The voice was not a sound. It was a thought, inserted directly into his mind with the delicate precision of a surgeon's scalpel. It bypassed his ears entirely, blooming in the center of his consciousness—a question formed from pure, resonant curiosity.
"Who are you that remembers our song?"
Elias's first instinct was to bolt, to throw open the door and run back into the rain-slicked streets where at least the threats were physical. But the triple-locked door and the long flight of stairs now seemed like a laughable defense. The danger was already inside. It was sitting on his mail table, a beautiful, palm-sized piece of a dead world, pulsing with a soft, violet light.
His heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs. This had never happened before. Fragments were supposed to be echoes, physical ghosts of things that once were. They weren't supposed to be… aware.
He took a slow, deliberate step back, his eyes locked on the shard. His sanctuary, his fortress of conceptual "uninterestingness," had been breached by a melody.
The whisper came again, more insistent this time, tinged with a loneliness that was ancient and vast. "You pulled us from the silence. You sang a note of home. We have not heard it in… time does not pass in the quiet. Who are you?"
Us? We? The thought sent a fresh wave of ice through his veins. He wasn't talking to a person. He was talking to a city. Or what was left of it. A collective consciousness, a fragment of the soul of Aeridor, trapped in the crystalline lattice he had so recklessly summoned.
He had to answer. To ignore it felt… wrong. It was like turning your back on a drowning man. But to engage with it? To open his mind to a being from a forgotten reality? It was an act of profound, unimaginable foolishness. It could attract anything. It could break him.
Slowly, cautiously, he reached out not with his hand, but with his mind. He didn't try to form words. He simply focused on the core of his identity, the raw, terrified essence of himself, and projected it toward the shard. I am the one who remembers.
The reaction was instantaneous. The light within the shard flared, and the single, clear note it was emitting rose in pitch. The voice flooded his mind, a torrent of emotion and fractured images.
"The… Archivist? The anchor? The memory that remains when all else is scoured away? We thought you were a myth. A story told as the walls of reality crumbled."
The sheer awe in its thoughts was staggering. To this… this echo… he was a figure of legend. A grim fairy tale whispered at the end of a universe.
Elias stumbled back, pressing a hand to his temple as a wave of dizziness washed over him. The connection was a two-way street. As it learned of him, he was learning of it. He felt the collective terror of the Aeridorians as their twin suns flickered and died. He felt their confusion as their beautiful glass city began to dissolve into static, its song becoming a scream. He felt their final, unified thought before erasure: a desperate plea for remembrance.
"Get out of my head," he rasped, the words feeling clumsy and loud in the silent apartment.
"We cannot," the voice replied, its tone shifting from awe to a soft, tragic sorrow. "We are… attached. When you reconstructed the memory, you did not just make a copy. You opened a door and called to the true echo. A piece of our soul latched onto yours. We are a part of you now, Archivist."
The floor seemed to tilt beneath his feet. A part of him. He wasn't just a librarian for the library of smoke anymore; he was becoming the library itself. The ghosts weren't just in his memory; they were becoming his roommates.
The shard's light began to pulse in a steady, rhythmic beat, like a crystalline heart. "You are in danger. The Cleaner that followed you… it is an agent of the Great Silence. It felt your song, your act of remembering. It will not stop until it has silenced you, and us with you."
"I know," Elias breathed, his gaze darting to the window that overlooked the street. "It's called a Librarian."
"A simplistic term for such a thing," the shard-mind mused. "It does not preserve knowledge. It sterilizes it. It is a janitor of existence." A new urgency entered its thoughts. "But it is not the only thing that heard you. Your song was loud, Archivist. A clear note in an eternity of silence. Others were listening."
"Others?" Elias's blood ran cold. "What others?"
"The other Forgotten," the voice whispered, and for the first time, Elias felt a tremor of fear from the ancient consciousness. "Those like us, but… broken. Hungry. They are the echoes of realities that did not die peacefully. They are the screams, the rage, the madness left behind. They crave an anchor, a mind like yours. They will devour you to feel real again."
A thousand shards of impossible glass. A city that sang. A Librarian hunting him. And now, a warning of ravenous, insane ghosts who wanted to eat his soul. The evening was getting progressively worse.
He felt a sudden, sharp spike of pressure against the outer walls of his mind—a cold, sterile, probing force. It was distant, but it was searching. The Librarian. It was sweeping the area, looking for the ripple he had caused.
He needed to get to his chest. He needed to hide, to sever the connection. He took a step toward the iron-bound box, but the voice from the shard cried out in his mind.
"Wait! Archivist, if you hide from it, you will only trap us in here with you! There is another way. Our song… it is not just a memory. It is a key. It can… reshape."
"Reshape what?" Elias demanded, his panic rising.
"The rules," the voice replied, its light pulsing faster and faster. "Listen to the harmony. Find the resonance. You can bend the space between…"
The voice was cut short. Not by choice, but by the sudden, sharp intrusion of a sound from the world of the real.
A sound from the street, five stories below.
Tap…
Elias froze, every muscle in his body locking tight.
Tap…
It was the clean, precise, metronomic sound of a silver-tipped umbrella striking the pavement.
Tap…
The Librarian was no longer just searching. It had found him. It was standing directly below his window. And in the terrifying silence of his apartment, Elias Thorne knew, with absolute certainty, that it was looking up.
End of chapter 3