocked. He was trapped. His only weapon was the very thing that was tearing him apart: the forgotten worlds themselves.
He fumbled in his satchel again, his fingers closing around the obsidian. It was a terrible, desperate choice. Reconstructing a fragment of a forgotten reality was like setting off a bomb to avoid a gunshot. It was messy, unpredictable, and it always, always left scars on his mind.
But the Librarian was getting closer, their grey coat a shroud in the gloom. He had no other choice.
His fingers tightened around the stone. He closed his eyes, ignoring the screaming protests of his own instincts, and reached into the chaotic sea of the past, searching for something—anything—he could use. He didn't need a weapon. He just needed a distraction.
He found it. A memory of a place not of ash and sorrow, but of glass and light. A city of crystalline spires that sang in the wind. A reality erased for being too fragile.
He pulled.
The world screamed.
And from the brick wall beside him, a thousand shards of impossible glass erupted outwards.
End of chapter 1